CHAPTER 2: WHY TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PARENTING SEEMS SO HARD
When Ben was eight years old, growing up in Burlington, Vermont, his favorite thing to do was to meet his friends and disappear into the woods to go mud sliding through trails that snaked between the trees. They would spend hours there unsupervised, getting completely filthy and having the best time. When Ben was asked what made that memory so sweet, he said, “Because my parents didn’t know where I was.”
That was then, and this is now. Ben is now the father of two boys, and he and his wife would never let their kids do what he did: disappear for an entire afternoon into the woods with friends, some of whom his parents didn’t even know, and then come back home with three inches of mud caked all over him. Today, his kids would be sent into the woods with requisite survival gear, such as tick repellent, an EpiPen, goggles, extra socks, water repellant boots, an expedition vest with enough pockets to hold supplies for an expedition up Mt. Everest, a GPS tracking device, and a video camera strapped to a high-tech forest exploration helmet.
“My kids never leave the house,” says Ben. “They’re too busy with their computer games.” Ben is kidding, but his point is well taken. For the most part, kids today don’t experience the purest of freedoms that their parents and grandparents enjoyed “back in the day.” They are certainly privy to things that previous generations didn’t have, such as science camps and computer games (the educational ones, of course) and an array of supervised team sports, but much of what they do through their teenage years is manufactured—and managed—by their parents or other adults. Too many kids today, in spite of continual advances in technology, communication, and access to unlimited information, have not experienced the excitement of tempting fate, risking conflict, and rallying together after a round of unexpected difficulty or failure. We can dream about returning our children to the simpler lives of yesterday, but in lieu of actually doing so, we should recognize what is missing and not only allow them to go mud sliding alone in the woods but even encourage it.
What to Expect When Everyone Is Telling You What to Expect
Nobody becomes a parent with a clear understanding of what it really means or involves. Once you figure it out and know what you’re doing, your kids are gone, or you have so many by then that you’re too tired and distracted to get anything right, and all you really care about is your next nap.
Parents today face unprecedented challenges in raising their children. Most of them seem to be trapped by unreasonable if not unrealistic expectations. But before anyone can attempt to remedy that situation, it is important to recognize the pressures that parents must cope with in today’s world.
Each and every day, from the time we wake up and turn on the radio, or check the news online or on TV, we are confronted by an onslaught of mass media communication that is designed to get our attention, primarily by frightening us. This creates feelings of inadequacy, as if we are lacking in at least one of life’s most essential qualities. It can translate into perceiving ourselves as fashion-deprived, out of shape, undereducated, or close to financial failure. Even worse, we may be driven to feel unable to care for our family. However we may identify our individual shortcomings, Madison Avenue has somehow succeeded in shaping our needs, perverting our desires, and refocusing our goals. This mind-set invariably infects our entire family, and as parents it affects how we view and raise our children.
When our aspirations and fears are heightened by the relentless noise of mass media, where are we to turn for a reality check? Our neighbors and communities can make our developing neurosis even worse, because peer pressure can create even more distorted expectations. It’s so easy for parents to compare themselves to other parents, and in no time, they will think that they should do the same things with their children. What kind of job does that father have? Which car is that mother driving? Where does our neighbor’s kid go to school? How do they have the time to coach their kids’ sports teams? It’s like taking “keeping up with the Joneses” to another level, where, sadly, no one can ever really measure up and there’s always a feeling of coming up short—as parents and families as a whole.
Society creates an inordinate amount of pressure to succeed at every level and at all costs. Speaking of costs, the current state of our economy makes parents worry even more about their children’s future and makes them put ridiculous premiums on the quality of their children’s education. Does the sticker price of a prestigious private school guarantee anything in today’s competitive world?
It’s enough to make parents recoil and to make any child sick. It actually comes down to an omnipresent fear of failure and a gnawing concern that your child will not make it, and that it will be your fault. Insecurity, anxiety, and a basic lack of trust in existing systems seems to be permeating every facet of our educational system and collective family life. These emotional deficits are caused in good part by people’s financial concerns. Families struggling with money problems fear for their future and that of their children. Those with plenty of cash feel a burning desire for more. For the majority somewhere in the middle, the cost of having a family seems daunting. Pregnancy is expensive, made more so by fertility treatments. Adoption is costly and time-consuming, and may come after a series of costly in-vitro fertilization treatments. A surrogate is no less expensive and can involve complicated legal issues. When a person adds on the basic costs for a nanny, extra childcare, private schools, extracurricular activities, specialized summer camps, tutors, and college consultants, it is overwhelming before you even get to the rising costs of college tuition. These days, even community colleges and state universities are becoming expensive, let alone four-year, private liberal arts colleges.
How Did Overparenting Begin?
It is virtually impossible to single out any one central factor when trying to determine why parents have come to be so intensely concerned with every aspect of their children’s lives. When did every trace of “live and let live” virtually disappear from our parental vocabulary? Overparenting has existed pretty much since parenting itself. If God was supposedly the father of Adam and Eve, can’t we safely say with some confidence that there was clearly some overparenting going on there in the Garden of Eden?
