even the buddha had helicopter parents
(Raising Energy—Viriya)
Where would I find enough leather To cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, It’s as if the whole world has been covered.
SHANTIDEVA
Too many of us exhaust ourselves trying to create a perfectly safe world for our children. Instead, we can more wisely use our energy to teach our family to be safe in a world that is often frightening and dangerous. You’ve heard the descriptions and maybe even leveled them at others or yourself: helicopter parents (hovering above and behind), snowplow parents (clearing the path to adulthood), bubble-wrapped teens, and more. Yet, despite increased parental involvement and best intentions, our children have somehow wound up more fragile and less prepared for a world that is even safer than in generations past. Although we expend a lot of effort, we’re not embodying the kind of wise use of our energy that the Buddhist monk Shantideva suggests in the opening quote.
In many ways, we have actually created a world that is safer than ever: we’ve coated our once-perilous playgrounds with rubber; bike helmets, seatbelts, and airbags have become the norm; allergy awareness has kept kids safer; and academic accommodations for different learning styles and abilities have succeeded in helping more kids learn more effectively. Yet, parents and children express more anxiety than ever before, and allowing a kid to walk alone to the playground is enough to warrant a visit from the police.
But covering the world in a protective layer of rubber (or leather) has backfired. A recent article in the New York Times exposed how an overemphasis on safety in modern playgrounds has resulted in kids being less able to discern healthy risks from true dangers, leaving them more vulnerable in the long run.1 Many of us enjoyed the thrills of seesaws, towering metal slides, and rickety hand-hammered tree houses. But how many of these do you see today? Research psychologists now believe that kids need to regularly face moderate dangers, take healthy risks, and master those dubious structures—earning stitches and skinned knees in the process—in order to meet and assess real-world challenges and risks as they arise. In the past, we worried that kids who fell from the jungle gym and broke their arm would invariably become afraid of heights (and their city afraid of lawsuits). In reality, we now know that a child who suffers a significant fall before turning nine is less likely to develop a fear of heights.2 Children require exposure to developmentally appropriate fears and setbacks in order to work through them and grow stronger.
A famous maxim tells us that “character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.” Most of us intuitively know this to be true—our kids need some stress so they can build their own strength and directly learn from overcoming challenges. It doesn’t matter how involved we are in our kids’ lives—no degree of protection will keep them perfectly safe from skinned knees and stubbed toes at age seven, or broken hearts and B minuses in adolescence, or rowdy roommates and rejected résumés by adulthood. I’ve worked with parents who schedule their teenager’s life down to fifteen-minute increments or constantly keep track of their college student’s movements by GPS. Although I believe they have their children’s best interests at heart, they’ve clearly over-done it. While they may be the extremes, let’s face it—we’ve all had our moments.
Where do these efforts get us? What is the result of this type of overprotective energy? Studies indicate that so-called helicopter parenting styles might keep kids physically and emotionally safe, but they also correlate with higher rates of depression and anxiety, difficulties with executive function, and lower rates of life satisfaction.3,4,5 A 2010 study found that college students with overinvolved parents were less open to new ideas, were more self-conscious, and were more likely to engage in drug use and other problem behaviors compared to kids with “free range” parents.6
reflection In what ways have you made your children safer? How do you help them adapt to their challenging worlds? How would you know if you were behaving in an overprotective way?
In the end, our children never turn out the way we plan. Plenty of spiritual stories illustrate this fact, from the prodigal son to the historical Buddha. Let’s look at the Buddha—Siddhartha Gautama—who was born into royalty to the ultimate helicopter parents. Before Siddhartha was even born, an oracle foretold that he would either become a renowned political leader or a spiritual figure. Of course, his father hoped for the former option, so Siddhartha’s parents created an elaborate bubble of safety and comfort around the boy. They showered him with every pleasure, comfort, and delight. They also forbid him to leave the confines and safety of his gated community.
