CHAPTER 5: HOW OVERPARENTING AFFECTS YOUR CHILD—AND YOU

With parents today feeling increased pressure to launch their children into the world with all the tools and advantages needed to be successful, we must examine the adverse effects of this behavior for children and parents alike. Even though the media may sensationalize the issue with headlines such as “From China to France to America: A Backlash against Overprotective Parents”1 or “Overprotective Parenting: A Growing Worldwide Problem”2 or “Children with Controlling ‘Helicopter Parents’ More Likely to Be Depressed,”3 these troubling notices do not appear out of thin air or without reason, and they should be a subject of our concern.

This is because the effects of overparenting go far beyond teenage children’s complaining about their parents’ nagging them and enforcing what seem to the children to be unreasonable curfews or limits on where they can go in the neighborhood and with whom. In fact, the effects of overparenting begin much earlier than most people think. From the first time a mother pampers her child when she barely scrapes her knee to the phone calls that a father makes to try to secure a spot for his kid in a Wall Street firm—and all the interventions in between—well-meaning parents run the risk of creating a falsely entitled, overly coddled, and dependent child, one long on laziness and short on self-esteem, lost without someone’s intervening on her behalf to take care of whatever problem she may be facing. These children may suffer from compromised creativity, have difficulty making their own choices, encounter trouble in dealing with failure, have problems with bouncing back from setbacks, and lack the ability to select or do things entirely on their own—at any age. Overparenting can reinforce a tendency in children to blame others for their own shortcomings, and the ones they ultimately blame are their parents. To make matters worse, these character traits and the inability to deal successfully with life’s issues continue to follow these children well into adulthood. Many of them will be unable to actually maximize their potential or fully take care of themselves without the urge to constantly look for a parent, life coach, or some other type of counselor to guide or rescue them.

Intensive Parenting

At the core of overparenting lies the psychological roots for why it happens. Why the push to try so hard? What makes parents so intense? Why do so many perceive their children, irrespective of their age, as vulnerable and incapable, if not helpless? What has prompted this mad rush to constantly monitor and protect our children? While some of the reasons have been explored in Chapter 3, it is worth reexamining some of the underlying roots of why parents are driven to behave like this.

It used to be the job of parents to expose their kids to the outside world by simply throwing them into the metaphorical pool of life and hoping that they could swim or by managing the amount of external input that they received, dosing out “the real world” a little at a time. But many parents today seem hell-bent on protecting their children from what they consider to be the perils of the outside world, which, if you are an overly protective parent, can be almost anything. More and more research suggests that this type of overly intensive parenting can be harmful for children and, not coincidentally, not very good for you as their parent. No matter what type of parent you might be, if you do not allow your child to make mistakes, learn coping skills, develop independence, and ultimately become self-sufficient, you simply have not done your job. Parenting is not about merely raising children by planning and trying to engineer a successful outcome for them. Your job as a parent is to help transition, if not slingshot, a whole, developing young adult—with his or her very own personality—into the world.

When parents are too intense, their children often fail to develop skills that they will need throughout their life. These include time management, strategizing, prioritizing, and the ins and outs of negotiating. It begins when you first feed your child and continues with his or her first tussle at home with a sibling or with another kid in nursery school or on the playground. Children subjected to too much overparenting are prone to demonstrate less spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative when it comes to how they spend their leisure time. Children raised by intensive parents also lean toward becoming less attentive to the feelings of others. This lack of empathy may be a result of constantly looking over their shoulders to see how they are doing in the eyes of the one person they think matters: their parent. This approach to life is clearly very limiting for children, and they may never get to successfully decide what they themselves want to do or learn how to internalize and appreciate how good of a job they have done.

When these kids finally do leave home, at whatever age, they do so with a continuous need to check on how they are doing in their parents’ eyes, as if they are always looking over their shoulders to get approval or validation. Their parents, who have somewhat crippled their children in the process of raising them, also seem to want to keep that umbilical cord intact. This leads to a bilateral and ongoing effort to continue access to the parents via email, texting, and phone. The habits developed through late childhood and early adolescence continue holding the children back from becoming their own people as they get older. They become essentially infantile and insecure, trapped in a constant state of uncertainty and dependency, as if they are always asking for permission or approval because they are terrified of jumping ahead on their own. At the same time, they have an ongoing fantasy that has been perpetuated by this interaction: that should there be a problem, there will never really be any major consequences for them, and their parents or someone else will always be there to jump in and fix the issue or bail them out of difficult situations. It should be no surprise when many overparented kids make poor choices, flounder, blame others, and then attempt to cope by using alcohol and an assortment of drugs as well as by resorting to a series of sexual relationships. By that time, though, they unfortunately discover that their parents cannot always bail them out, make it right, or protect them from the consequences of their behavior, and they do not have the interpersonal resources to do it on their own.

