CHAPTER 3: HOW DOES OVERPARENTING HAPPEN?

In the United States, overparenting seems to have started with the Baby Boomer generation, when folks grew up in a world of increasing access to education, job security, wealth, and technology. But in the span of a few decades, the Baby Boomers’ offspring have morphed into a society built on vanity, consumerism, an acceptance of excess, reduced attention spans, and a sense that there are shortcuts to almost everything. We were told that we could be anybody and do anything.

“Just do it.”

“Be all that you can be.”

“Think outside the box.”

The encouragement from Madison Avenue is quite seductive and continues to influence one generation after the next.

“Have it your way.”

“The power to be your best.”

“Unleash the beast.”

“Life’s a sport. Drink it up.”

“The best never rest.”

These messages seem to be speaking to each and every one of us, hitting our empathy bones and anointing us with the capability to rule the world, or at least our local universe, or at least our child’s school, or, at the very least, our own home.

“Impossible is nothing.”

“Success. It’s a mind game.”

“Because you’re worth it.”

With all these encouraging words, it’s no wonder that some parents simply feel entitled, especially if their world is expanding materialistically and they anoint themselves as unofficial masters of the universe, believing that their children are entitled to the same benefits, luxuries, and preferential treatment that they are experiencing.

On the other hand, many parents are seeing their world shrink, as jobs go overseas, education becomes more difficult to obtain, and families get smaller. Parents threatened by economic woes are afraid that their kids may not be successful. Understandably, they will do anything to provide their children with a chance to enhance their position in life and succeed.

Defining Success

Is it a success when parents hire a team of tutors for their child to whip her into shape academically so that she will achieve test scores beyond her natural capacity, opening the door to get her into a college that is too big of a reach, where she will not succeed on her own? For a child who has had everything managed for her all through childhood, how will she automatically know how to manage her own time, let alone keep up with the academic demands of a high-quality university, without that team of tutors holding her hand and guiding her every step of the way? Is it any wonder that in this era, more than 50 percent of all college students require at least five years to graduate?

According to a high school college counselor we spoke to in the fall of 2014, “I have parents bringing in completed college applications that they filled out for their child—including the essays! In this society fueled by wealth and status, the father’s job is to make a lot of money so that the family can continue to live in the right neighborhood and go to the right school, while the mother’s job is to make the children successful. If the mother doesn’t succeed with her kid, meaning get him or her into an elite college, then the mother is considered a failure. In these social circles, we have seen marriages deteriorate, where the father may even divorce the mother because she did not do her job well when the child does not meet his expectations. We have also seen situations where a father loses his job, meaning that they can no longer live in the right part of town and their child can no longer attend an exclusive school, and the father, unable to bear what he perceives to be an embarrassing change in circumstances, commits suicide. In other instances, even when something so drastic does not occur, it can cause complete family breakdowns.”

Insecure parents are rolling their problems onto their children. Perhaps these parents grew up without positive parental role models, because it’s clear that they don’t know how to be appropriate role models for their children. Why have parents become so desperate to have their kids attend prestigious colleges that they will go to almost any length to make that happen, beginning when the children are so young that they have not yet learned to read?

The competition to get into college is essentially out of control at this point. With more and more applicants each year to colleges and universities, these schools can be more selective than ever. Many of today’s parents are so obsessed with paving a path for their children’s automatic success that they do not give their kids even a remote, selective chance to fail. This is really too bad, because it’s especially easy to fix many of the failures and use them as a learning experience for our children. If parents would occasionally do this, we might see them redefining success—for themselves and, even better, for their overparented kids. It is important to recognize that when children are little, their mistakes and failures are small and relatively easy to correct. When they get older, and their mistakes and failures often become bigger, the efforts to correct them also become more difficult.

One of the great comforts of parenting is that we don’t always have to focus on ourselves and our own shortcomings. Instead, we can become very busy taking care of our kids in the hopes that they will make up for our own disappointments! Being responsible feels so good—at first—but then it can quickly become something else, like an obsession. But why? Why do parents become so obsessed with their kids? What drives parents to behave like that?

“This is our only child. We’ve got to get it right.”

We’ve heard this refrain a million times. Let’s see where it was born.

In the Beginning

Your first child has just been born. Your hopes and dreams are booming, like the most optimistic fireworks display on the Fourth of July. You bring your baby home, swaddled in a safety net of abundant love. You want the best for him, no matter what. Everything should be perfectly safe and smooth with no bumps or bruises—none.

When your parents and in-laws arrive, they coo and cuddle and admire your prodigious ability to procreate. Everyone toasts to the newborn’s future, to his or her future acceptance at Harvard, to finding the right spouse and a top career, with a large house full of perfect children and a life of success and happiness. Your kid is barely forty-eight hours old, and you’re already planning his entire life!