Overparenting apparently ebbed and flowed over the past thousands of years, but it clearly exploded during the 1990s. It was as if the public trust had been damaged enough that it was affecting the very core of our family structures. We had peace and prosperity at home, at least for a majority of people, yet anxiety and fear were permeating our society more and more. While crime rates were going down, parents were ratcheting up their safety measures, keeping their kids within earshot and under constant supervision.
Our country’s innocence and general trust in authority was shattered in the 1960s with the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Our communal belief that governmental institutions would take care of us and protect us continued to erode with the awful realities of the Vietnam War, especially as people came to the conclusion that the military could not be trusted or, even worse, that they might not know what they were doing. This was compounded when Nixon imploded right before our eyes. Collectively, these events created lasting feelings of insecurity as we lost our respect for, reverence for, and belief in our government.
The insecurities and polarization that we have come to feel as a nation have bled into our personal behavior and have seemingly gotten worse. While many parenting authorities feel that the rash of overparenting that we have seen since the 1990s is past its height, we disagree. As evidenced here, we can see that parents are as tightly wound as ever, and the prognosis for their children is troubling. Perhaps an examination of human behavior over the ages will help us understand where we are today and put us on the road to being better parents. It is important to note that being a better parent is different from overparenting.
A Brief History of Parenting
Parental involvement in children’s lives has changed dramatically throughout history. Whether you subscribe to creationism, take stock in the science of evolution, or lean toward a different vision of history, it’s informative to see how parenting has developed and changed since the first baby was born.
Stone Age parents were not exactly diligent when it came to their children’s dental hygiene, but according to studies on the moral development of children presented in 2010 at the University of Notre Dame, these original moms and dads raised well-adjusted, empathetic children.1
“They instinctively knew what was right for a child, and children thrived because of that,” claims Darcia Narvaez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, whose research on hunter-gatherer societies explored the psychological, anthropological, and biological conditions related to human development.
In certain ancient Semitic cultures of Mesopotamia, babies were named for the emotional response of the family upon the child’s birth. Children modeled adults by playing with miniature weapons and household implements. Bonds between parents and children could be broken, as stated in Mesopotamian law: “If a son says to his father, ‘You are not my father,’ he can cut off his son’s locks, make him a slave, and sell him for money. If a son says to his mother, ‘You are not my mother,’ she can cut off his locks, turn him out of town, or drive him away from home, deprive him of citizenship and inheritance, but his liberty he loses not. If a father says to his son, ‘You are not my son,’ the latter has to leave house and field, and he loses everything. If a mother says to her son, ‘You are not my son,’ he shall leave house and furniture.”2
In classical Greece, babies who survived early infancy received toys during sacred festivals, and once they became adults, they dedicated their toys to various gods. Girls were kept at home until they married, but boys were encouraged to go to school and immerse themselves in the social world of their mentors.
During Roman times, the law and principle of patria potestas meant that the male head of household held absolute power over his children. He could discipline them as he wished, or even kill them or sell them into slavery. Valued children were given a bulla, or bag of magical charms worn around the neck to protect them from harm. Discipline could be harsh, but many Romans realized that the rod was counterproductive.
Imperial China valued its children highly. Parents debated philosophies of discipline and methods of character building, and many rulers encouraged a mix of harsh authority and gentle permissiveness.
Viking girls were educated in domestic arts, while boys typically learned farming. A community of adults raised these children together.
Skipping ahead to modern times (apologies to the amazing parents of the Coptic period in Egypt, the Persian Empire, China’s Ming Dynasty, and the Dark Ages, just to name a few), we can understand today’s parenting issues more thoroughly if we examine the changing conditions that precipitated most of the challenges we currently face. That will help us understand why parenting today is so hard and how we may ease that burden.
Life in America was great in the 1950s—if you were white, male, athletic, and popular. But other kids—nonwhite and not obviously athletic—had a much tougher time, and still do. While we have made many advances as a society regarding civil and human rights, making our country a better place for women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community, children have not necessarily reaped the benefits of this progress. Childhood anxiety, depression, suicides, and feelings of helplessness are on the rise, and these issues cut across race, economic class, and gender. It’s wise not to take things for granted when it comes to the environment in which you are raising your children.
The Psychology of Children
It was barely one hundred years ago when scientific interest in parenting first began in America, with academic evaluation and recommendations for child rearing. Pediatrics, infant care, and child psychology became subjects of scientific interest only in the late 1800s. Up until then, health care for children was generally considered to fit within the confines of the church and the dominating trends of society.
The Industrial Revolution changed everything in America, with its great breakthroughs in technology, agriculture, and economic growth. But child labor became more rampant—and more harmful as well as more dangerous for children’s well-being. In 1887 the American Pediatric Society was established to educate the general public on infant issues. They gradually started conducting baby examinations and expanded into childcare through adolescence. In 1897, the Parent Teacher Association was founded to advocate for children and their health and safety. In 1912, the US Children’s Bureau was founded to provide information on infant care and maternal health matters.