The Overparenting Equation: Cause and Effect for Your Child and You

Actions have consequences. But in today’s world, where the stakes seem much higher and our lives are coming under unprecedented scrutiny, it’s becoming more and more difficult as parents to feel confident in our choices. While we can’t always predict the consequences of those choices, we must always deal with how they affect our children and us.

Times have changed. In previous generations, parents who “let their kids run wild” were viewed with disdain by neighbors, but subjected to no greater sanction than head wagging and disapproving gossip in the community. Today, such situations are far more likely to result in a call to Child Protective Services, with subsequent legal intervention and the threat of losing custody of your child.

“We raised our three children without any television and with a very limited amount of computer time,” says Jamie, from Columbia, South Carolina. “They played outdoors a lot with no adult supervised sports until they played baseball and basketball in middle school. It was very lonely unless we had playdates. We lived in a low-income neighborhood so I could stay home with them and make this happen. I would’ve had to work full-time for us to live in a better neighborhood. Our neighbors thought we were crazy. But as kids grow, it’s practically impossible to find places where they can play freely without an adult accusing you of neglect.”

So, we keep asking ourselves, when it comes to our own flesh and blood, our beloved children, are we doing too much or too little? Can my kid make it if I’m poor? Isn’t having plenty of money the ticket to a perfect future?

“I teach in a very diverse community with children of drug addicts and ex-cons and kids whose parents are very well educated and successful,” says Larry, a middle school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. “There is a big range of socioeconomic levels, and in terms of classroom behavior, the low socioeconomic students are starting to outshine the high socioeconomic ones. I think it’s because outside of school the ‘better-off’ students never get a break from their nonstop schedule of practices, lessons, and playdates, leaving them with very little time for self-directed play. The supposedly ‘lesser off’ kids may have quite a few hassles at home and in their neighborhoods, and as a result they learn a lot more about dealing with things and negotiating their way through it all.”

Overparenting can send a variety of messages to your children. Most, if not all of these messages, are better not sent at all. The rule of cause and effect essentially goes like this: for every parental action, there is a child’s reaction, for better or for worse, with a lot of reality in between. Your concern should not be about any one singular incident and how you respond to it, unless something very traumatic has occurred. In that case, you should probably seek outside help for your family. Generally, though, you should be deeply concerned about any patterns of overparenting you notice yourself becoming comfortable with and repeating. While your behavior may seem to be habitual, which can deceptively give the feeling that it is OK, these questionable patterns can have very negative effects on your children—and you. They can put you in a mode where you are not looking at every situation independently and instead you are treating your children as if they are always the same and not constantly changing, as most children do. In fact, not looking at every situation independently can cause a parent to begin to stereotype or scapegoat a child as “the smart one” or the “oppositional one.” It’s no joke that as soon as we figure out what phase our kids are in and how to deal with it, they are on to the next one! This means that any stereotypical reaction you may employ to react to their behavior, such as “you’re lazy,” will fast become a losing proposition for them and you. With these principles in mind, it would be wise to take a deeper look at the overparenting equation, that is, what happens when you make certain choices and the consequences they create—for your children and you. It is important to also recognize that all children are different, even those with the same parents, so you really need to think through what each child is like, what works for each one, and what you need to tailor to each one’s distinctive personality and circumstances, and when some of what the child does changes, you need to change your perception and response as well.

In order to understand the risks and results of overparenting, we would do well to reexamine the parental archetypes that we presented in Chapter 1, which demonstrate much of this behavior. Each personality presents specific risks, which may trigger a variety of results, for parents as well as children. See if you can identify yourself among these archetypes and whether you recognize the risks and results. Within each archetypal grouping, we will discuss the overall weight of these risks and results. While the short-term effects may not be so bad, the long-term consequences are not encouraging or to be taken lightly. It is worth pointing out again that at times of crisis we all may slide into one or more of these roles, which is quite understandable. It becomes problematic, however, if you remain stuck there or include your child in your counterproductive behavior.

GUARDIAN ANGELS

The Protector

Risk: These parents will do almost anything to protect their child.

Result for Child: The child never learns to take chances or risk failure.

Result for Parents: The parents must work harder to support the appropriate development of the child’s independence.

The Hyper-Protector

Risk: These parents keep their child from participating in normal activities.

Result for Child: The child feels left out and becomes alienated.

Result for Parents: The parents need to spend more time helping the child become social.

The Intervener

Risk: These parents put their nose in the child’s business against her will.

Result for Child: The child can’t solve problems on her own.

Result for Parents: The parents must figure out how to empower the child to solve problems on her own.

The Anxiety Maker

Risk: These parents openly worry about everything concerning their child.

Result for Child: The child grows up anxious about everything.

Result for Parents: The parents must deal with the child’s increased anxiety levels.