For some anxious parents, this marks the first stage of overparenting. This is especially true for a parent raising his or her first child. Each time the baby burps, the parent may flinch and consider running to the emergency room. But by the time that same parent has a second or third child, it’s usually quite a different story. Burping, falling, and crying—the usual range of daily angst and agitation—often become quite unremarkable for a parent of multiple children.

“Since my son was born a few years ago,” says Paul, an architect in Charlotte, North Carolina, “all the crazy technology we’re surrounded with has only given me more stuff to obsess about. For example, I recently noticed a recall alert for our jogging stroller on my Facebook page, describing how the product label could be removed, becoming a potential object for a baby to choke on. They said that no baby had actually choked yet, but I certainly didn’t want my son to be the first. It seems like from the day he was born, I have been on involuntary lookout for anything that could possibly go wrong or harm him in any way, big or small. I’ve investigated every alarm system for his room in our house and researched pollution detectors and car seats till I can’t keep my eyes open at the computer. Now, I read every warning on every label of every object I purchase. My son is six months old. I can’t imagine how crazy I will become by the time he’s walking.”

Caution: Fragile Contents Inside

Are your kids really as fragile as you think they are? For some people, overparenting begins at birth, when parents begin overprotecting their children with an unnecessary amount of swaddling. This continues with enlisting baby coaches, enrolling in pre-toddler tutoring programs, and cajoling pediatricians to prescribe needless antibiotics.

Your expectations may be as fragile as your child’s two-year-old little body. What happens when he or she doesn’t meet your expectations, which will undoubtedly happen sooner or later? How do you react when one of your children doesn’t get a leg up on the competition?

The answers to these questions may be found in how you were raised by your parents. Many of us, despite how well our parents may have done in bringing us up, still feel a need to do better. For those whose childhood memories remain full of the fallout from a divorce, preoccupied parents, countless hours of solitary activity in front of the television, and a freezer full of TV dinners, it’s no wonder that they are determined—if not obsessed—with winning a Parent of the Year award every year and for every child. They feel a need to make up for what they missed, thought they missed, or consider to have been a less than optimal childhood. But was that childhood really so awful? Previous generations enjoyed freedoms that don’t come easily in contemporary society. Walking to school alone, with time to reflect or just happily space out, seems like a bygone luxury for many kids today. Imagine your child taking her time to stroll home after school, unattended, and then spending hours in the backyard with nothing special to do and no one checking every fifteen minutes to make sure that she’s properly stimulated and fed.

We are not advising that you abandon your children and let them fend for themselves. But a parent can be present without being intrusive. It’s a dance that we all should pay attention to and do our best to master. It requires observation, watching, listening, and developing a feel for when we should engage and when we should yield to the ebb and flow of a developing individual. When in doubt, ask. Children of all ages have a fairly keen sense of when they want company, when they want help, and when they are just fine being alone.

Regardless of whether you are the child of a divorce or not, it’s no surprise that you feel committed to making your child’s life as perfect as possible. Many of you probably made a vow with yourself that if you ever had kids, you would never argue with your spouse in front of your children, let alone get divorced. Your home would be stable and loving, a creative and nourishing place for children to grow up and flourish in. Whatever shortcomings your parents may have had, you would not only erase them; you would obliterate them in a nonstop clinic in how to be an amazing parent, also known as Super Mom or Super Dad, shield optional.

Aspirations like these are fine, but the consequences of being overzealous should be somewhat obvious by now. We can’t become better parents by controlling our kids’ childhoods. We must be willing to let them play in the backyard without our micromanagement and devoted attention, leaving them the opportunity to discover their own shortcomings, creativity, hungers, and strengths. You can begin to practice this hands-on/hands-off approach at an early age, giving your children the gift of independence.

Testing! Testing! Testing!

When parents start testing their children as early as possible, without a clear-cut medical reason and without a physician’s referral, who really benefits? The testing centers certainly do, but who else? Depending on the results of the tests, which can so often be skewed, particularly by a testing facility that also provides follow-up training or therapy, the information the tests reveal can be particularly suspect when we’re talking about a child who may barely be speaking, and the parent’s reaction to the test results can range from great satisfaction to abject panic.

“If my child’s test results are off the charts,” says Brian, an economics professor at a Southern university, “should I be bringing in specialized tutors right away to make sure he realizes his apparently huge potential?”

“What if my child doesn’t test well?” asks Claudia, a computer software executive from the Northeast. “Should I hire tutors to help her correct her deficits?”