From 1920 onward, American parents were privy to a host of information regarding their children’s health. This science-based advice, however, was not always in the best interests of the children. Victorian behaviorist John Broadus Watson published his famous Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928, which presented his relatively rigid views on people and society.
“Treat them as though they were young adults,” he wrote. “Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly and firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. Shake hands with them in the morning.”3
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for affection. In fact, Watson advised parents to withhold that sort of love just in case it might spoil their children. He preferred that mothers and fathers reject their parental instincts, including any bonding on an emotional level, because he felt that any emotions, positive or negative, were a threat to order and rational behavior. By having parents act this way, Watson—and prominent others at the time who subscribed to his philosophy—felt that children would grow up with a sound work ethic and become more productive members of society.
Spock Talk
In his landmark 1946 book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a disciple of the Freudian psychoanalyst view, encouraged mothers to trust rather than abandon their natural parenting instinct, a practice that John Broadus Watson had tried to eradicate. What distinguished Spock from others before him was his belief that if parents were going to better understand the behavior, needs, and personalities of their children, they would have to view the world from their children’s perspective. Spock felt that being aware of and meeting a child’s needs was crucial for the child’s well-being and future development. Contrary to what has been said about Benjamin Spock, he did not suggest that parents abandon discipline. He favored methods of discipline that are age- and circumstance-appropriate, and not enforced merely for their own sake. He also preached about the importance of trying to understand what motivates a child’s negative behavior and was a great supporter of affectionate parenting.
Children of the 1960s
Psychoanalyst John Bowlby offered the world his famous research on the early infant bonding process, including his theories of attachment, child grief, and separation. Yet another voice from the child-centered parenting domain was A. S. Neill, the Scottish educator and founder of the Summerhill School, a passionate advocate of a child’s right to personal freedom. He said that “free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.”4 He went on to add, “The function of the child is to live his own life, not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.”5
While both men, along with many other experts of their time, had a great influence on the progression of parenting philosophy in the United States, mixing the images of Victorian fathers and Freudian mothers, perhaps no one has had more influence than clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind, whose contributions to the field of child-rearing research are virtually unparalleled. She identifies the three most popular styles of parenting in white middle-class America in the 1960s as follows:
• Authoritarian parenting: A behaviorist parenting approach recommended by John Broadus Watson, utilizing high parental control and low parental responsiveness. This approach would be considered too strict and hard today.
• Permissive parenting: Inspired by the Freudian approach to children, urging low parental control and high parental responsiveness. Today, this approach would be considered too soft or permissive.
• Authoritative parenting: A combination of the two, featuring high parental control along with high parental responsiveness. This approach is now considered to be just the right balance of authoritarian and permissive parenting.
This is how Diana Baumrind describes the role of the mother:
She encourages verbal give and take, and shares with the child the reasoning behind her policy. She values both expressive and instrumental attributes, both autonomous self-will and disciplined conformity. Therefore, she exerts firm control at points of parent-child divergence, but does not hem the child in with restrictions. She recognizes her own special rights as an adult, but also the child’s individual interests and special ways. The authoritative parent affirms the child’s present qualities, but also sets standards for future conduct. She uses reason as well as power to achieve her objectives. She does not base her decisions on group consensus or the individual child’s desires; but also does not regard herself as infallible or divinely inspired.6
The Changing Paradigm of Parenting
What worked in previous generations doesn’t necessarily hold up so well with today’s crop of parents. What used to be nonnegotiable between parents and children, such as bedtime, attire, and cleaning your plate at the dinner table, is now open for discussion in many households. Quite often, it’s much more tempting (and easier) for parents to just give in, give up, or go along with their child’s wishes, as if they were not the parents, or don’t want to continue to reinforce traditional ideas and values. Nowadays, parents are more willing to blame someone else for whatever shortcomings or issues they perceive their children to be facing, even when they are self-inflicted or precipitated by the parent and/or child.
Of course, many people claim a multitude of fundamental reasons for why parenting today is so hard. From the parents, educators, and professional family experts to whom we have spoken, here is a short list of what they report:
1. Parents’ careers are more complicated or demanding.
2. Times are more dangerous.
3. Families don’t live near each other, compromising the input and help from an extended family.
4. Parents want their child to be seen as “perfect.”
5. Parents need full access all the time to everyone in their child’s school.
6. Everyone is expected to go to college, and to the “right” college.
7. Parents expect their children to do something significant after college.
8. Smaller family size creates more pressure on their child to “make it” in the world.
9. Parents are afraid that their kids won’t be successful by their definition.
10. Kids today are less responsible and have little sense of boundaries.
11. There is a much higher number of single parents and children of divorce.
This list is surely incomplete, but collectively it still demonstrates a relatively narrow view of why parenting in today’s world is so hard. Let’s see if any of these reasons really stand up upon closer inspection:
1. Parents’ careers are not necessarily more complicated, but in our current economy, they may be more demanding, especially when it comes to overtime.
2. Times seem more dangerous in some parts of America because of the proliferation of guns, but, generally speaking, the crime rate has gone down.
3. Families don’t live near each other. As our society becomes more mobile, the extended family unit has disintegrated and childcare has become less of an “inside job,” with fewer family relatives participating. Although many people live near each other in big cities, it seems like fewer and fewer people get to know each other, much less trust each other to help look after their children.