Still, the young man grew curious about what happened outside the palace walls. He convinced a servant to take him into the city and quickly encountered a world of profound suffering. During Siddhartha’s first trip to the city, he saw a helpless and frail old man. On the next trip, he encountered a sickly and depressed man. On the third, he met a grieving family carrying a loved one’s corpse. Siddhartha was baffled by each encounter, and he began to reflect on the suffering of inevitable old age, illness, and death. Eventually, the young prince decided to do something about it. He left the palace for good, renounced his status and his stuff, and became a wandering ascetic. If you know the story, you’ll remember that total renunciation didn’t work out so great for Siddhartha either. Only by following a middle path did he become enlightened.
We can almost imagine the privileged child brought from the gated community by his nanny into her neighborhood, only to be shocked awake by what he encountered. Or perhaps we know the sheltered child who heads off to a college or abroad only to return home a campus radical, renouncing his parents and upbringing, but then settling into a middle path by middle age. (Or maybe I’m just remembering my own younger self.)
The Buddha’s story holds a lot of life lessons, but let’s look at the most useful message for us parents: no matter how hard we try, our kids must and will forge their own paths, and despite our best intentions to protect them, they will eventually encounter suffering. But how they meet challenges and obstacles—whether they fight or flee or embrace and transform—is somewhat up to us. We can’t defend them from every pain that’s coming their way, but we can—and must—prepare them with the tools they’ll need to face the world. What would the world look like if our greatest spiritual teachers or philosophers had never encountered suffering?
reflection What’s your style of parenting? What are the moments in which you are most likely to overparent? What about underparenting? What would a middle way between those two look like for you, and how could you aim for it?
What does the middle path look like between creating a safer world and producing a savvy, resilient, street-smart kid? As with most things, it’s not a matter of more effort and energy but right effort and energy. This presents a challenge, of course, because our kids—and the world—are constantly growing and changing. As a guideline, I’ve adapted the “5 W’s and H” of journalism—who, what, where, why, when, and how (though I leave out “where” below). To begin with, let’s look at the reasons we want to engage in right effort in the first place.
Why?
What’s our intention here? In short, it’s not just about saving energy; it’s also about giving our kids the best chance of growing up happy and resilient. There are four reasons to commit ourselves to right effort: first, to diminish unhelpful states of mind (depression, anxiety, confusion); second, to heal those states when they arise; third, to encourage positive states of mind (happiness, peace, resilience); and, lastly, to maintain these states as best we can. Most parents I know would love to pass on these four results to their children, but the motives beneath our choices don’t always reflect this desire.
While past generations may have underparented, leaving us with thousands of hours of therapy, our generation is more likely to fall in the overparenting trap, missing the mark on the middle path of what I’ve heard called “benevolent neglect.” Overparenting may involve mixed motives, but we also do it because it makes our life easier when we don’t have to deal with the tantrum that results from a no. Sometimes our own self-image is caught up in how others (classmates, teachers, etc.) view our children, and this tempts us to touch up that science fair project. Other moments, we keep kids away from the dangers that we ourselves fear. Psychologist Madeline Levine points out three common patterns of overparenting: when we do something for our kids that they are already capable of doing, when we do something that they can almost do for themselves, and when we do something that has more to do with our own egos or, I might add, our own baggage.7 It’s important to check in every so often and ask ourselves why we do what we do and who is really benefitting.
This is a big one. Even if we get our intentions on track, it doesn’t mean we automatically know how to parent with right energy and effort.
At my first job out of college, I worked as a special education teacher at a residential school for kids with severe emotional problems. I was an English major; I’d never taken an education class in my life. Needless to say, I felt overwhelmed by my experiences with the kids and thoroughly confused by all the policies and procedures we had to follow. One coworker—a genial, if jaded, veteran special education teacher—saw my struggle and said (in a thick Boston accent): “Chris, to do this job and not make yourself crazy, you gotta figure out how to work smahtah, not hahdah.” That maxim has stayed with me in work and parenting as a practical definition of right effort. So, to avoid overparenting and exhausting yourself, parent smarter, not harder.