Once they submit their kids to testing, Brian and Claudia are stuck with their scores and with a diagnosis that the child may be given. As parents they are cursed, because they are attaching great meaning to the numbers and looking to take immediate action, whether it’s to get the most out of their little Einstein or to “correct” their “deficit-laden” child.

Short of avoiding the whole testing merry-go-round, how can parents navigate through the pressures of getting their children into the best preschools, which is seen as the ticket to the best elementary schools, middle schools, colleges, and ultimately graduate schools? No one can question a parent who wants the best for his or her child, but at what expense? What’s reasonable when it comes to testing? At what age should the testing start? And what should parents do when their child’s initial tests don’t meet their hopes and expectations? Maybe parents should be tested, too, so that we can be sure that their children will be protected as they grow up, in spite of their parents’ overzealous behavior. In the case of a two- to five-year-old, the more accurate testing would be of the parents, their IQ, and their ability to function in the world, rather than testing the children. Imagine if gynecologists were charged with testing each pregnant woman (and partner, when available) who was in the process of becoming a parent? The following parental aptitude test (PAT) may reveal crucial areas in which prospective parents need help, and why not provide that assistance before it’s too late?

Parental Aptitude Test

(answers on page 194)

  1. Successful parenting means:

A. Your children attend Ivy League schools and become doctors or lawyers.

B. Your children take care of you when you get old.

C. Your children enjoy growing up and feel good about themselves.

D. Your children become so independent that they move out by age thirteen.

  2. Children should be seen, heard, or tested.

A. Seen.

B. Heard.

C. Tested.

D. All of the above.

  3. If your child breastfeeds, it means that he will:

A. Be smarter.

B. Love his mother more than his father.

C. Grow up to be a heterosexual.

D. Never go hungry.

  4. Love means never having to say:

A. “Shut up and go to bed.”

B. “Clean your room.”

C. “Leave me alone.”

D. None of the above.

  5. If your child fails a math test in third grade, it means:

A. Life is over. She sucks at math and will never get into MIT.

B. You are a bad parent.

C. Time to call in the tutor brigade.

D. None of the above.

  6. When your son’s soccer coach doesn’t start your son, you react by:

A. Wondering aloud what you did to deserve this.

B. Punching the coach in front of your son.

C. Looking for another team.

D. Enjoying the game.

  7. When your daughter wins an award for the sixth-grade science fair, you:

A. Tell her that you’re proud of her.

B. Hide the fact that you did her project for her.

C. Hire a tutor to make sure that she maintains excellence in science.

D. Tell her younger brother that you expect him to do the same next year.

  8. Your child is not sure whether he wants to go to college. This make you feel:

A. Worried. Can he get a good job these days without a college degree?

B. Suicidal. His life will suck without going to college.

C. Elated. College costs too much.

D. Curious. Why does he feel that way?

  9. If your son is being bullied by his seventh-grade classmates, what do you do?

A. Intervene and ask questions later.

B. Ignore it. After all, kids will be kids.

C. Ask your son what’s happening.

D. Ask your spouse to take care of it.

10. When your five-year-old falls off a sliding board and breaks his arm, you choose to:

A. Sue the inventor of the sliding board.

B. Shrug and move on.

C. Restrict his play activities for the next five years to the living room couch.

D. None of the above.

Aptitude versus Fortitude

It’s no surprise when we choose a piece of cake for dessert over a bunch of grapes. We know that the grapes are healthier and have their own good taste, but the cake—oh, my—the cake is just so sweet and satisfying, and considering all of our hard work, don’t we deserve it?

It’s a question of what we know versus what we feel, the ongoing struggle that we all face on a daily basis, whether it applies to our diets or how we parent our children.

“Oh, I should have known better!”

We often hear this response when regretting a choice that we’ve made, especially when it applies to something regarding our children. A recent New York Times article pointed out that parents who are able to defer gratification and control their impulses have children who become more successful. We all know this, yet we still often do what is easier, or what seems to make the child happier in the short run. When that happens, we probably have deep regrets and feel terrible, even for mild transgressions, yet we often continue doing the same thing.

Parenting inside this pressure cooker can force moms and dads of all shapes and stripes to overreact and do things triggered by their feelings or by expedience rather than by logic and good sense. This often begins when their children are very young. After all, these parents reason, if my kid is going to get a step ahead in life, it better start as soon as she learns how to walk!