4. Parents want their child to be seen as “perfect,” certainly by others. This is nothing new, but it’s still a factor, especially among those parents who feel as if they can buy, hire, or coach perfection.
5. Parents need full access all the time to everyone in their child’s school. First of all, unfettered access would be a nightmare for teachers and administrators, and it would do little good for the students. Parents who feel this way might benefit from seeking a new hobby, therapy, or vice in place of their children.
6. Everyone is expected to go to college, and to the “right” college, too, not just any old school. The pressure on families to have their kids attend college has grown exponentially, and for good reason. In today’s workforce, a college degree is essentially equivalent to what a high school diploma was two generations ago. On top of that, there is a greater push than ever among upwardly mobile parents to get their kids into “elite” colleges and universities. This is causing an enormous upheaval throughout America’s educational system and an ever-growing cottage industry of tutors, consultants, and literature on the subject of getting your child into “the right school.”
7. Parents expect their children to do something valuable and productive after college. The race is on to get the best jobs after school. Unfortunately, the unemployment numbers for college graduates seem to be rising.
8. Smaller families put more pressure on their child to “make it” in the world. Logically, parents tend to focus more on only children, and because today’s families are generally smaller, this is causing a general increase in overparenting.
9. Parents are afraid that their kids won’t be successful. This fear can be traced back to the Depression era and Post-Depression, when parents were afraid that their children might suffer the same setbacks they did as children.
10. Kids today feel less responsible and have little sense of boundaries. This may apply to children who have been spoiled and feel a certain sense of entitlement, but it is not always the case and certainly occurs less often inside intact, well-grounded households.
11. There are more single parents and more divorced families, but that does not mean that parents can’t learn to co-parent and work things out for the benefit of the children.
Honestly, a number of the reasons for overparenting stated by those we surveyed made some sense, and may suggest reasonable, understandable challenges; however, each of them is controllable and need not become an obstacle to healthy parenting.
Who’s Minding the Store?
The late Suzanne Bianchi, a social scientist who analyzed how American families have changed during the late twentieth century, found that working mothers of the 1990s spent as much time (an average of twelve hours) with their children as—or more than—stay-at-home mothers of the 1960s.7 This challenges the perception most of us have developed that today’s working women may be short-changing their children of what they purportedly need to ensure proper nourishment. In fact, Bianchi discovered that working mothers today spend the same amount of time (an average of twelve hours) with their children as their counterparts during the 1960s.
So how can mothers (and fathers) effectively parent their children if they are spending more and more time away from home—working? Common sense would have us believe that less time at home means something negative for children. However, the math doesn’t always work out that way. In many cases, time is simply spent differently. Parents sleep less, delegate housework, eat out less, cut back on TV time and “date nights,” work a certain amount of hours from a home office, and in households with small children they occasionally bring their kids to work. It’s a matter of shifting gears and managing time and space effectively. It sure sounds easy enough. We wonder why more parents aren’t following this path.
We can argue quite confidently that over the past fifteen to twenty years these parental tendencies have shifted and, in many cases, not necessarily for the better. Many, if not most, parents work more than thirty hours per week; working forty, fifty, and even sixty hours is not uncommon for parents in demanding professions. Children may be compromised when both of their parents are gone at work for a good portion of their children’s waking hours.
Some parents actively seek promotions, which will mean increased time away from their families but more money in the bank, along with the possibility of affording private school and a private university for their kids.
Raising a Global Child in Today’s Society
The responsibility of raising our children does not fall on the shoulders of parents alone. Between home, school, television, the Internet, and Madison Avenue, your child is bombarded on a daily basis by passive and active external forces, some rather aggressive and invasive. As a parent, you’re the quarterback of a team. In the beginning, you control how your children eat, what they wear, and with whom and where they hang out. Slowly but surely, that changes as they begin attending school, unless, of course, you live in the woods, free of electronic devices. By the time your child becomes a teenager, you may control the purse strings and the curfew but not much else.
Mission impossible? Welcome to raising a global child in today’s society. It is hard, but it’s all a matter of letting go—in a positive sense. Your children can certainly learn from you; you are probably the first presenter of a moral code in life and their primary role model, but you are far from the only one! The sooner you realize that fact about you and your children, the better off all of you will be. This reality is not much different than it has always been, but there are significantly more external inputs now than ever before.
This means that beginning with your babysitter or nanny, you rapidly cease to be the only adult or outside influence in your child’s life. How, then, can you manage what your child digests, much less his or her evolving emancipation? What about the risk factors that accompany your child’s increased freedom? Are you willing to accept that as your children age and develop, life becomes more risky and you control less and less of it?
Those are tough pills to swallow. Without any formal education in parenting, how are we supposed to know how to do it? Shall we simply copy and, in some cases, emulate what our parents did—for better or for worse? We can read one or two of the plethora of books available, and that can be quite helpful, but, overall, we must choose what type of parent we want to be, based on our own personalities, strengths, and weaknesses and our understanding of our environment and our children.