Those of you who have practiced meditation are familiar with this principle. You have to use just the right amount of energy to nudge your mind back to some kind of clear, peaceful anchor. If you try too hard, you’ll exhaust yourself, make your body tense and sore, or get a headache; if you don’t try hard enough, you’ll space out, make grocery lists in your head, or simply fall asleep. One ancient analogy refers to tuning an instrument—not too tight, not too loose. Practicing smarter in this context means finding just the right amount of effort for you in your particular circumstance—a guideline that can be applied directly to your parenting. Ideally, finding that balance point looks like what positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi labels flow—that sweet spot when a task challenges us but keeps us happily engaged.8
Your balance point as a family most likely looks different from mine, but most families benefit from some degree of predictability or rhythm. Predictability saves us effort in the long run and helps kids feel safer and adults feel saner. In addition, as Kim John Payne (author of Simplicity Parenting) points out, when we establish rhythm and routine in our families, it allows us to occasionally break routines while paradoxically reinforcing them.9 For example, if your kids normally go to bed at eight but vacation means they get to stay up later, that break in routine actually reinforces the particular rhythm of the school year. Or when your children encounter different sets of rules around screen time at a friend’s house, it helps your kids learn to cope with different experiences they will invariably meet in the world. That being said, I highly recommend establishing routines with your kids in the morning (to get their brains ready for a busy day) and at night (to comfort them and help them relax and reflect). Regardless of what you choose to do, remember that consistency and predictability are important—they help your kids become attached in a healthy way and foster their ability to regulate their emotions and reactions to changes later on.
Working smarter (not harder) often comes down to paying attention to our behavior and simply cutting out some of the ways we overparent. Here’s a fun exercise: grab a sheet of paper and quickly list the first ten things you do for your child on a daily basis (if you’re like me, you might need more than one piece of paper). Here’s an example from a day with my son:
1. Wake up when I hear Leo cry.
2. Get out of bed and go to him.
3. Pick Leo up and soothe him.
4. Change his diaper.
5. Change his clothes.
6. Get a bottle of milk.
7. Try to make coffee while preventing Leo from climbing the bookshelf.
8. Try to drink coffee while preventing Leo from stealing my phone and throwing it in the trash again (maybe he’s on to something?).
9. Play with Leo intermittently while also trying to fold laundry (mostly his) and wash dishes (also mostly his).
10. Prepare breakfast for Leo and try to convince him to eat it.
Okay, so those are my first ten things, and I haven’t even made it through breakfast yet, to say nothing of my own breakfast. As Leo gets older, he’ll be able to do more on his own, of course. He’ll feed himself, dress himself, and not practice death-defying bookcase climbs in the blink of an eye, though he will certainly find other, more worrisome death-defying behaviors out of sight. In the meantime, we’ll still be tempted, like all other parents, to clean up after him, prepare his meals, and intervene when interactions with friends go awry.
Before those tween and teen years kick in, what can we do to help our kids develop independence and prepare for the world? Take a look at your list and ask yourself which things you can start to let go of now. What freedom can you offer everyone in the family by teaching your children the real-world skills they need to acquire?
In my work, I’ve been surprised that an increasing number of kids have yet to get their driver’s licenses. I know several high school seniors and even college kids who have become so comfortable being driven around by their parents or others that they have never bothered to obtain their license, and now they feel too anxious about the responsibility that driving entails. Having been a kid who couldn’t wait to drive, I’ve been baffled by this. Who wouldn’t want the freedom and autonomy that come from having your own license?
To me, this reluctance symbolizes a larger trend. When we do too much for them, kids grow up believing they aren’t capable of doing things on their own, whether it’s learning to drive or completing their homework. At worst, kids feel like they have no control and end up with a sense of “learned helplessness”—the idea that they have no influence over anything in their lives. This leads to anxiety and depression and crushes intrinsic motivation.