From Playdates to Preschool: Too Much Programming

Nowadays, from the time children become toddlers, parents have a tendency to overprogram their schedules with an assortment of preschool activities, tutoring (yes, tutoring toddlers), after-preschool classes (yes, those, too), music appreciation, athletic activities, and an endless schedule of playdates. Parents probably take this route because they’re worried that otherwise they might not be providing enough stimulation for their child, and their child will lag behind his or her peers when it really counts: later in life. After all, if your child can learn origami on Mondays, tae kwon do on Tuesdays, gymnastics on Thursdays, and dance on Fridays, and you can afford them all, how can a caring parent say no—particularly when some of your friends with kids the same age are doing them, too? Not to mention team sports and music lessons at least two or three days a week, before or after the other classes. Weekends, of course, are reserved for games, recitals, and tournaments. It’s a wonder that your family even has time to sit down and eat, or watch your other children’s activities.

Is all this necessary or even beneficial to children—at any age? It’s nice to expose your kids to new ideas, new friends, and museums, but do they have to connect with all three every single day? Children need free time, downtime, do-nothing time, whatever you might call it—they need it. Parents need it, too. Imagine a day without racing around town from one activity to another. Someday, when your kids are grown and you are filling in as grandparents, you may appreciate the time you put in but also come to realize how much of it may have been extraneous, if not unnecessary.

To Schedule or to Chill?

Parents with demanding jobs that require them to put in long hours and/or travel out of town may feel guilty about being away from their children. As a result, they often overcompensate, either by overscheduling their kids with afterschool and weekend activities to make up for their lack of involvement, or by packing in too much activity during the parent-child time they do have, all in a misguided effort to make up for their limited time with their child. This is the same phenomenon that divorced parents who have their children only part-time go through when they try to package a week’s worth of parenting into their limited visitation time.

For example, Mike, a caterer in a medium-sized New England suburb, works most weekends. When he finally has a Saturday off, he expects his children to be as ready and excited as he is to spend the entire day together, doing father-son and father-daughter things.

“Hey,” he tells his kids, “we’ll be best buddies this Saturday. We can go bowling, bike riding, and ice skating!”

Mike doesn’t always take into account that his kids might have other plans for that Saturday and don’t necessarily want to spend the entire day with their dad doing things. They may prefer staying home and doing not much of anything, but enjoying that time nevertheless because it’s nice and relaxed and it’s hanging out with their father.

But Mike insists.

“Hey, guys, I never get a Saturday off, and I want to do stuff with you guys. We’re best buddies, after all, right?”

Mike’s push to hyper-parent his kids may have a downside.

Child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development, told Cristin Conger, author of 5 Signs of Overparenting, that “we’re the first parents in history who really want to be their kids’ friends. Some parents even talk about wanting to be their kids’ best friends.”1

Weissbourd feels that when parents become so focused on bonding with their children, they may be sabotaging their own authority and doing so at the expense of traditional role modeling.

Because Mike is absent so often, he may not realize just how overscheduled his children are, and how much they need a break at least one day out of each weekend. By depriving his children of some necessary downtime, he takes away the chance for their creativity to flourish while their brains and bodies relax. Mike might also do himself a big favor by staying home to chill next time he has a Saturday free. You also want your children to be able to enjoy playing alone and have friends separate from you so that they will not spend all of their time just waiting for you to be available.

But What If?

Maybe Mike is right. Maybe his kids will be missing something if they don’t bowl, ride bikes, and go ice-skating, particularly with him. Their friends may get better at those things, and that can’t be good, can it? Plus, there’s all that parent-child bonding that Mike has heard about, and if he wants to be as good a parent as his neighbors seem to be, with their camping trips and family barbecues, he better get busy.

Time-out. Are kids today more tightly scheduled than ever before because enrolling them in extracurricular activities and academic tutoring is considered a mark of highly effective and caring parents? Does “the busier the better” mean having more enriched lives or getting a step ahead of their friends on the way to résumé building for college? Do we all still believe that “idle hands do the devil’s work?”

Maybe Mike’s response should be, “OK, kids, go outside and play catch or whatever else you want to do.” He might even start a trend among other parents.

“I didn’t want to become the alpha-parent I kept seeing in the playground,” says Tina, “fussing over their kids, directing who they played with and taking over the sandbox with their Neiman Marcus shoveling kit. I dreaded becoming that, but I began to feel guilty sitting on a bench twenty feet away, reading a magazine, and occasionally glancing over to make sure my kid was still playing and happy.”

Unfortunately, Tina was falling into a trap that many others succumb to these days in this atmosphere of hyped-up parenting and an angst-driven need to succeed, one motivated by guilt and a fear that they may not be the ultimate parent, and in turn are letting their child down.

But what if Tina could just resist the temptation to become her worst nightmare? Would she and her daughter be happier?

It’s worth remembering that our children are not our project, and as they become older, we must let them discover the world more and more on their own, with an appropriate amount of supervision. There lies the conundrum, the fuzzy line between too much supervision and safety and too little. How much supervision is enough, and when should we go further or sit back?