The Big Three Parenting Styles
Just as we have presented a host of parenting archetypes and styles, a deeper evaluation of their combined consequences may be merited. Diane Baumrind has coupled some of these tendencies in ways that clearly reveal the pitfalls of overparenting:
• Authoritarian Parenting: This is generally considered to be an oppressive parenting style that may have unfortunate long-term consequences for children, producing low self-esteem and poor social skills.
• Authoritarian Beliefs and Values: Patriarchy, Victorian ideals, behaviorism, insensitivity and intolerance, hierarchy, authority, submissiveness, harshness, predictability, conservatism, no parent-child discussions, a black-and-white world view, rigidity, aggressiveness, inhibiting psychological control, suppression of emotions, threats.
• Permissive Parenting: This style has been noted for producing children with good social skills and high self-esteem but mediocre academic performance. Therefore, this parenting style is also seen as less successful because, in general, academic performance is considered to be a goal.
• • Permissive Beliefs and Values: Freudianism, manipulative control, bribes, individual autonomy and personal freedom, high creativity, non-restrictiveness, role equality, non-punitive techniques, harmony-orientated environment, free development, flat hierarchy, self-regulation.
• Authoritative Parenting: This is considered to be the most successful of the three parenting styles in terms of producing happy, independent children who do well in school.
• Authoritative Beliefs and Values: Social responsibility, shaping and reinforcement, cooperation, rational control, relative freedom of choice.
• Shared Authoritarian and Authoritative Beliefs and Values: High behavior control, disciplined conformity, demands and chores, rules and order, obedience, punishments.
• Shared Authoritative and Permissive Beliefs and Values: High responsiveness, give-and-take discussions, self-assertiveness, warmth, independent thinking, meeting needs, encouragement.8
Mindful Parenting
Which parenting style or combination of styles do you prefer? Which might work best for you? The only way to determine that is to be in the moment as much as possible, and that means finding a balance between establishing a consistent parenting style and living life as it happens, one minute, one hour, and one day at a time. If you can do that, if you can be aware of your feelings as they ebb and flow—and change—parenting won’t feel so hard, and communication with your children will get easier and produce better results.
Following someone else’s rules will only get you so far. You must get in touch with yourself as a parent, much like you had to do when you first moved away from your parents’ home and, inspired by your upbringing, established your own identity and presence in the world. Listening to yourself is a start, after which you must follow your intuition and learn as you grow. Sometimes, in order to feel secure, your child will need you to be predictable and set well-established boundaries, while at other times he or she may need freedom and the chance to take risks and possibly even fail! That’s right. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is get out of the way and let your kid make his or her own choices, even if you can see that the child may not get it right. That may be your biggest challenge and what many parents are unconsciously referring to when they say that parenting is hard, or “it will hurt me more than it hurts you.” Letting go and allowing your children to make their own choices and fail—while you watch—is a big challenge. From your perspective, it means paying attention, opening your heart, negotiating, and making decisions. Then, it will require yielding, one of the hardest thing for any parent to do sincerely and successfully.
“When we took our ninth-grade daughter to a boarding school and were about to say goodbye,” reports Tabitha, a mother of two from Tampa, Florida, “I couldn’t help noticing how small she appeared, especially with all the upperclassmen running around the campus. She wanted to be there, but I was nearly trembling, imagining how she would cope with so much newness in her young life. Just as we were about to go, I ran to the car to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. I think I was trying to escape the moment of saying goodbye. As I was about to leave, my older son gave me some great advice: ‘Mom, whatever you feel like telling my sister right now—don’t. No words of wisdom before you drive away, leaving her in tears. She won’t cry. She’s totally fine. Let’s just say goodbye and go.’ So that’s what we did, and we are all better for it.”
Your Child’s School as Co-Parent
An effective parent must learn to yield. Recognizing that your time parenting your children is limited and that it is augmented by a variety of other individuals and institutions is an important part of being able to let go. This does not occur only at home. Parental yielding goes far beyond your efforts at home. On an average weekday, your elementary- to high-school-age children spend approximately seven hours at their respective schools, and up to three more hours if they participate in afterschool activities, such as pottery class, drama, homework help, or athletics. Their school plays a significant role in helping you bring up your children. Therefore, your relationship with that school can influence your child’s overall experience.
As a parent, you must learn to navigate your way through an ever-changing educational system influenced by federal, state, and local mandates that can affect everything from a school’s social culture to its testing philosophy and practice. Your involvement is up to you. Certainly, it’s good to know what’s going on, but becoming too present is not advisable. It’s your child’s school. When a teacher takes attendance, it is your child’s name that is called out, and unless a problem develops, your child’s teacher does not need to know you very well.
Trust: that’s what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter whether you are sending your child to a public or private school; you must take a leap of faith and trust the school to do what it theoretically knows how to do: educate your child. Sure, pay attention and keep up with the daily, weekly, or monthly goings on, but, as a rule, it’s best to not interfere with your child’s school experience, unless, of course, he or she is obviously struggling with an academic, social, or physical issue.