But there’s good news: our kids can rise to the occasion. If they learn in an age-appropriate way, small children love to be helpful around the house. As they get older, kids feel important when we ask them to hold the screwdriver while doing some repairs around the house, to look up directions when we get lost, or to lead a gratitude practice before meals. Ideally, we find the middle path for our family between over- and underparenting, challenging our children in just the right amount and offering just enough structure that they’re able to learn for themselves.
If you’re not sure what constitutes an age-appropriate task for your child, I strongly recommend the work of Lindsay Hutton of the Family Education Network.10 I’ve adapted some of her advice here to give you a brief rundown:
Ages 2 to 3: Small Chores and Basic Grooming
This is the age when your children will start to learn basic life skills.
By the age of three, your children should be able to
• help put toys away and clean up spills;
• dress themselves with some help;
• put dirty clothes in the hamper and put trash and recycling in their proper places;
• help with setting and clearing the table for meals;
• wash up and brush teeth with some assistance; and
• help with the care of younger siblings.
Ages 4 to 5: Important Names and Numbers
When your children reach this age, safety skills are a priority.
By this age, your children should
• know the full name, address, phone number, and emails of important people;
• know how to make an emergency call;
• engage in simple cleaning chores, like sweeping or pet care;
• recognize cash denominations and have at least a vague sense of their value;
• perform basic hygiene independently (brushing hair and teeth, washing up);
• pick out clothes to wear; and
• ask doctors, waitstaff, teachers, and tour guides their own questions, with some assistance.
Ages 6 to 7: Basic Chores
Kids at this age can start to help with cooking meals and helping around the house.
Have your kids
• mix, stir, and cut ingredients, with supervision;
• make a basic meal, such as a sandwich;
• help put the groceries away;
• wash the dishes and empty the dishwasher;
• make the bed without assistance;
• bathe with minimal supervision;
• make some of their own purchasing decisions, with parental guidance;
• write their own thank-you notes; and
• complete homework and chores with prompting and checking.
Ages 8 to 9: Taking Care of Things
By this time, your children should take pride in their personal belongings and take care of them properly.
By this age, your children should be able to
• fold clothes;
• learn simple repairs, with supervision of tools, glue, or sewing equipment;
• take care of outdoor toys such as a bike or roller skates;
• perform personal hygiene without prompting;
• vacuum and sweep;
• read a recipe and prepare a simple meal;
• bathe unsupervised;
• help with the grocery list and shopping;
• understand how to save and budget their money and to count and make change;
• help with outdoor chores, such as watering and weeding;
• take out the trash and recycling;
• get homework and chores done, with minimal input and checking over from you;
• learn to use a calendar and manage and plan time with supervision;
• shovel snow and scrape ice from car; and
• resolve some peer and sibling conflicts with parental guidance.
Ages 10 to 13: Gaining Independence
Ten is about the age when your children can begin to perform many skills independently.
Your children should know how to
• stay home alone safely;
• walk to the store to make small purchases;
• change bedsheets;
• do laundry and dishes;
• plan and prepare a meal using the oven;
• learn to use basic hand tools, with supervision;
• change lightbulbs;
• mow the lawn;
• look after younger siblings or neighbors;
• use a calendar and budget time for small tasks effectively;
• begin to arrange play dates and plan their own social life and free time;
• begin chores and homework unprompted; and
• ask teachers and school staff for help.
Ages 14 to 18: More Advanced Skills
By the age of fourteen, your children should master all of the previous skills.
On top of that, they should also be able to
• perform more sophisticated cleaning and maintenance chores, such as changing the vacuum cleaner bag, cleaning the stove, and unclogging drains;
• fill a car with gas and fill and change tires;
• understand food labels and basic nutrition;
• read and understand medicine labels and dosages;
• interview for, get, and keep a job;
• prepare and cook meals;
• plan their own transportation needs;
• manage time effectively, including planning and making appointments, with some guidance;
• resolve conflicts with adults, with your guidance; and
• understand and budget their own finances, including learning about the risks and benefits of checking accounts and credit cards.