Do I Have to Wear a Helmet to Bed?

Parents with uncontrollable levels of anxiety about their children are prime candidates for overparenting. Where the parents’ anxiety comes from is anybody’s guess, but it’s not terribly surprising to see parents worry themselves into a tizzy when it comes to the welfare of their kids. But this can have adverse effects on their children. At the first sign of a child’s distress—for example, when they are learning to walk, ride a bike, or drive a car—moms and dads who are overanxious may suffocate their child with their own unreasonable concerns. In these cases, children can become as anxious as their parents, which will only increase their struggles and chance of failure.

An insistence on protecting your child at any cost is clearly counterproductive. Parents in these extreme situations overcompensate for whatever their own reasons are, and in essence generate more anxiety, which only leads to more worrying rather than normalizing.

What can follow is a move from anxiety to pure fear. For example, some parents will not allow their children to play outside without strict supervision because they are afraid that their children will be stolen. Even inside the house, they take protective measures to ensure that none of their children can possibly get bumped or bruised when playing. This goes past the point of just closing off electric sockets for infants, and moves on to covering sharp edges on tables and making sure that all floors have carpets for when the child falls, which they are apt to do. When parents behave to this extreme as their children grow up, it leaves them no flexibility to find a happy medium with more complicated issues, like how to let their children use modern-day communications.

As children begin to play, this vigilance is followed up with rubber-cushioned playgrounds (sadly preferred to grass, which can be dirty and theoretically have worse germs); a steady slathering of sanitizing gel whenever they go out, come in, or do something in between; and a large basketful of car seats, helmets, and body pads for miscellaneous activities. Some say that all of these safety devices are just a calculation by the manufacturers of these products to increase their profits by first creating panic among parents and then nurturing it with a continual series of studies proving how dangerous life is without suitable protection.

We want our children to be safe, whether it’s at home, in school, or in between. Their physical well-being is of paramount importance, as is as their emotional and psychological health. But when do parents concerned for their child’s safety become overprotective?

Techno Wars

With all the devices and diversions our children have at their disposal, it’s no surprise that parents feel compelled to referee their kids’ impulse to tweet, text, and otherwise plug in to a world of music, selfies, and video clips. The explosion of cell phone and Internet technology over the past twenty years has significantly altered contemporary parenting. All of the mobile devices currently available make it possible for parents to stay in contact with their children around the clock, even texting each other in the middle of the night from their respective bedrooms.

But is that always a good thing? Should parents become a family version of the NSA, spying on their own children? A few years ago, Taser, better known for making stun guns, introduced software that could intercept phone calls, text messages, and emails that are transmitted through personal cell phone use.2 This extends an open invitation for parents to enter the surveillance business, with their children posing as their primary targets. Then there are all the possibilities that GPS technology offers, from live monitoring of a person’s movement, even at preschool, to tracking their minute-by-minute location. Back on the home front, parents can use a number of different apps to monitor their children while they are alone or with a babysitter. This sort of technology can also provide police with up-to-date information and photos in the case of missing children.3

No one could argue with the benefits of this technology, especially if it protects children and in some cases saves their lives, but can keeping electronic tabs on our kids also have the opposite effect on both parents and children? Keeping our children on electronic leashes may very well alienate the very ones we are trying to protect. What ever happened to trust and teaching responsibility? It shouldn’t be surprising that normal teenagers, who really have not been in any significant trouble, resent being followed and/or tracked—like a potential criminal—by their parents. Statistics show that crime rates have gone down nationwide during this generation, so parents in most cities and towns should appreciate this fact and give their kids the age-appropriate freedoms they deserve.4

Which Parents Are Most Susceptible to Overparenting?

Single parents, divorcees, widowers, high-achievers, stay-at-home parents, two-parent couples, type-A personalities, parents of adopted kids, low-income parents trying to make sure that their kids get a fair shake, same-sex parents, parents of gay children, and so forth—the list could go and on, meaning that anyone and everyone can join the crowd of parents who may just be trying too hard. Here is a sampling of parental types ripe for overparenting.

  1. Dual-income households with expendable cash to devote to special activities for children.

In middle- and upper-class families all over the world, parents are obsessed with packing their children’s lives full of a succession of activities from morning till night, with even more crammed into the weekends. In some communities, there seems to be a race going on to see which families are spending the most on their kids.

