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Hi, I am Nataly and I am the co-founder of Work It, Mom!
I write the daily Work It, Mom! Blog where I talk about issues affecting working moms, goings on in our Work It, Mom! community, new site features, updates,and contests. I also share my own juggle between work and family and love to see members jump in with comments. Come and visit often!
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I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker about the rise of overparenting and my head is spinning. If anyone has an over-sized chill pill, I’d like one. NOW. please.
The article reviews several recent books that explore the subject of helicopter parenting in more detail than I’d seen before. To save you the suspense, the verdict is uniformly negative: Overparenting is bad for our kids.
Overparenting means different things to different people, but the article’s author defines it through several elements:
-Spoiling kids with attention, stuff, and latitude through lax rules.
-Achievement pressure — i.e. I need to make sure my kids gets into Harvard so I am hiring him a tutor when he is 5.
-Anxiety about everything from sanitizing kids’ hands to worrying about how they are getting on with their classmates.
As I was reading through these I was checking them off in my mind, as they relate to the kind of parents I think my husband and I are. I am not sure how we fared: We definitely spoil our daughter with attention, but not stuff or lax rules. I do think education and academic achievement is important, but so is being kind, funny, generous and content with yourself. I do get anxious about her not washing her hands enough but I don’t send her to school with bottles of sanitizers (which apparently many parents do, according to the article.)
Whether or not I overparent, I do think about these issues a lot. Just before I read the article I was talking to a few other moms waiting outside my daughter’s ballet class about trying to find the impossible balance between exposing our kids to different activities and not overloading them (and our families and wallets) with too much stuff. None of us had great answers.
According to the article — and to others I’ve read — overparenting is a fairly recent phenomenon. Some of the causes mentioned are interesting:
-Working mothers: We overcompensate for not being there with hiring tutors and installing nanny cams to monitor them and we hang over our kids at night and on weekends.
-Stay-at-home mothers: To make up for not pursuing their own careers they infuse all their energy into rearing super-achieving kids.
-Global competition: The Russians launched Sputkin and American schools started to push students harder in the sciences.
-Too much brain plasticity research: Several research studies that suggested that we need to stimulate our kids from the youngest of ages with things like art on TV (e.g. Baby Einstein) to get their brains to develop. Apparently this research is now being questioned.
I have to say that I found reading all this fascinating and there is more food for thought there than I can digest in a single, overly long blog post. I invite you all to sound off in the comments with your thoughts about overparenting:
Is this something you encounter in yourself or your friends? Do you see it as a worrisome trend? How do we maintain some sanity for our kids by allowing them time to just be kids and not put them at a disadvantage when competing with other kids who’ve had SAT tutors from the age of 14?
Well, I do know that my Mom often comments about how much attention we pay to our daughter compared to “her Day” but I feel that is because she is the only one and we are the three musketeers so to speak! However, she does play nicely by herself and with other children.. We are not lax, but I do get annoyed when I experience alot of parents who seem to think it’s ok to let Johnny run around the grocery store or crawl under the table in a restaurant. I do see parents now as a bit obsessed about their kids achievements. Growing up we played for hours out in the woods and my mom did housework and coffeeclatched with the neighbors! At luch she’d yell and we’d show up. I was doing dishes while standing on a chair- about 8 years old and had chores. I don’t give mine chores but do expect her to clean up. I do see the too much pressure to grow thing going on. I do think that there is too much striving for perfect parenting and that creates stress and distortions ex,- parents are never angry, yell or spank (yet they do get a lot more divorces!). Now my head is spinning!
starrlife | November 16th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
OK, I think it is absolute bullsh*t that the working mother is a cause of overparenting. Good grief. Middle class and poor mothers have been working outside the home for decades, at least 100 years, or more and overparenting seems to be something specific to the past 15-20 years. God I am so sick of the popular culture pretending that working motherhood is something new! The difference is the guilt peddling. Can people stop acting like being a mother and working is this difficult new challenge? It’s just not. It’s been done for generations and generations.
