Thoughts on Parenting

In the past year or so I have thinking a lot about the issue people call “helicopter parenting”; the tendency for our generation of parents to be intensely involved in every aspect of our children’s lives. 

The book The Tiger Mom, by Amy Chua, addresses one helicopter approach but ironically it is also present in parents who focus strongly on self esteem, try to shield their children from all disappointment and distress, try to be their child’s “friend”, don’t ask their children to take responsibility for their behavior, or for chores around the house.

Parents I work with say “I would never have talked back to my parents like my child does, they wouldn’t have tolerated it.”  On the other hand when I ask if they really talked to their parents, they often say no. And, “after school I went out with my bike and my friends in the neighborhood and my parents didn’t see me until dinner.  They didn’t know what we were doing.”  These parents reflect with nostalgia on that sense of freedom, that ability to explore, and problem solve, but often also express a sense of sadness that their parents didn’t know they were being bullied, didn’t realize they sometimes got into real trouble.  Parents say “I wrote all my college applications myself, my parents were hardly involved at all” they rue the fact that there is an expectation on them to be so involved with their children’s college application process, but they also feel they may not have received enough guidance in their own process.

We live in a very different world now than when we were children.  With good reason there’s a lot more concern about safety.  It seems like it is much harder to get into a “good” college, and the expectations of the extracurricular activities, grades and AP courses on our children are so much higher than for us. It’s all very complicated and fraught.  But we tend to swing to the opposite extreme in an attempt to correct what we felt didn’t work for us.

In a great article in the Atlantic,  Lori Gottleib writes about the “20 something’s” she sees in therapy. They often don’t have the necessary skills for day-to-day living perhaps because they did not participate in chores at home.   They expect things to always be perfect for them perhaps because they were sheltered from distress by parents intervening on their behalf even into the college years. They were not raised with firm limit setting, so perhaps they don’t know how to handle disappointment and frustration.  These children fear making choices because they were given so many choices they began to fear choosing any option because it precluded other options.  They have expectations that everything will be perfect for them perhaps because their parents always emphasized how special they were and put building self esteem as the most important goal of raising children.

I started to think about all this and came to the conclusion that in the swing to put more focus on self esteem, be more involved in our children’s lives, make sure they get into good colleges, prevent some of the pain we experienced,  some of us swung to an opposite extreme of not setting firm limits with our children, not promoting appropriate age level independence and problem solving and therefore we now have a problem with our children being equipped to handle distress and disappointment as well as be able to independently problem-solve. I don’t think the answer is to swing to the “Tiger Mom” approach.

I have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to find a middle ground approach and I hope to share my ideas and thoughts about that in this blog.