Overparenting = A Lack of Trust

Overprotective parents unintentionally send out a message to their children that they are incapable of handling things by themselves, and need their parent’s input to make sure that they “get it right.” For children, that simply translates into a feeling that their parents do not trust them, which is true, no matter what the parents may say. When parents step in to take over even the most basic transactions that a child is capable of doing for himself, the message is that they do not trust their child to manage even the minor ups and downs of life. This means that, ultimately, the parents don’t make things easier for their child, but rather inhibit the child’s growth and, in the process of jumping in, give their child permission to be lazy, be unmotivated, and believe that he is not responsible for his actions, and leave the child with feelings of inadequacy and a lack of confidence.

Overparenting also contributes to other kinds of trust issues in children. If parents do not trust what is happening in the world, and consistently transmit their own fears about the world to their children, those kids will also grow up suspecting everything around them. That again leads to a sense that the world is more dangerous than it is, that nothing can be trusted, and that there may be real danger lurking around any corner. This is not the legacy that most parents want to leave their children, when they are just trying to help them out.

Overparenting = Inadequate Life Skills

When parents intervene, or have the maids and nannies do so for their children, to ensure that they do not have to be burdened with any of life’s mundane tasks, such as learning to tie their shoelaces, dry themselves, comb their own hair, or pick up after themselves, they are certainly not helping their children grow up and accept responsibility for themselves. In fact, they are doing quite the opposite, in relaying the message that those tasks are unimportant, and someone else will do them, so that their children can just do the important things, such as being brilliant at building with wooden blocks or LEGO.

Luanne, an elementary school teacher, told a story about going on an overnight school trip with fifth- and sixth-graders where she discovered that many of the kids had never learned to get dressed by themselves, make their own beds, or set the table for a meal. Luanne was flummoxed. What other basic life skills might these kids be lacking, she wondered, and how will that bode for their future in middle and secondary school? She thought that maybe her classroom curriculum should be expanded to include these things, because they obviously weren’t being taught at home.

Are these kids victims of overparenting, underparenting, or neglect?

Judy, a longtime acquaintance, grew up in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, and while her family was not wealthy, per se, Judy had a nanny who looked after her and kept the house in order. This arrangement was in place until Judy went to college. Well, a few weeks after she arrived, she had quite a shock when she went to get dressed one morning and realized that she had no clean underwear. In fact, when she began looking in earnest, she realized that for the past three weeks, she had been discarding her worn clothes randomly around her room, without a single thought of putting them in a hamper or cleaning them. Laundry? What’s that? Judy’s nanny had always picked up her clothes and made sure they were all washed, ironed, folded, and made ready for Judy’s next wearing. So, Judy’s first major learning curve in college should have been doing her own laundry. But in Judy’s case, and we suspect that it could be the same with many others, she simply went shopping that day for new underwear and hired another student to do her laundry. Apparently, this habit hasn’t gone out of style, and many students today are heading off to college without a clue about how to take care of basic things for themselves. Some colleges have prepared for this and provide weekly laundry services.

While there have been no studies that we know of to find out how many children over the age of eighteen know how to change a light bulb, we can probably go out on a limb and guess that the number is shockingly low. Will those kids learn any fundamental life skills such as that during their college years? Probably not. So, what favors are parents doing their children when they spare them the “burden” of learning how to take care of themselves while they are growing up? A child who grows up like this will certainly tax his or her spouse, who may feel like he or she has taken the role of the maid, nanny, or parent in picking up after her spouse, unless they are sufficiently wealthy that they can afford a nanny or a maid from day one.

TYPE As

The Overachiever

Risk: These parents set unreachable expectations.

Result for Child: The child feels as if he can never satisfy anyone.

Result for Parents: The parents may regret the extra pressure placed on the child.

The Controller

Risk: These parents insist on making choices for their child.

Result for Child: The child can’t think for himself.

Result for Parents: The parents must take extra time to deal with a needy child.

The Negotiator

Risk: These parents do not allow their child to deal with difficult situations alone.

Result for Child: The child’s ability to fend for himself is compromised.

Result for Parents: The parents will not relax and trust their child’s ability to cope.

The Micromanager

Risk: These parents take drastic measures to control the outcomes of the child’s life.

Result for Child: The child fears making mistakes and loses learning moments.

Result for Parents: The parents lose the chance to see their child learn from mistakes.

Overparenting = Fear of Failure

Fear of failure often occurs when parents who are already overinvolved with their kids reward them for every little activity or action. It is almost as if every breath they take becomes a major event, like with your first child, and in turn those children often develop a false sense of accomplishment and specialness.

According to Katherine Ozment in Boston Magazine, Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, feels that too much praise can be counterproductive. Dweck says that “when we tell kids that they are gifted, rather than hardworking, they can develop a fear of failing that leads to an unwillingness to take the risks necessary for true learning.” We see evidence of that among children in gifted and talented programs who become stressed out trying to keep up with the expectations placed on them by teachers—and parents.