Most French children wave goodbye to their parents at age two or three when they enter France’s educational machine and embark on a path intended to make them into miniature adults. This is true in many countries, especially where both parents traditionally hold jobs and need daycare for their children at a very young age.
So, do schools really take care of your children? Can they be consistent with your parenting style at home? It seems that schools are not as strict as they used to be. We rarely see children walking around with bruised knuckles and sore backsides as a result of corporal punishment. That’s a good thing, of course, but an increase in parental involvement in their children’s school activities often is a result of a lack of respect, prestige, and recognition for teachers, which in turn leads to a decline in teachers’ authority over children at school. When we speak of our children displaying bad behavior, who is responsible, and where and how can it be remedied? Some parents drop off their kids at school and expect the teachers to take care of everything—teaching values, good behavior, how to dress, what to eat, and so on—from soup to nuts, and then reinforce that stuff as well!
“I pay the school all this money, so they ought to raise my kid,” says Bill, an oil executive in Dallas, Texas, who sends his son to a local private school. Does Bill have unreasonable expectations and a misguided sense of entitlement? Probably, but he’s not the only one—by far—and it’s not just private school parents who take this stance. Plenty of PTA folks in public schools are guilty of the same behavior, in effect, abdicating their responsibility, underparenting their children, and then wanting to blame someone beside themselves if they don’t like how their children turned out.
Parent-teacher conferences may not happen often enough for some parents, but in most schools teachers encourage parents to email them with any concerns. Thank goodness for email. It keeps overly anxious parents at bay and from randomly barging into the classroom, at least to a point. Beyond that communication, some schools provide parents with the option of using specialized recordkeeping software to access the schools’ websites and monitor their children’s grades and class attendance. Parents can also check on what their kids are eating by monitoring their children’s lunch menu through special websites. These services go a long way toward keeping you informed, and then helping you determine when to advocate for your child and when to yield.
These days, though, despite having all this information available, parents have become increasingly involved in activities and decisions that were previously under the teachers’ absolute discretion and control. Parental involvement also extends to school governance and decisions pertaining to curricular and extracurricular activities. Surely you’ve seen more than your fair share of parents intervening on their children’s behalf to ensure that they get their first choice in selecting their child’s teacher for the next year, or which extracurricular activities their child can participate in. In some cases, parents who go too far could be accused of bullying their children’s school.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. What can schools do to combat overparenting? Even more important, what can you do to ensure that you aren’t already or won’t become one of these parents? How can you empower yourself to establish boundaries between you and your child’s school, much like you try to teach your child to do? If you think you have it rough, imagine what a typical school goes through, trying to educate masses of children, while doing its best to satisfy hundreds, if not thousands, of demanding parents, who are often not as knowledgeable as they think.
Ban Those Balls!
Going overboard in the pursuit of protecting our children is not limited to parental behavior. With the omnipresent fear of litigation, schools can be equally guilty of “overprotecting the children,” as exhibited recently by school officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington, New York. It seems that some students were getting hurt during recess, and according to school superintendent Kathleen Maloney, “some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected.”9
As a result, footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, and any other balls that could possibly hurt someone are banned on school grounds. Physical tag games are also verboten, as are unsupervised cartwheels. It’s not clear if spontaneous jumping for joy will continue to be allowed, but if these measures are any indication, that too may also soon be banned, and it won’t be because some kids are simply awkward.
While it’s clear that helmets and pads can help prevent injuries, we haven’t been able to find many statistics to support the dangers of unsupervised cartwheels. In fact, it’s hard to understand why this has even happened, and why other school districts are apparently considering following suit. Playground injuries are as old as playgrounds, and most playgrounds these days, with their rubberized flooring, are infinitely safer than they used to be. So, is this concern for safety going too far? If a child breaks his leg playing kickball, do you cancel all kickball games for the foreseeable future and ban kickballs altogether? If a kid falls off a jungle gym in a playground and cracks his elbow, do you immediately have the jungle gyms removed, or only allow a child on one if there is an adult monitor at his or her side? Or, to go even further, do you simply close all playgrounds? At Weber Middle School, that’s what the administration has effectively done. Perhaps because Port Washington, like any other town, has its share of car accidents, it won’t be long before it will be banning cars.
Childhood is fraught with danger. But are Nerf balls really the answer for everything?
“Hey, Tommy, go out for a pass!” says Dave.
“OK, sure, Dave, here I go!” Tommy replies.
Tommy, all four-foot-three of him, goes racing across the playground, zigzagging his way through the other children, who are peacefully playing kickball with a balloon.
“I’m throwing you this Nerf football, Tommy,” yells Dave to his friend. “Keep running and look, come on, look for the ball, it’s coming! Hey, Tommy! Watch out! Be careful; you’re going to run into the fence!”
Which is exactly what Tommy does, after he bangs into his teacher and crashes into the fence, just as the Nerf ball safely bonks him on the head.
This sounds like a scene straight out of The Nerf Ball From Hell, just another case of institutionalized over-adulting. Let kids be kids! Good manners and human decency are one thing, but too much political correctness is another. By enacting these rules, the school district in Port Washington has legally wussified an entire town.