Young Adults: Preparing to Live on Their Own
Your children will need to know how to support themselves when they go away to college or move out.
By now, they should know how to
• make regular doctor and dentist appointments and other important health-related appointments independently;
• schedule oil changes and perform other basic car maintenance;
• have a basic understanding of finances and be able to manage a bank account, balance a checkbook, pay bills, and possibly obtain and use a credit card, with some assistance;
• understand basic contracts, such as for an apartment or car lease;
• understand how to use health insurance; and
• pay some or all of their own bills.
The key to not helicoptering is to line up developmental abilities with appropriate tasks, instruct kids as needed, and talk about the activities. This list might not be exactly right for your family, and your kids won’t always be thrilled about learning to do more for themselves, but you can link the new responsibilities with new freedoms. Also, keep in mind that having kids help around the house isn’t just about making your life easier (especially when the food they prepare takes twice as long and comes with twice the mess). Ultimately, it’s about making a wise, long-term investment. Teaching your kids self-reliance means a more meaningful form of liberation for everyone in the family.
reflection Which items on this list jump out at you? Which will be particularly hard for your children to learn? Which tasks will be particularly difficult for you to let go of? Which do you look forward to letting go of?
Who?
This may seem like a simple question to answer. After all, you are the parent. But consider how much we outsource the care and supervision of our children—their education, after-school activities, health care, and so much more. There’s no shame in this, of course. As the adage goes, it takes a village to raise a child.
My wife and I had only been parents for a few months when we had brunch with some friends of ours—seasoned parents in their own right. We commiserated and compared notes about catching colds, finding childcare, and dealing with the lack of sleep that comes with having an infant. “Wait a minute,” our friend Rachel interrupted. “You were both up when Leo was crying? Total rookie move. No wonder you’re both exhausted. You have to take turns, or you’ll end up killing each other!”
There’s something irreplaceably special about those first few months with your newborn child. The weeks race by in a blur. I don’t want to discourage anyone from maximizing that precious and (relatively) brief period, but our friends’ advice on balance will prove invaluable as your kids age. If there are two or more caregivers, find ways to balance the workload and delegate so as not to exhaust yourself. When your kids are babies, take shifts or alternate nights; as they grow older, consider the big picture and share responsibilities of rides, meals, and everything else.
With some social progress, we can have more productive conversations about who is responsible for what and when. We can split things down the middle at 50/50. However, with two busy careers, it might help to have more give-and-take on a daily basis or for even larger spans of time. A wonderful article by Andrew Moravcsik in The Atlantic discusses “lead parenting”—taking turns with which parent leads at home and which leads in career.11 It’s a helpful construct, especially in a marriage of two ambitious adults. My wife and I tend to take the lead on different weekend days or when we travel, alternating the role of “Family Activities Director.” As I’m writing this paragraph, I’m in London taking care of my son while my wife works—I’ve taken off most of the summer from my clinical practice. I spend the mornings with Leo and write during his afternoon naps. At other times of the year, the balance changes in our family, as it will at other points in our life together.
At some point as parents, our kids enter “the village.” They are parented along the way by teachers, coaches, music instructors, and maybe even therapists. This form of sharing responsibilities can be a relief, but it also can be painful or even threatening. I often encounter parents who are clearly concerned that I am somehow “better” at communicating with their children than they are. But my work with their kids is always temporary. Keep in mind that children—especially adolescents—need someone outside the family to offer a safe sounding board so they can then reconnect with their family. And most kids return to their own family’s values after a period of searching or rebelling, even if it’s not a whole Rumspringa. This process is full of ups and downs, but I’m reminded by older parents that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
In a recent support group for parents, a mother of a successfully launched young adult encouraged us all by saying, “Just wait. Keep connecting with your children, try to stay calm, and think of the long view. The cards you’ll get for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day when they’re twenty-five are totally worth the wait.” I hope my own parents would agree.
reflection How do you and your co-parent share the lead with parenting? Which roles would you like to change or adapt over time? What other adults in your child’s life can they connect with when things are difficult at home?