“Kids who are told that they’re hard workers, in contrast, are more willing to take on challenges and better able to bounce back from mistakes,” Dreck told Ozment. “The psychological community now holds that incessant praise actually works against parents’ intentions. You don’t gain self-esteem first, then achieve great things. You work hard, fail, pick yourself up, try again, accomplish something new, and then feel pretty good about yourself.”4

Magnifying every action and activity our children come up with only sets them up to expect that everyone will make a big fuss over everything they do and/or say. That leads to disappointment in the real world, few problem-solving skills, a lack of perseverance, and failure when hardships do occur. When problems arise, which happens to everybody, they don’t know what to do and have a tantrum or just plain fold. When a child is young, this can be corrected with extra effort by parents, peers, and teachers to deal with their fragile emotions and bolster their self-confidence, while trying to help them learn to manage problems themselves. When they grow older, it is often too late for them to learn how to take care of issues, let alone push forward with any real tenacity.

Overparenting = Reduced Self-Esteem

As Steve Baskin discusses in Psychology Today, when author Nathaniel Branden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem in 1969, he reconfigured how we consider psychoanalysis and the ways in which we look at ourselves. Branden’s groundbreaking philosophy was radically different than the status quo of that era and asked people to reexamine their very nature as humans.

The Psychology of Self-Esteem redefined the relationship of reason to emotion, Baskin explains, including the nature of free will, and the powerful impact of self-esteem on motivation, work, friendship, sex, and romantic love.5

According to Dr. Branden, “self-esteem is an essential human need that is vital for survival and normal, healthy development. It arises automatically from within, based on a person’s beliefs and consciousness and occurs in conjunction with a person’s thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and actions.”6

Branden’s book prompted parents to begin doing whatever they thought was necessary to boost their children’s self-esteem. We call it “parenting on steroids” because it led to a lot of artificial “pumping up” of children’s egos, all in an effort to boost their self-esteem and self-worth. How else do you explain kids on losing sports teams receiving trophies simply for participating or students bringing home lackluster grades, only to be stroked and told that they must have done their best and that they should feel good about themselves? That sort of recognition and empty praise has proved to produce poor performance, acceptance of mediocrity, and unhealthy personality traits in children as they develop.

For example, a landmark 2007 study from Columbia University found that kids who are continually told that they are smart tend to avoid activities where they don’t excel, essentially selling themselves short for fear of failure.7

This kind of coddling to promote self-esteem, which often comes with an acceptance of mediocre performance, may explain record-high rates of narcissism among today’s young adults.8 We see evidence of that in almost every classroom, including private, public, and parochial schools.

Indulging our children with bloated praise and meaningless trophies will not go very far toward supporting successful, satisfied kids. Learning how to fail and bravely move forward is part of growing up—for everyone. Self-esteem is an essential human need that is vital for survival and normal, healthy development. It should begin at a young age.

As psychologist Abraham Maslow explained in his work on the human hierarchy of needs, self-esteem is one of the basic human motivations. Maslow suggested that people need esteem from other people as well as from their own self-respect. Both of these needs must be fulfilled in order for an individual to grow as a person and achieve self-actualization.

The issue is not artificially trying to pump our children up to make them feel good and bolster their self-esteem. It is helping them learn to master situations so that they can feel good about and respect themselves for what they have accomplished. This will also prevent them from seeking out other children who are also struggling with low self-esteem, who accept and then validate each other’s poor performance. This is particularly an issue among teenagers, who tend to bond together and support each other’s bad behavior. As parents, we play a central role in the development of our children’s self-esteem, and it is critical to examine what we can realistically do in this regard to ensure that our children develop properly.

BUDDIES

The Best-Friender

Risk: These parents constantly crave the companionship of their child.

Result for Child: The child has little life of her own and becomes a puppet of her parent.

Result for Parents: The parents have no life of their own, and when the child eventually leaves, they are crushed.

The Assister

Risk: These parents help the child, even when she doesn’t need it.

Result for Child: The child never learns to be self-sufficient.

Result for Parents: The parents don’t really take care of their own needs.

The Spoiler

Risk: These parents will do anything to indulge their child.

Result for Child: The child expects anything that he wants to be provided.

Result for Parents: The parents lose their own sense of working for something.

The Smotherer

Risk: These parents overwhelm the child with too much attention.

Result for Child: The child can’t develop a sense of his own independence.

Result for Parents: The parents sacrifice their own independence.

Overparenting = Feelings of Entitlement

Many parents are so overprotective of their children that the children do not learn to take responsibility, accept the natural consequence of their actions, and learn from their mistakes. This notion that they can do whatever they want, that the rules don’t apply to them, and that if a problem develops, their parents will jump in and help, provides a sense that they are really not responsible or accountable for anything and, therefore, they do not learn from their actions. This well-meaning but needless protection may cause these children to develop a sense of entitlement that will end up crippling their development while creating problems for them as they interact with others. Parents who feel entitled themselves, be it from their own success or being born into the right family, may find it difficult to work with their child’s school in a trusting, cooperative, and positive manner, which only tends to impede their child’s progress in school. The result is that the staff at the school are often resentful, and at some point distance themselves from the child, who they will just see as spoiled.