Think how far some parents may take the situation:
“I’m very upset,” says Carmine, an imaginary mother of three from Port Washington. “My son was playing baseball the other day at school, and they were using a tomato instead of a ball. Anyway, he’s up at bat, and the pitcher hits him in the eye with the tomato! At first, he’s not hurt, but then his eye swells up and he has to go to the emergency room. It turns out he has lycopene poisoning. If the school would have been using a baseball like kids have been doing for the past one hundred years, my son could have just gotten a plain old concussion instead of lycopene poisoning! I mean, he could have died from that!”
We are not advocating negligence or carelessness. We also recommend that children wear batting helmets, even when using vegetables or fruits to replace actual baseballs. However, we do encourage a healthy dose of reality, risk, acceptance, and common sense.
Whose Education Is This, Anyway?
Some parents become too involved in their children’s educational experience. They push administrations to assign their children to the “best” teacher in a particular grade, berate coaches for not playing their children enough on an athletic team, or intervene when it comes time for casting the school play. They may even uproot their family and move to a new part of town with what is perceived to be a better school, in spite of the children’s wish to remain in a neighborhood that they consider to be home. This is often accompanied by a succession of tutors and private coaches, beginning at an early age and continuing all the way through high school.
Some kids are naturally more gifted athletically than others, just as some are more academically adroit. Children develop at different speeds, so a child who physically develops very rapidly may be slower to catch up intellectually. This process, which reflects the neurological system’s maturation, is frequently more obvious with boys than with girls. In spite of that, some parents expect—and push for—their children to excel at everything, and all at the same time! Interestingly, this is particularly true for parents who were not stars growing up but wished they were and now hope that they can push their children into accomplishing what they couldn’t.
This may mean hiring a private baseball coach for a six-year-old by a father who never played or was a marginal junior high school player. While he knows nothing about coaching, this parent will maneuver his way into becoming the Little League coach, not because he particularly wants to volunteer, but so that his son can be the team’s starting pitcher.
Behavior like this can happen on a larger scale, too. In a suburban Pennsylvania town a few years ago, several parents hired two semipro ball players to coach their children’s team, whereas all the other teams in the league used local college kids, most of whom had played on the same field when they were growing up. The team with the fancy coaches did not win many more games, but it created a lot of animosity with the other parents, and a sense of unfairness to the children on the other teams. Despite the use of semipro coaches, no one from that team, or, in fact, any of the other teams, ever made it to the major leagues, and it is unlikely that anyone will. But all it took to create this situation was a few parents who were aging, frustrated jocks and were willing to do anything to give their kids a leg up on the competition.
Pursuing a better education or athletic advantage for children—at any cost—can be harmful to the very children parents are trying so hard to support. Parents must allow their children to learn the lay of the land—that not everyone can be the star of the play or the team, and that failure can be as valuable a lesson, if not more so, than success. Children already know who is good and bad at different things, be it in sports, academics, or school, and sometimes not intervening allows them to appreciate the gifts that others have, and in turn to value their own talents, which is a much more important life lesson. While it may hurt at the time, most children figure out that, as Mick and Keith once told us, “you can’t always get what you want” all of the time.
“My kid is only a tree in the first-grade play,” Ray said, feeling as if his whole world was being cut out from underneath him. “I need to talk to somebody to get him a better part.”
Really? The insanity has begun! Ray is making things difficult for his child, and his kid is only in first grade! This has trouble written all over it. We can safely bet that Ray loves his kid and wants the best for him, but why is he already freaking out because his son will be playing a tree in the school play? Maybe it’s a story about trees, and he’s the star tree who sings and dances! Who knows? Maybe he is just playing a glorified piece of furniture. So what? Are the other children performing soliloquies at his expense? No wonder parenting is so hard. Ray is making it impossibly difficult because of his unrealistic expectations. He’s obsessing about his son’s success for absolutely no reason.
How do we get parents like Ray to manage their expectations for their kids? How do we get parents to manage their own expectations? Can we just say to these parents, “Your kid is not a genius! There’s only one Einstein. Not every child is meant to go to Harvard; not every kid is meant to play major-league baseball. Get over it; average is beautiful. Appreciate the abilities that he or she has, not the ones you want him to have.” Can we actually say that? When it comes to our own children, can we hear it and accept it? Let’s hope so. Let’s hope that we can accept, appreciate, and honor the gifts that each of our children possesses, even if they are not the ones that we thought he or she should have.
It would be wise to learn from our ancient predecessors. Our forefathers and mothers, the hunters and gatherers, nurtured their offspring with kindness and hours of unstructured free play. In fact, children were raised in a village atmosphere, with multiple adult caretakers. That guaranteed a certain level of physical affection and comfort, which pediatricians agree is crucial during a child’s developing years.
Sounds like common sense, but not everyone gets it. In fact, many parents need to be reminded—and in some cases, taught—how to love their children, by simply being there for them and providing a loving, caring environment.
There is no “I” in “Team”—or “Parent.” So, let us be clear as parents that our children’s lives are their lives and not ours. We already have our own, and by the grace of God we are simply here to enjoy the privilege of watching (and sometimes helping) these human beings discover themselves, sometimes right in front of our eyes. Enjoy it. Love and appreciate the journey. It doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it out to be.