Julie, a mother in Hong Kong with a son and daughter who attend prestigious local schools, shared her excitement with the Rockmom.com’s Ata Johnson about making a trip to Italy with her children over the summer holidays. She claimed that it would be their “last hurrah,” a chance for her son, especially, to enjoy one last carefree summer before attending a fancy, all-boys school. Julie’s son is seven.5

  2. Parents working longer hours, who use extracurricular activities as a convenient option for childcare.

In his book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, author Carl Honoré says, “Now, everything is supervised, scheduled, controlled, and there’s this strange unwillingness to let go or to be uncertain of anything. I think parents particularly want a single recipe for raising an alpha child, and there’s a lot of pressure.”6

Kevin, a high school freshman in Wichita, Kansas, complains about never getting a night off from the grind of homework.

“My parents freak out if I tell them I don’t have any homework,” he says. “They email my teachers to make sure I’m not lying and then make me study random stuff, just because I’m supposed to be learning, or whatever. I never get a night off.”

In fact, many parents can’t relax at all around the subject of homework. In a 2013 survey conducted by the homework resource website AskKids, 43 percent of the 778 parents asked admitted to having done their kids’ homework at least once, to curb the stress their children were feeling.7

But are parents to blame when children feel overwhelmed by homework? We should look at schools and examine individual teachers to get a more accurate view of the matter.

“What would happen if we stopped helping our kids with homework?” asks Meg, a mother of three from Las Vegas, Nevada. “Our kids would get in trouble at school and probably be punished if they didn’t hand in their homework. Then they would feel bad and get very grumpy.”

Homework is a contentious subject in many households and school districts.

“A large body of existing research indicates that homework does not play an important role in student achievement,” says Robert, a school board member from Missouri. “Apparently, it doesn’t stimulate independence, either, or responsibility, and nothing proves that it builds character. Plus, it makes it really tough for kids with limited ability and resources. The research says so! The hype for more homework is a myth! So, I would like to see a revision of our school district’s homework policy.”

Deciding the merits of homework does not rest entirely on the shoulders of parents. Much of it comes from school boards as well as teachers, and if parents want to make life infinitely more livable for their families, they should consider joining movements in their area that are fighting to reduce the amount of homework that schools are currently demanding of their children.

  3. Moms and dads who come to parenting later in life and bring a “time-is-running-out” or corporate mentality into the household. These parents tend to professionalize parenting by employing consultants and experts to ensure that their children will have the best of everything.

Maybe this sums it up best:

Q: How many kids does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Is that with or without a tutor?

  4. The Joneses (see “keeping up with . . .”): these parents just can’t help it.

“I know that it’s wrong to overprogram my kids,” says Vicky, a mom of three in Boston, Massachusetts, “but if I don’t, I feel inadequate as a parent. It’s like I have to enroll them in as many extracurricular activities as their friends.”

Parents put pressure on other parents to produce “all-star” children.

“Love to talk,” says Jessica, a mother of two in Sacramento, California, “but I’ve got to go pick up my daughter Crystal at school and take her directly to ballet class—you know, the new one in town, it’s so prestigious—and then she’s got her French tutor—we meet her at Le Pain, you know that French café, it’s so authentic there—and then we’re racing off to join her synchronized swimming team. They’re doing a charity performance at the country club, and I’m going to send photographs of Crystal to the US Olympic committee, because she’ll be old enough in 2020 to join them! I’m sorry, am I going too fast?”

  5. Parents who just aren’t cut out for playing with their kids, so they hire people to do it for them.

An older, very wealthy father of a ten-year-old boy was known to have a teenager pick up his son to go play tennis with him at the father’s country club because the father did not want to play, and did not want to join in with his son.

  6. Safety nerds who can’t stop worrying about their children’s safety and resort to almost any length to protect them.

They are not hard to find. Just visit a typical playground and you will probably observe a parent going overboard, trying to protect his or her child from just about anything they consider threatening, from sand in the sandbox to water in the water fountain.

On his 1999 album and HBO special, You Are All Diseased, George Carlin bemoans how preoccupied Americans can be about child safety. “What ever happened to natural selection?” he asks. “If a child swallows seven marbles, maybe we don’t want him to reproduce.”8

But overprotective parenting is really no joke. When parents are too safe, they do not let their children grow into confident and independent adolescents and adults.

American parents are not the only ones who are overprotective. Indian parents are becoming synonymous with overprotecting their kids. Ritu will not let her nine-year-old son ride the school bus in Delhi because she has heard that the bus drivers are sometimes erratic. Sanji does not allow his thirteen-year-old daughter to have any sleepovers at her friends’ houses because he’s not confident that the other parents will provide adequate supervision. Priti gets so nervous when her seven-year-old son plays on a jungle gym in Calcutta that she won’t let him do it by himself without standing right near him every step of the way. She will not allow her teenage daughter to go on a school picnic at the beach because she is afraid that her daughter may drown.9

  7. Families with fewer children, who have more time to invest—literally—in each child.

Allison, a college placement counselor in an academically competitive high school, is always amazed by how quickly her phone calls to parents get returned. She feels like she has a red phone at the White House. When one dad returned her call, she heard an odd noise in the background.