Entitlement then becomes a tricky issue to deal with, rather like bad karma. Just as the world has its own way of filtering out injustice and balancing the scales of who gets what they deserve, what goes around may come back to haunt you, or, in the case of overly entitled kids becoming overly entitled adults, it may come back to haunt them and their own children.

Overparenting = Lack of Creativity

Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist at Boston College, who edited the spring 2011 issue of the American Journal of Play, explains that free, unstructured play helps children learn how to get along with others, control their emotions, and develop their imaginations.9 Does this sound like the pool of children from which you want your kid to be selecting for his or her playdates?

How could it have happened that kids and play are no longer guaranteed to be entirely synonymous? Since the 1950s, Gray says, there’s been a steady decline in the time American children spend playing on their own.

A study by the University of Maryland’s Sandra Hofferth found that, between 1981 and 1997, American kids ages six to eight spent 25 percent less time engaged in free play, while their classroom time rose by 18 percent. Meanwhile, their homework time increased by 145 percent, and the time they spent shopping with their parents rose by 168 percent. When Hofferth updated her research in 2003, free time continued to decline, while study time increased another 32 percent.10 Who knows what happened to shopping time, but if the amount of goods that kids seem to have today is any indication, it has not declined at all.

Family psychologists point out that during the past twenty-five years the value of free time in childhood has been largely forgotten. But all the hours and money spent honing artistic, athletic, and academic skills can actually tamp down on children’s creativity, because kids aren’t left with any spare moments to read, draw, or imagine on their own.11

By overscheduling children’s lives, parents inadvertently prohibit them from developing the creative skill sets that foster problem solving, resiliency and self-confidence down the road. Free, unstructured time, when children can daydream, fantasize, and look at their lives and work out solutions to what they see as life’s problems, allows creativity to develop. When people are too busy, they don’t have the time or the mental space to be able to do that.

The iconic psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim explains that a child’s inner world becomes impoverished without sufficient mental room for play. “Play is the work of the child,”12 he said, a central mechanism through which children get acquainted with the surrounding world and develop a sense of independence and separation. Intensive parenting, which is built on intense, hands-on supervision, significantly limits play and puts our children at risk.

PRODUCERS

The Consumer

Risk: These parents put a price tag on everything concerning their child.

Result for Child: The child considers herself to be unrealistically special, and believes that school is just for academic performance and not social skill development.

Result for Parents: The parents alienate people around them.

The Blamer

Risk: These parents put blame on others instead of facing consequences.

Result for Child: The child feels entitled to behave however he chooses, because it’s not his fault.

Result for Parents: The parents alienate people around them.

The Delegator

Risk: These parents view their child as a project.

Result for Child: The child is not sure who loves him or is responsible for him.

Result for Parents: The parents lose their chance to really know their child.

The Disrespecter

Risk: These parents act out their superiority complex on adults responsible for their child.

Result for Child: The parents undermine and essentially disrespect their child.

Result for Parents: The parents alienate people around them.

Overparenting = Irresponsible and Unaccountable Young Adults

Why is it that when children screw up or don’t achieve what they want, more and more parents seem so willing to blame someone else instead of holding their own child—and themselves in some cases—accountable?

If your child cheats on a test, do you blame the teacher because the test is too hard? Do you blame your child’s eye doctor because he forgot to tell you that your kid has a “wandering eye”? Or do you blame the government for insisting on all these tests in the first place? Some of those excuses will stick, won’t they? If you keep looking to excuse your child from being accountable for his actions, you are helping him also accept the idea that he is not accountable for what happened, and teaching him to behave in the same way as you have. Your kid will become as arrogant and irresponsible as you have been when you try to blame someone else for your child’s shortcomings. The idea of blaming someone else means that you don’t have to accept responsibility for what happened, and you then don’t have to make an effort to make things better.

Fortunately, the fact that some things in this complex world in which we live are cut and dry and right or wrong is not hard to establish. Cheating is wrong, no matter how you slice it, and it appears in many forms. Some of them are not so easy to referee, and when it comes to crime and punishment, figuring out what punishment is proportional to the crime is even more difficult. How you determine what a proper reaction or consequence might be as opposed to just overreacting can be quite tricky, but ignoring the issue or blaming someone else for it is never an answer. Determining right and wrong and what the consequences should be depends on your own moral code as a parent, but it is a subject you can discuss with other parents or staff at school. For some people, trying to determine this is very difficult, and it only gets harder when you are trying to get a leg up on everyone else on behalf of your child.