When?
Simply put, catch it early. The best time to make an effort is before the problem happens—“Put things in order before they arise,” as Lao-Tzu reportedly instructed. Whether this is teaching our teens how to rotate the tires before they get a flat or having “that” conversation with our tweens before they become sexually active, it’s our job as parents to prepare our children for the world they’ll face before any of us are ready. Think about it, we teach kids fire safety and practice drills, hoping they’ll never have to use them. On a less dramatic note, we can preview difficult confrontations with peers or teachers, nervous first days of school or summer camp, and managing forbidden or frightening foods at a friend’s house. Talking and visualizing their way through anticipated difficulties—a process known as elaborative rehearsal—helps kids feel confident in new situations and builds strong executive functioning. As you might recall, chapter 4 also discusses previewing and reviewing.
As kids become teens, it’s a good idea to keep this previewing and reviewing casual. With my adolescent patients, I ask, usually at the end of our sessions, “Any good stuff coming up in the next week?” Asking in this seemingly offhand manner, rather than in a mechanical way, invites reflection and previewing, even when teens grunt some indecipherable, monosyllabic answer. For younger kids, you can have fun and play a bit more. For years, my mom sang me “The Tomorrow Song” (the same song her father sang to her), previewing the next day’s events. It went something like this:
Tomorrow is Tuesday.
You’ll get up, have breakfast, get dressed, and go to school.
It’s a cold day, so you’ll need a coat.
You have gym and library, so pack your books and shoes.
Laura will walk you home, and you can have a snack and play outside.
Daddy will be home by four . . .
The song went on and on. When my mom forgot a detail about the coming day, I would remind her, and we would add it to the song. As I grew older, we sang the song less and less, but the practice of previewing the coming day remained.
When can also refer to predictability and rhythm, which—as I’ve emphasized before—are important for kids. But we don’t have to be rigid to help our children feel safe and regulated. Roughly the same rhythm of days and weeks is good enough, though a more predictable rhythm is preferable with kids who have executive function issues. Some schools these days operate six days of the week, which makes me (not to mention their parents) crazy. How are these kids supposed to align with the rest of the world’s five-day week?
When can also mean knowing the right time for a challenging conversation. That means knowing when our kids are the most open and calm—maybe it’s during a car ride, when taking a walk in the woods, or while doing chores side by side. Staring each other down as you discuss a challenging topic will be tough for both of you (I learned that early on as a therapist); it’s more effective to talk while doing something side by side (a puzzle, game, drawing) and simply bringing up topics as you go. We (men, in particular) are wired to feel threatened in that eye-contact-directly-across-from-each-other stance; it tends to make our “upstairs” brains shut down. The path of least resistance into that prefrontal cortex is when our kids feel safe, are well fed and rested, and are not too stressed or emotional about anything else.
reflection When are the best times to hold important or difficult conversations with your kids? What helps them feel more open and relaxed?
What?
What do we choose to focus our efforts on? What do we choose to let go of? These are some of the hardest questions of parenthood—deciding which battles to fight and which to let go. What’s more, this conundrum often creates conflict with our co-parents. You might be a stickler for “please” and “thank you,” while your partner is more worried about dirty hands and messy rooms. Remember, you don’t have to solve every problem or challenge all at once, just as you aren’t obligated to show up for every argument you are invited to.