“What’s that noise?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the dad on the line. “I can talk. I’m just doing a colonoscopy.”

Allison didn’t feel comfortable continuing the conversation and asked to call back later. The father—and devoted colonoscopy provider—insisted on continuing the conversation because, after all, it had something to do with his son, and what could possibly be more important than that?

Allison referred the father to a local parenting group that focuses on reprioritizing our values as parents.

  8. Parents who send their kids to private schools and get anxious about everything once the first bill arrives in their mailbox.

Investing in our children can be taken too far, as evidenced by the following story.

A very exclusive, expensive, well-regarded, and academically rigorous international school in Hong Kong was planning to open a sister school on the mainland. The Hong Kong school planned to send their tenth-year students there for a year of study. The parents were split evenly as to whether that was a good idea. The most common objection: Homesickness? No. Parents missing their children? No. Most of the parents were worried about their children being away from their tutors.10

  9. Immigrant parents raising their first child in America, who will do almost anything to help the child get ahead.

Families come to America from all over the world with the promise of free education and endless opportunities. But these immigrant parents aren’t playing around. Citing the sacrifices they have made to come here, they put tremendous pressure on their children to succeed academically at the highest level. Luckily, many of these families come from countries with a strong work ethic, so their children do excel in school.

When American-born parents realize that their children’s futures are threatened by this “foreign” competition, they often react with fear and anxiety, not only by pushing their children unreasonably, but by intervening on their behalf, succumbing to the worst of what overparenting can become.

Both sets of parents, the native-born and the newly arrived, essentially turn their children’s lives into a series of hurdles to jump over and through in order to finish first in a race to what they consider to be the top.

10. Parents with an abstract fear of failure.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, organizers of an annual Easter egg hunt attended by hundreds of children canceled last year’s event, citing the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park the previous year, determined that their kids get an egg.11

Was it pure greed that drove these parents to act so badly? Let’s hope not, because unless there was an acute shortage of Easter eggs in Colorado going on at the time, such a thing is unfathomable. Was it guilt? How much guilt were these parents possibly feeling that they had to fight over Easter eggs?? Were they all trying to fix something in their kids’ lives that only a painted egg could accomplish? Most likely they did not want their child to feel bad or be the one kid who did not find an egg or who got the smallest number of eggs in his or her basket to take home. Once again, here is an instance of parents trying to protect their children from a perceived sense of failure.

A Warning to Divorcing Parents

If you are a parent in the midst of a divorce or somewhere in the aftermath of that process, chances are that you are very susceptible to overparenting, simply because you can’t help feeling as if you are competing with your ex for the affections of your children.

Because divorce has become more common over the past two or three decades, often played out in public, children are increasingly caught in the middle of their parents’ bad behavior. These parents just can’t help themselves when it comes to contesting and competing about everything, including what they do with their children, which invariably leads to overparenting by both parties. Divorce attorneys joke about these “Super Dads” and “Super Moms,” who often are also trying to improve their position in front of the judge to impact the amount of visitation—and, in turn, the money—either party will pay out or receive.

Sadly, these conflicted moms and dads, wrenched apart from their children for days and/or weeks at a time, are quick to lose the good judgment they formerly possessed. This plays out during their one-on-one time with their children, when they try to score points with their kids by being “the better parent.” This often means trying to ensure that the child has a good time with them, doing what the child wants, and providing almost no discipline for the child, so that they will want to come back and be with them during the next weekend or holiday.

If that is what you are doing, only bad things will happen. Divorce is hard, no matter how amicably it is conducted. If you are used to being with your children on a daily basis, and then you are stripped of that privilege by the agreement you arrange with your ex, those lonely days and nights without them can not only make you hurt, they can shake your confidence and lead you to say things and act out in ways you may regret. Disparaging the other parent is one way to do that, while overindulging your child is another.

If you are feeling vulnerable to all that, seek help to keep your balance.

Communication Gaps May Lead to Overparenting

In families coping with a divorce, parents and children face increased levels of stress, complete with varying degrees of denial, guilt, and confusion. As a result, communication between parents and children may suffer at a time when it really is most important and necessary. This irony of how parents and children view the effects of divorce differently and their inability to communicate about it is best illustrated by the following study.

When a parenting website in the United Kingdom12 surveyed one thousand parents and one hundred children (separately) about divorce, they discovered that 39 percent of the kids said that they hide their feelings about the split from their parents, 20 percent said that there’s no use communicating because their parents are too “wrapped up in themselves,” and 14 percent said that they couldn’t be honest with their parents about how upset they felt. Nearly one-third of kids under eighteen described themselves as “devastated” by the divorce, and 13 percent blamed themselves for their parents’ breakup.