Overparenting = Bad Role Modeling

Crissy and Lauren are in an afterschool program at their middle school in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. One day, while they were messing around in the library, making videos on their phones, Crissy hit Lauren in the mouth by accident and busted up her lip pretty badly. It was a total accident. They went to the nurse right away, who called Lauren’s mother, who came immediately (as if she had been waiting outside the school for such an occasion) and took her daughter to the local emergency room, where she got a few stitches. As soon as Lauren and her mother got home, Lauren called Crissy to give her the lowdown on her stitches and the cute guy working as a nurse in the ER, while Lauren’s mother emailed the school, complaining bitterly about its lack of proper supervision. She then called Crissy’s house to report the incident to her parents, accusing Crissy of hitting her daughter intentionally. She kept demanding an apology, even when Lauren insisted that it had been a total accident.

Lauren’s mother, triggered by an irrational need to intervene on behalf of her child, is a good example of what overparenting can look like. What we say to our children is important, of course, but our actions play a bigger role in modeling positive and realistic behavior. The sad part of this story is that the kids were ready to move on with their friendship until the parents got involved and made it worse.

Overparenting = Inept Children

As our children develop, we must allow them the chance to take responsibility for some basics in life, such as buttering their own toast, picking up their own clothes, putting away their toys when they finish playing with them, and helping with setting or clearing the dining room table. Not allowing children to do any form of chores or assume any responsibility because they may not get it right or because there is a maid who will do these things for them is not doing them a favor. Children must be encouraged to take responsibility at home as they are growing up, so that by the time they become teenagers they are somewhat self-reliant, especially when it comes to life’s basic needs. If they do not learn this before they leave home, they will never know how to manage on their own when they leave home, whether that means attending college, taking a job away from home, or enlisting in the armed forces. Learning to do things for themselves is also a way in which children learn to build self-esteem, take pride and responsibility in the commitments they make, and in turn feel good about themselves. Not letting them learn to do this essentially deprives them of learning how to move forward by themselves when you or someone else is not around.

Learning to do chores, even if they are not done perfectly by a six-year-old, allows you and your child to accept that he or she may not always do it perfectly. Dishes do break, even when a parent does them at times, and children can accept that no one, including their parents, is perfect, and they make mistakes, but at least they are trying to do things and help out.

This process also helps your children when you have realistic, age-appropriate expectations for them and helps them appreciate that if it doesn’t work out quite right all the time, it is not the end of the world. If this doesn’t happen, by the time children are sixteen or seventeen years old, they will feel incapable of doing anything right or meeting any of your expectations.

Coddling is not a recipe for success. Spoiling your children is harmful. It does not empower them to make confident decisions. For example, when it comes time for high school seniors to make decisions about where they want to apply to college, they have to use at least some of their own judgment and learn to work with someone who is more knowledgeable in that area, such as their school counselor. If they end up at a college that’s not right for them, it is not the end of the world. It happens all the time and can be fixed. It’s a learning opportunity for children, not a chance for you to bemoan their choices or for them to complain forever that it was your fault that they didn’t do well, that they didn’t like the place they went to, or that they sabotaged themselves because they didn’t feel like they participated in the decision.

ACCESSORIES

The Cheerleader

Risk: These parents think their children are the “best” at everything they do.

Result for Child: The child develops a false sense of accomplishment.

Result for Parents: The parents perpetuate a false sense of reality.

The Carpooler

Risk: These parents can’t stop gossiping about their child’s teachers and school.

Result for Child: The child is humiliated by the parents’ loose lips.

Result for Parents: The parents alienate people around them.

The Trophy Giver

Risk: These parents want their child to be a “winner” at everything he or she does.

Result for Child: The child grows up without a realistic view of the world.

Result for Parents: The parents lessen the value of their own achievements.

The Maturity Killer

Risk: These parents always treat their child like a “child.”

Result for Child: The child’s psychological and emotional growth is stunted.

Result for Parents: The parents miss out on the evolving parent-child relationship.

Overparenting = Increased Anxiety

When we become too emotionally involved in the issues facing our children, we ramp up the stakes unreasonably high and create way too much pressure for our kids. Children by nature want to please their parents, but when their anxiety to do so is very high, they have little room to live their lives and balance out what they want as well. The fallout from this can be far-reaching.

A study by Columbia University psychology professor Suniya Luthar reveals that pushing kids can be just as bad for them as attending to their every desire. Luthar found that the children of upper-class, highly educated parents in the Northeast are increasingly anxious and depressed. Children with “high perfectionist strivings” were likely to see achievement failures as personal failures. Luthar also found that “being constantly shuttled between activities—spending all that time in the SUV with Mom or Dad—ends up leaving suburban adolescents feeling more isolated from their parents.”13 We suspect that their parents also feel more isolated from them as well, as they get to feel like chauffeurs and not like parents.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect one in eight children. Research shows that children with untreated anxiety disorders are at higher risk of performing poorly in school, missing out on important social experiences, and engaging in substance abuse. Anxiety disorders also occur with other disorders, such as depression, eating disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). With treatment and support, your child can learn how to successfully manage the symptoms of an anxiety disorder and live a normal childhood.14

With “normal,” good parenting, however, anxiety disorders may not develop in the first place. In fact, our children’s anxiety can often remain at normal levels when parents take a step back, relax, and let life happen. We should all take notice that an overanxious parent who constantly magnifies issues can escalate a child’s anxiety levels, sometimes to the point where he or she will become terrified of everything.