Overparenting or Just Plain Dumb?
In this game, you will read examples of parental behavior and decide whether the mom or dad in the story is overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD). What do you win? Peace of mind, confidence, and the knowledge that you’re not screwing up your kids too badly.
(Please note: These questions are rhetorical and do not suggest actual answers.)
1. A parent wrote her child’s paper, and the child received a grade of C. The parent was upset, and, as it turns out, she had consulted with an out-of-state professor to get his ideas for the paper. It’s unknown whether the professor was also given a C or was asked for a refund because his work did not get the desired result.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
2. A high school student was having trouble in school and skipped some classes, but as a cheerleader she was intent on showing up at the homecoming game. However, she missed school for a second day, saying that she had to go to the Department of Public Safety for her driver’s license. The school called home to say that because of the absences, no matter what the reason, she couldn’t cheer at the weekend game. Her mother pleaded her daughter’s case, lying about her daughter’s whereabouts on the day she missed school. But because her daughter had been caught on video getting her nails done in a salon during school hours, the mother’s cover-up backfired. She got mad at the school for not understanding that as a cheerleader her daughter needed her nails to look perfect for the game.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
3. A seventeen-year-old boy has grown up quite smothered and spoiled. He goes on a community service school project to Kenya, where his school and his parents hope that he will learn a few life lessons. At the last minute, however, the boy’s parents go with him, which in essence undoes the potential for having a positive effect on the child.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
4. A mother with a heavyset daughter wants her school and a counselor to put the kid on a diet and help her pick out her clothes, rather than the mom being the one to tell her daughter that she is overweight, and doing these activities with her.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
5. John is a six-foot-two-inch, 210-pound high school senior. One day, with his class scheduled to leave in the morning on a field trip, he goes to school without his lunch. That morning, both his parents noticed that John had forgotten his lunch, so each of them drives to the school with an alternative meal. Neither parent could imagine John’s missing lunch that day, even though the school had already told the parents that it would be providing pizza on the bus. John’s father drops off a lunch for his son and heads back to work. John’s mother breaks down in the school office.
“I’m really sorry,” she says, “but besides taking care of my husband and kids, I don’t have much of a life.”
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
6. At one particular private school, student grades are posted online every day. When parents check in, some of them call and/or text their kids during the school day to tell them their grades, and, if it applies, they even will ask them what they did to mess up. Others contact the school directly, even before their children know what is going on, to challenge the grades and demand changes.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
7. Valerie is in fifth grade, and she isn’t doing very well in school, which upsets her mother, who demands a meeting with all of Valerie’s teachers. She wants them all to sign a contract, promising that her daughter will get good enough grades to be admitted into a prestigious middle school.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
8. Scott has been removed from his school play because of his bad attendance record and poor grades. His parents write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, blaming it all on the school and claiming that being in the play is the only thing their child likes or is good at, and if the school deprives him of that, they will be doing irreparable harm to his future.
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
9. Candice let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. This caused an uproar among local parents and was even picked up by international media. When Candice appeared on a national TV program to discuss her decision to let her son ride the subway alone, the host asked the viewers at home whether Valerie was “an enlightened mom or a really bad one.”10
Is the media reaction an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
10. At a recent gathering of kindergarten parents at a small school, the teacher pointed out one child’s painting among others hanging on the walls of an exhibit displaying all the children’s artwork.
“He’s a gifted artist,” the teacher announced to everyone.
The “gifted” child’s father raced home and told his son what happened. He then proceeded to find art tutors for his son, promising him that they would help him draw even better. His son looked at him like he was an alien.
“Dad, I just wanna draw stuff, OK?”
Is this an example of overparenting (OP) or just plain dumb (JPD)?
The Ethical Road Is Forked
Whether we refer to certain parental behavior as overparenting or just plain dumb, the choices that parents make are often rooted in the moral code that they opt to adopt. Most of us learn basic concepts of right and wrong when we are young children, taught by our parents, in fact, and later embellished by relatives, teachers, coaches, and mentors. These lessons form the foundation of our value systems, as tried and true for us as the Ten Commandments. For many parents, though, these principles, such as “do unto others as you would have done to you,” fall by the wayside, often as early as when it’s time to find a spot in a preferred preschool program. At that point, some parents (unbeknownst to their children, so it’s OK in their minds) go to great lengths to gain their children’s admittance. In New York City, parents have been known to grease the palms of admissions directors for a spot in a select school, much like prospective tenants have been doing with building superintendents for years to secure an apartment over other candidates. “Do whatever it takes” is the familiar refrain in those circumstances, but who are we convincing when we tell ourselves that as parents? Does the end really justify the means? What kind of hypocrisy are we setting ourselves up for when it comes to raising our kids?
“Do what I say, not what I do.” Really? Has parenting become so hard these days that we have to lie and cheat to help our kids get ahead? Is the ethical road as forked as it appears? Each of us must answer that question as we navigate our way through this complicated thing called parenting.