#hyper-parenting

[livemessy]

Have less stuff. Messiness compounds the chaos of family life.

Pam Druckerman.  A Cure for Hyper-Parenting.  The New York Times [The Opinion Pages].  12 October 2014.

[newstfionline]

A Cure for Hyper-Parenting?

Pamela Druckerman, NY Times, Oct. 12, 2014

PARIS--I recently spent the afternoon with some Norwegians who are making a documentary about French child-rearing. Why would people in one of the world’s most successful countries care how anyone else raises kids?

In Norway “we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them,” explained the producer, a father of three. The French “demand more of their kids, and this could be an inspiration to us.”

I used to think that only Americans and Brits did helicopter parenting. In fact, it’s now a global trend. Middle-class Brazilians, Chileans, Germans, Poles, Israelis, Russians and others have adopted versions of it too. The guilt-ridden, sacrificial mother--fretting that she’s overdoing it, or not doing enough--has become a global icon. In “Parenting With Style,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti say intensive parenting springs from rising inequality, because parents know there’s a bigger payoff for people with lots of education and skills. (France is a rare rich country where helicoptering isn’t the norm.)

Hyper-parenting is also driven by science. The latest toddler brain studies reach parents in Bogotá and Berlin too. And people around the world are breeding later in life, when they’re richer and more grateful, so the whole parenting experience becomes hallowed. Scandinavians complain of “curling parents,” a reference to the sport in which you frantically scrub the ice to let a stone glide across it.

Twenty-first century parenting isn’t entirely illogical. Rather than trying to eradicate it, I suggest a strategy of containment: Rein in its excesses, and keep it from getting worse. Based on my own research, an unscientific reading of parenting literature, and a sample size of three kids, here are some key things modern parents should know:

Babies aren’t savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk. This means you can teach them not to pummel you with carrots at dinnertime, making your life calmer (and your floor cleaner). “Expect more from your children, and they will rise to it. Expect less, and they will sink,” Emma Jenner writes in the book “Keep Calm and Parent On.”

Seize windows of freedom joyfully, without guilt. Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn’t that it’s bad for children; it’s that it’s bad for parents. Between the mid-1990s and 2008, college-educated American moms began spending more than nine additional hours per week on child care; this came directly out of their leisure time. The greatest insight to emerge from France is that children’s birthday parties should be drop-offs. The other parents get three hours to go off and play.

Don’t just parent for the future, parent for this evening. Your child probably won’t get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.

Try the sleeping cure. Most parenting crises are caused by exhaustion. Force yourself to observe the same nighttime rituals as your toddler: bath, book, bed. When you feel an adult tantrum approaching, give yourself a timeout.

Have less stuff. Messiness compounds the chaos of family life.

Don’t worry about overscheduling your child. Kids who do extracurriculars have higher grades and self-esteem than those who don’t, among many other benefits, says a 2006 overview in the Society for Research in Child Development’s Social Policy Report. “Of greater concern,” it noted, “is the fact that many youth do not participate at all.”

Don’t beat yourself up for failing to achieve perfect work-life balance. The French have national paid maternity leave, subsidized nannies, excellent state day care and free universal preschool, and yet they blame the government for not helping parents enough. We Americans have none of the above, yet we blame ourselves.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them. “When a girl meets a new person, she often automatically strives to be likable, even before she has decided whether or not she likes the new person herself,” Rachel Simmons writes in her book “The Curse of the Good Girl.” “Tell your daughter to switch the order: Size up the person before you start worrying about what she thinks of you.”

Transmit the Nelson Mandela rule: You can get what you want by showing people ordinary respect. When Mr. Mandela heard that an Afrikaner general was arming rebels to prevent multiracial elections, he invited the general over for tea. The journalist John Carlin writes that Gen. Constand Viljoen “was dumbstruck by Mandela’s big, warm smile, by his courteous attentiveness to detail” and by his sensitivity to the fears of white South Africans. The general abandoned violence. Remind your kids that this technique also works on parents.

It really is just a phase. Unbearable 4-year-olds morph into tolerable 8-year-olds.

Don’t bother obsessing about what you think you’re doing wrong. You won’t screw up your kids in the ways you expect; you’ll do it in ways you hadn’t even considered. No amount of hyper-parenting can change that.

Pamela Druckerman is an American journalist and the author of “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.”

[theparentingmystique]

Introducing The Parenting Mystique

I have spent the better part of the last decade thinking and writing about the problem of parenting culture. Raised in the golden age of the family sitcom, I have always been curious about in the history and role of the family in American society, but at a certain point, concern about the family as an institution was superseded by the parent/child relationship. By happy coincidence I became parent around the same time.

As a new parent and a writer in Park Slope, Brooklyn I had a front-row seat where I could observe, participate in and ultimately write about the strange excesses of our new culture of parenting. Park Slope is the most family-friendly neighborhood in New York City. It has also has a somewhat deserved reputation as the nadir of hyper parenting. I soon realized however that the same assumptions, attitudes and insecurities the shaped parents in Park Slope exist in every community.

The problem of raising children is quietly consuming American.Thousands upon thousands of books and classes promise to teach parents how to raise their kids. Policy makers concern themselves with intimate aspects of family life including but not limited to: promoting breastfeeding, how and with whom babies sleep, circumcision, diet, exercise and encouraging parents read to their children.

Parents, for their part find it very difficult to let go. They are highly engaged in managing every aspect of their children's lives, from taking charge of their vaccination schedule to managing their college careers.They advocate on their behalf long into their twenties, so long that some large employers have found it necessary to hold orientations for the parents of their graduate recruits.

No one is disputing that this is a problem. Many people have written trenchant critiques of intensive parenting and sociologists have documented the characteristics of this emerging social trend but very few have offered a compelling explanation as to why and very few people, with the notable exception of Lenore Skenazy, of Free-Range Kids have attempted to change the way parents behave.

I believe that the reason parents behave the way they do – often in spite of their subjective intentions - is that we have become caught up in a Parenting Mystique. Like the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan wrote about so effectively in her 1963 book, parents have internalized a set of beliefs about the nature of their role in raising children. This mystique has its origins in profound changes in the way our society manages the assimilation of a new generation of adults.

In The Parenting Mystique, blog and book I hope to expose the real forces driving parenting culture today. But like any complex social phenomenon understanding it is one thing and explaining it is another. I hope to use you this blog as place to test out ideas, and to participate in some of the debates and discussions about intense parenting and what to do about it.

Nancy McDermott

June 2011