Overparenting = Compromised Resilience

When parents try to overprotect or coddle their children, they are providing them with short-term protection at the expense of long-term life skills. By overprotecting children from an unpleasant occurrence, of which life is full, parents are keeping them from learning how to deal with those types of events, or, in essence, to become resilient. A lack of resilience also results from your occasional, small, and simple indulgences. When your son has a little cold and wants to stay home from school, rather than push him to go when you know that he is not very sick, you may want to be the “perfect” parent. This is an excuse to pamper your kid so that you keep him home, where he ends up playing all day, happy to have your constant attention. This can quickly become an indulgence that repeats itself over and over. That may not sound like a bad thing at first, but what are you really teaching your son by indulging these whims? The message you give is that every little sniffle or pain needs special attention and treatment and that school, and ultimately work, can be put off for any sort of minor reason. This approach does not help a child develop maturity and responsibility, and, besides, you might be missing the real reason why he wants to stay home. Could he be having any issues at school? Is he struggling? Being bullied? Being a bully himself? In between hugs, you might want to check out those things.

Children—like all of us—are not always ready to deal with many life events and will hide behind a cold or headache to keep from doing so. Naturally, parents do not want to upset their children, believing that they should not have to deal with unpleasant situations—or at least not too soon. This inclination to protect our children, as noble as it may first appear, does not give them a chance to learn how to cope with whatever it is they need to wrestle with, be it loud teachers, teasing, not getting what they want, or wishing that they could just stay home and watch TV. We all know adults who use these same ploys to basically avoid unpleasant circumstances or get what they want. Let your parental resolve and resilience teach your children how to develop theirs. You are their role models, and “do as I do, not just as I say” is the more accurate mantra.

Does Overparenting Affect You, Too?

It surely does! We can see from this list that parents are affected just as much as children by their own overparenting, and in some ways, the long-term consequences for the parent may be worse.

As an adult, you need to create a life of your own, and your self-esteem and self-worth should be driven by your own successes, activities and relationships—not just those of your children. It’s all fine and good for you to feel pleased by their accomplishments, but if your life is totally caught up in how your child lives his or hers, you will never be happy. You will always be hanging on to how well—or not—they are living up to your expectations.

There is no way that anyone—your child or your spouse—can fully meet your hopes and expectations all the time. If your levels of self-esteem and self-worth are determined too much by how your child is doing, then you will always be living on the edge of your seat, worrying about how his or her next act will play out. That means that the way in which you value yourself will be contingent upon how well your child performs—compared to your expectations—in his or her own life.

What if they don’t do as well as you think they should? Like everyone else, they will have ups and downs, but that roller coaster—just like yours—is about their life and goals—not yours. So if you are always trying to manage your child’s life, you will never be living your own.

If you have been constantly invested in overseeing or managing your child’s life, then you risk becoming not just an empty nester, but also a very depressed, sad and lonely person. You will quickly find that while you may have socialized with the parents of your children’s friends, those relationships fade when your kids leave home and you have to invent new ones.

While it may be true, as the saying goes, that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child, you also have to develop other things in your own life, regardless of how and what your child is doing. This becomes even more crucial when they start getting involved with friends in lower school, go out with friends as teenagers or hopefully leave home and go to college.

Why do parents forget so easily that as children—both young and older—we figured out what was going on in the world just as much on our own as we did from our parents? So while it’s one thing to explain to a young child that the world is a dangerous place and that they need your protection and input to function or be successful, if you keep that up at the same rate as they grow older, you may get your wish and have a child who fears going out into the world and never leaves home. That means both of you will ultimately have no outside life, and it can create a very unhappy, angry, co-dependent relationship, one in which the child blames the parent for never having a life and the parent continues trying to help the child manage their own life, even into adulthood. Years of clinical experience repeatedly demonstrate that these are some of the most unhappy, unsuccessful people needing help.

Which Child Is Yours?

While it may not be quite so obvious, the subtle effects of overparenting are often regrettable and can be avoided. It would be wise to avoid these pitfalls for yourself, but, most of all, for your innocent children. These parental archetypes often produce a certain type of child whose particular behavior in response to a parent’s style can even begin to be recognized during preschool years. While parenting authorities have ascribed catchy names for these children, their behavior is often anything but cute. The biggest challenge we face as parents is to be objective about our own kids before it is too late. When we accomplish that by acknowledging their weaknesses, faults, and strengths, we can also recognize some of our own as well as the choices we make that may push our kids in a direction in which we do not really want them to go. If we are alert, we can nip some of what they do early on in the bud, before they are older and their behavior becomes much more difficult to reverse. Looking beyond the cute nicknames, see if you recognize your child within these groupings.