Liz | November 16th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I subscribe to the New Yorker and read that article and had so many conflicting emotions. One point that really resonated with me was the “every family for itself” issue - that is, that helicopter parenting has resulted in parents being divisive in trying to get a leg up for their own kids at the expense of kids in the community as a whole. I have seen the phenomenon and my knee jerk reaction was, really, disgust at the parents. However, on the heels of my disgust was understanding. This article really came down on parents (and most harshly on mothers, of course) as if all of this occurs in a vacuum. Oh the horrors - kids being overscheduled to get into college. It MUST be overambitious parents - it couldn’t possibly be the impossible thresholds set by the colleges. As an aside, I am a college instructor and, no matter what jargon is thrown about, it is still performance on the standardized admission tests that reigns supreme.
Given that other societal institutions have abandoned the “best for the community” route, can we really blame parents? I mean, it used to be that a company would take care of its employees (career stability, good health and retirement benefits). Then, it became every man for himself. How can companies now complain about opportunism and job-hopping?
I believe that parents’ actions are a direct result of the individualistic, isolationist trend that runs through ever other aspect of society. As evidenced by the snarky comments and scolding, it appeared to me that the experts cited in the article were just interested in blame and not understanding. Everything is ALWAYS the complete and total fault of the parents.
So, ultimately, this article infuriated me.
Mary | November 17th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I think this article follows a trend of “creating a crisis” or a “problem” out of mundane issues. Reading it might cause a “first year medical student” syndrome, when you read the description of the disease and most of them seem to fit how you are feeling - “headache, tiredness, lack of appetite” etc. I think that elements that article focuses on are only a problem when they are done with fanaticism, but each one of them is ok when taken in moderation.
-Spoiling kids with attention, stuff, and latitude through lax rules. - Kids do need attention and parental love, that’s first rule of parenting. Lax rules do not arise out of extra attention nor those two are really connected.
-Achievement pressure — nothing wrong with wanting your child to succeed, again unless someone goes really overboard. Signing up a five year old into scientific experiment camp in order to make sure science is fun later on is very different from hiring a tutor to get into harvard. It’s how you approach it and how much pressure is really exerted on a child vs. how much of it stays in parents’ head.
-Over-obsession is a problem - but simple thinking of it and planning ahead that a child has a chance to wash hands and paying attention to teachers’ comments is in my opinion a good parenting.
I think that even though the article might be trying just to draw attention to those issues and elements stressed the negative effect way too much, and those issues can hardly be studied in isolation and scientifically proven. So the conclusion to me is to check myself if I’m not overdoing it once in a while. I will also use the article as an “excuse” if I start blaming myself for not paying enough attention, by saying it’s actually good for my child
Maria | November 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
>>a direct result of the individualistic, isolationist trend that runs through ever other aspect of society<<
A-freakin’-men, Mary.
We’re all in competition with each other. And every choice is scrutinized and, when the result is less than perfect, criticized, even condemned.
Let’s say you forgo the hand sanitizer because you think maybe a little germage here and there isn’t the end of the world. Then by a bizarre series of coincidences your kid comes down with bubonic plague. Who do you think would get the blame for that? That’s right — Mommy. And woe be to the Mommy who tries to claim there is such a thing as an appropriate amount of calculated risk.
I think it boils down to this isolationism that Mary brings up. We’re no connected with each other anymore. When connection disappears, so does empathy; it’s replaced by suspicion and antagonism. Instead of holding each other up, we compare ourselves. The more we can heap criticism on our peers, the better we get to feel about ourselves in comparison.
I think when it comes right down to it, we are an all-about-me society these days. Instant gratification! Keeping up with the Joneses! Live the American Dream!
(For the record: the hand sanitizer in my purse is pretty much reserved for cleaning up after porta-potty experiences)
Jan | November 17th, 2008 at 3:42 pm