On the other hand, 77 percent of the parents expressed confidence that their kids were dealing just fine with the divorce. Ten percent thought that their kids were relieved that their parents had split. But only 5 percent of parents were aware of their children’s blaming themselves for the situation. Even more alarming, only 1 percent of the parents knew about their kids’ resorting to alcohol, self-harm, and contemplating suicide as a reaction to their parents’ divorce.

While these statistics alone do not point to parental problems, it’s not surprising that the trauma of divorce can lead parents, fueled by guilt, to overcompensate, often without even being aware of it. The study also points out that it is very important to talk to your children and to listen to what they say, even if you don’t always want to hear it. Clearly, these parents had their own agendas, and didn’t ask their children, didn’t listen when the kids told them what they didn’t want to hear, or simply minimized what they were told to fit into their own view of the situation.

Who Are You Really Helping?

It’s clear from these parental subgroups that all of us are susceptible to overparenting. We want the best for our children, and most of us will occasionally overparent, especially during times of crisis. We don’t want anyone to cut in line during our children’s march to the top, and we are ready to protect them and advocate for them every step of the way. It all sounds good, until we consider the consequences of all that attention, protection, and advocacy.

Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy and distinguished scholar at Columbia College in Chicago, sums up the moral conflict for parents in his 2012 book Against Fairness.

“If some science-fiction sorcerer came to me with a button and said I could save my son’s life by pressing it but then (cue the dissonant music) ten strangers would die somewhere . . . I’d have my finger down on it before he finished his cryptic challenge.”13

As far as hyper-competitive parents are concerned, in the ultracompetitive world we live in, the choices we make on behalf of our kids boil down to one thing: survival of the fittest.

“It is a jungle out there,” according to Suzi, a parent of four from Brooklyn, New York, who spoke to us last year. “Either my kid gets into that great school or into the starting line-up of the fifth grade volleyball team or somebody else’s will, and that could mean the difference between Harvard University and the local community college.”

While Suzi may mean well, becoming so invested in our children—emotionally, psychologically, and financially—can make us do strange and harmful things—to ourselves and to them. It might be wise to reconsider our behavior. Not every child is destined for the Ivy League, and some kids may be better off somewhere else. For some kids, a community college, especially during their first year or two after high school, when they have no idea what they want to study or do with their lives, is not an unreasonable idea. For parents looking to spend their money wisely, this might be a sensible path to consider. It is also important to recognize the fact that many very successful people in terms of personal happiness, financial success, and a fulfilling family life have attended community college and non–Ivy League institutions.

Fighting the Odds

In today’s parenting world, it’s not easy to avoid overdoing it, especially when you consider everything parents must navigate while trying to do the best for their child. From the pressure to enroll your child in a good school to the constant lure of texting, not to mention tutoring companies and the steep mountain that parents are told they must climb to ensure their child a prime spot in college, mothers and fathers face a battle of wills when it comes to resisting the pull to overparent.

So, when you screw up, which is inevitable, at least sometimes, it may not be your fault at all. Just as succumbing to peer pressure was easy when you were a youth, it remains challenging as an adult, especially if you have even a hint of anxiety about yourself and your child’s ability to keep up with his or her peers. Everywhere you turn, you are assaulted by come-ons, telling you what you need to do in order to attain that edge for your kid.

It is almost as if we need a twelve-step program for parents who can’t control themselves, or an Al-Anon type of program to try to stop saving our children. Once again, it boils down to being smart, letting go, and making sure that you have a life of your own, independent of your child’s.

The temptation is everywhere. Parenting self-help books (like this one!) are conveniently located right next to children’s books in the stores, and you can find even more of them online. Some schools offer parents the chance to download their child’s grades every day so that they can post them on the refrigerator at home or on Facebook. “Save Your Family” workshops are advertised in every local and regional parenting magazine, and national publications never stop telling you what you are doing wrong, what you are (almost) doing right, and what new magical advice exists to make parenting an instantly more rewarding experience for you and your child. If you haven’t been knocked out by now, college recruiters, testing companies, and a still-growing tutoring industry are all competing for your bank accounts, not to mention private schools that are raising tuition each year and PTAs that are hunting for donations. Add to this the scientific push to get everyone’s performance enhanced with ADHD medication, and it’s no surprise that there are many days when parents feel out of control. And it’s no wonder that perfectly smart and capable parents leave their jobs and devote 100 percent of their lives to their kids, only to discover before too long that all the pressure drives them crazy, if not clinically neurotic, which no doubt will rub off quite quickly on their children.