Teacups: These children are extremely fragile and sensitive about their own discomforts or problems.15 It is as if they could be easily broken, and they have an extremely difficult time handling criticism or rejection and tend to avoid anything where they might not easily succeed. As these children grow older and encounter challenging high school curricula, college life, and the job market, they tend to stumble and need large doses of external support. As they get older, this often takes the form of subsidies from parents who are guilt-ridden about having raised children with limited coping skills and do not know how to help them move on in any other way.

College counselors see “a rise in digestive and eating disorders, headaches, generalized anxiety disorder, substance abuse, social and school phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorders among students who are perfectionists, and overwork school assignments. Even more alarming is the increase in self-injury—a desperate and poignant cry for relief. Our mental health services can barely keep up with the demand.”16 This shows that these kids cannot extricate themselves from a situation that they have most probably gotten themselves into in the first place, so they create a crisis so that someone, usually a parent, will jump in and bail them out.

Toasties: These kids, who were heavily overloaded from a very young age, have burned out by the time they really need to perform on their own.17 Their parents overloaded their schedules with performing arts classes, karate, tennis, and tutors. If there was a brochure laying around for something new, these children were surely dragged out the door, into the minivan, across town, and into another “enrichment” program. From a very early age, these kids were so busy in structured settings that they never had sufficient time to relax and just play or hang or do nothing for a while. By the time they hit their middle teenage years, they are often burned out—just when they are becoming aware of the looming pressure to be involved in activities and build a résumé for college. By the time they graduate from high school, they are simply relieved that it’s over, and this feeling may last well into their college years and beyond. Without the ongoing supervision and direction they had at home, by the time they get away in college or boarding school, they may lose themselves in “partying.” Because they were constantly monitored and never learned how to control and moderate their activities when they were growing up at home, as soon as they are no longer supervised, they lack any direction and often do poorly or get into alcohol and drugs. Many of these kids have no sense of what really interests them or what they care about because they have been directed since early childhood. They may pick a major they don’t really care about and then professions that don’t really challenge them. In some cases, their lives become a disappointment—to themselves and their parents.

A report from the Harvard Office of Admissions describes some incoming students as “dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp.”

“Incoming students have been so scheduled, so sleep deprived and pressured, that they come to college too finely tuned,” complains one dean of students. “They’re like thoroughbreds. If they ‘throw a shoe,’ they can’t recover.”18

Turtles: As a result of being raised in an atmosphere of privilege, entitlement, and being protected from real-life issues, including those that have affected their parents, these kids assume that everything in their lives will always be fine and that there is no need to hustle or push for anything. They feel that they can just chill and not stress about anything, which often translates into not putting forth the effort to seize opportunities or realize their potential—in the classroom, on the ball field, or in the studio. They skate through life without taking on any challenges that might mess up their hair or make them sweat. This path produces docile, lazy kids who lack general empathy and tend to become apathetic and passionless.19 This is best illustrated by the old phrase “good things come to those who wait, but the best things come to those who do.”

“These kids who come from highly entitled environments, who have been spoiled all their life, have a difficult time in college,” says an admissions counselor from an elite liberal arts college in the Northeast. “First of all, they’re barely capable of doing their own laundry, and they’re clueless when it comes time to sign up for classes and eventually declare a major.” Did their parents really do them a favor by paving the way for them?

Tyrants: These kids have grown up with their parents constantly telling them that they are special, that they can do no wrong, and that their poop smells like birthday cake. They feel that they deserve the best of everything, and see no reason why they should not have whatever they want. While they will apply themselves to get what they want and what they feel they are entitled to, if they don’t think that they are the center of attention in any given situation, they will let everyone know about it in no uncertain terms.

“I’ve seen these types gravitate to fraternities,” reports one alumnus from a large Midwestern state school. “They were probably a big-shot athlete in high school, and their father was a prominent lawyer or bank executive, so they feel that the world is their oyster. Except at a big university, there are a lot of other big fishes coming from small ponds, and once they get on campus, they find out real quick how insignificant they are. A lot of them can’t handle it and end up self-destructing.” In truth, these tend to be somewhat narcissistic and entitled kids who not only feel like they deserve whatever they want but resent having to work for it. They think that they can simply take shortcuts or use Mommy’s or Daddy’s connections to get them where they think they deserve to be.

As a parent, you may recognize some of these traits. Many kids will show traces of some of these characteristics on occasion, and if that’s all they do, they will be fine. But before your children grow up and become locked into any of these types, watch out! This behavior is very easy to undo when the child is young—if you recognize it and respond differently to your child—but it is very difficult to undo once the child gets older. That’s why it’s so vital for parents to see their children with clear eyes, and if they sense that their kids are developing any of these tendencies, they should take action so that the children don’t become stuck in these patterns. The long-term effects of these patterns are not positive for you or your child.