We can counter the what problem to a degree by limiting choices for our kids. Parents often are tempted to offer unlimited options (maybe because they have trouble deciding for themselves). But as we learned in chapter 3, too many choices can paralyze kids or lead to rumination and regret about whether they made the right choice. So make everyone’s life easier by offering fewer (or no) options, especially at younger ages. Little kids don’t even have the prefrontal lobes to effectively make complex choices. Too much choice overtaxes the prefrontal cortex and limits resources for self-control, patience, ethical decision making, and other important functions,12 potentially leading to more meltdowns, not fewer. So, you actually empower your kids when you limit their choices—what economists call choice architecture. For example, “Do you want to take your bath before or after dinner?” is better than “When do you want your bath?” and leads to them thinking they chose the bath. As a client I work with in sales says, “Never give the customer an opportunity for a no.”
reflection What battles can you let go of, at least for now? How can you streamline or reduce your kids’ choices? Are there points with your partner where you struggle with different priorities?
Here’s another tip: according to a study by researcher Ellen Langer, when you want your kids to do something, the way you ask matters. People are more likely to agree to a request or an instruction when you offer a reason (even a nonsensical one).13 Rather than telling your kid to “Set the table,” you’ll find more success if you try something like, “Set the table because it’s dinner time.”
Another big “what” in terms of perennial battles is around food. Resistence to eating new foods may even be hardwired in by evolution. But there’s good news: before age five, kids may not eat balanced meals, but within the span of seven days, many will eat a balanced week’s worth of food. While they may refuse vegetables one night at dinner, they can learn to listen to their bodies and find those needed nutrients in the next well-rounded meal we place in front of them. We can also invest effort in the short run and save in the long run by involving our kids not in making choices but in making food—from gardening to slicing and stirring, each step of the way leads to more ownership over the meal. We don’t know for certain whether children were historically picky eaters, but we do know they probably helped at all these stages of the meal and were less picky in the past. We can also encourage them to try every food ten times before giving up, which also leads to fewer blanket pronouncements of “dislike.” So with spinach, that means spinach salad, sautéed spinach, saag paneer, spanakopita, spinach quiche, spinach pasta, and so on. Wouldn’t it be a relief to have your kids say they dislike half of these items rather than a blanket refusal of spinach? My friend Mark Bertin, a developmental pediatrician, is adamant about not making “kid food,” which takes more effort and sends the message that kid food and adult food are different things, discouraging experimentation. He also recommends putting everything on a kid’s plate. Even if they just eat the burrito wrapper today, eventually they will eat the insides. But they never will if they don’t first get used to it being on their plate.
When we can find a middle path between under- and overparenting, it’s incredible how much we can help our families. We’ll often miss the mark, but we can keep getting closer, moving to one side or the other depending on our situations, histories, and temperaments. This is also where our self-compassion helps. We feel tremendous shame and anxiety about over- or underparenting, and we judge ourselves preemptively before the other playground parent, professional, or even our partner has a chance to. Let the unhelpful comparisons go.
On a flight across the Atlantic recently, Leo got his first exposure to screen time (he even tried to hug Daniel Tiger through the iPad). While we could have spent six hours exhausting ourselves trying to entertain him without screens, it felt like “right effort” to let him watch Daniel Tiger for a while. After all, we had jet lag and the stresses of being in a foreign country to look forward to, and it wasn’t like we wouldn’t watch movies had we been flying without him. In the end, what was the point? So do your best. It won’t always be the perfect choice, but you can usually steer yourself toward some relief for you and your family.
You don’t have to be perfect, and neither do your children. Freud and the early psychoanalysts were notoriously misogynistic mother-blamers, and we still carry a lot of their bias with us. More recently, however, child analysts have lightened up, so to speak. D. W. Winnicott, for example, stresses that kids don’t need a perfect parent; that parent just has to be “good enough.”14 You don’t have to clothe your baby in organic, locally sourced, hand-sewn diapers that are only washed in a Himalayan stream by unionized Tibetan refugees. Just do your best. All you need to be is a “good enough” parent. Love your imperfect self and love your imperfect family.