Monday, July 21, 2008

A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting


Parenting hit the news this weekend with a review of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting in The Boston Globe and interview with the author in Time. I find this topic and the conclusions of the author highly alarming.
A scathing commentary on today's parenting
By Barbara F. Meltz June 5, 2008

A Nation of Wimps: The High
Cost of Invasive Parenting

By Hara Estroff Marano
Broadway, 320 pp., $23.95

Helicopter parenting is so passe. Why waste your time hovering, waiting to swoop in on a moment's notice to rescue your child from a crisis, when you can clear potential obstacles ahead of time and make the path as smooth and safe and stress-free as possible? Kind of like, well, a snowplow.

But wait. A snowplow can rip up chunks of grass now and then, or dent a tree so badly it will eventually die.

In "A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting," Hara Estroff Marano spares no detail telling us that snowplow parenting is risky business, shortsighted and selfish, even stupid.

Parents, gird your loins. This is not bedtime reading. Marano lays out a scary story.

Protective parents have morphed into "death-grip" parents who hold on to their children so tightly that nothing is left to chance, raising them in "hothouses" where every aspect of life is under parental control. The normal course of child development gets short shrift, if it's not completely short-circuited. The results, writes Marano, are "teacup kids": "Without opportunities to experience [for] themselves, to develop and call on their own inner resources, to test their own limits, to develop confidence in themselves as problem-solvers, they are fragile and shatter easily."

Researchers, educators, and authors before Marano have been saying in one way or another for a number of years that childhood is in trouble, particularly because of a cultural devaluing of imaginative play. They have linked the loss of play to a demise in creativity and self-esteem. Marano takes it a step further: She claims that nothing less than the survival of democracy and, indeed, all of humanity is at stake.

Marano, the former editor of Psychology Today, lays out cogent arguments. Chapter 7, "Crisis on the Campus," shows that our country is churning out a well-credentialed generation of people who can't - and often don't want to - think for themselves. "College is where the fragility factor is having its greatest impact," she writes. "By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. . . . There isn't a meeting of college presidents where the subject of student mental health doesn't come up."

Afraid to take risks, afraid to fail, these students don't know who they are. Extensions of their parents? Trophies for their parents? They don't even know how to separate long enough to figure it out.

The book is a scathing commentary on contemporary parenting, particularly the parenting of the affluent. (She predicts the children of the current generation who will be most successful are those with immigrant parents, because these parents could not run interference.) When she rails about how children and their accoutrements and accomplishments provide parents with status, she is harsh and unforgiving.

Here's an example of her comments about micro-managing parents, from Chapter 3, "We're All Jewish Mothers Now": "The desire of parents for a wholly sanitized environment for their kids, totally free of uncertainty, couldn't be clearer than in the rash of new hand-cleansing agents intended for children to take with them to school. . . . It reflects a dream of total control over the child's safety and, consequently, development, a kind of parental panopticon in which children are under the constant gaze, literally and metaphorically, of adults. Among teens, the means change but the principle stays the same; nanny cams give way to Internet activity monitors and cellphones with GPS monitors."

Surely every reader will acknowledge a bit of him- or herself or someone they know somewhere in the book. But even when Marano's facts convince, her tone is off-putting. Consider this passage toward the end of the book: "In this perspective, parents are far more worthy of sympathy than of ridicule. They are more stressed and depressed than anyone else in the culture, doing their best to cope with an adverse climate. That is, they would be worthy of sympathy - if their efforts were not all so tirelessly, relentlessly self-focused."

Marano has important things to say. Her arguments may upset and anger some, but her research is exhaustive, and many of her points deserve national conversation. But the book comes across as an overdue spanking of parents. You can't be a wimp to read it.

Damn, sounds pretty bad -- maybe my parents weren't so bad after all.

Here is the interview from Time.

Are You Turning Your Child Into a Wimp?
By ANDREA SACHS

Are American parents smothering their children? Hara Estroff Marano, an editor-at-large at Psychology Today magazine and the grandmother of three small children, is convinced that they are. In her provocative new book, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting (Broadway), she writes, "Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history! Kids need to learn that you need to feel bad sometimes. We learn through experience, and we learn especially through bad experiences. Through disappointment and failure we learn how to cope." TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs spoke with Marano:

TIME: How did you become interested in this subject?

HARA ESTROFF MARANO: I had done intensive reporting on what I call the crisis on the campus. Why were college kids breaking down now in record numbers? Genetically they're not different. My kids had gone to college not long before. This was not a problem when they went to school. So I began looking at why, and I began talking to everyone on the front lines. There were hundreds and hundreds of people who were treating these kids, and they all said the same thing: these kids lack coping skills because they've not been allowed to fully function. They are the products of parental anxiety and all the lumps and bumps have been taken out of life for them, so they have no idea how to manage the normal vicissitudes of life.

Why has that occurred?

The world has changed on our watch. I didn't grow up knowing how to use a computer. So that instrument alone is highly symbolic that the world has changed. It's very fast, very dynamic, very fluid. A kid in Bangalore can come up with a program that could make Microsoft obsolete in two years. This is scary. This makes for great uncertainty. So what we're really worried about is the success of our kids. That's why we push them to achieve. And that's why we're focused on the Harvard, Yale, Princeton brand-name education. In a world of uncertainty, a brand name carries some cachet and it's the closest thing you can get to a guarantee of some kind of success or achievement.

You consider medicating kids with drugs like Ritalin over-parenting.

Parents go out of their way to have their kids declared defective so that they can get the drug and so that they can also have "accommodations." This is a big deal. It has been going on for five or seven years now. Parents go out of their way and spend fortunes. Neuropsychologists do the testing. It's a huge business. "Accommodations" is not an informal word. It's a formal thing that schools do. Almost all of the accommodations are centered around prolonging the test time the kids have. It's no longer something that gets marked on your record. So colleges don't know if you had twice the time to take your SATs. That's why parents find it so highly desirable. But in the course of doing it, they have their kids tested to find some little quirk, some little vulnerability� And that's a measure of parental anxiety. And the parental anxiety is willing to put a negative label on kids. That's really something very new. You don't boast your strengths. You boast your weaknesses.

You write about the importance of play and how it's not valued to the degree it should be.

Right. It's so counterintuitive. Play builds brains and gives children the ability to impose self-control and creates within brain circuitry the ability to pay attention. When you look at kids playing, adults see it as a waste of time. They have no clue what play does. Vigorous social play stimulates the growth of brain cells in the executive portion of the brain in the frontal cortex, and that lays the foundation for the circuitry of self-regulation, which is what you need to pay attention when you're at school. I'll just give you a very, very clear little example. We're talking about free play, not play that's monitored by adults. Because we know that when the adults are near kids, kids change what they talk about and change the content of their play. We've known that for a long time. But just picture two little kids in free play. They're inventing what they're going to do. Okay, we're going to play house. You're going to be the doggie and I'm going to be the mommy. So these kids, what are they doing? They're creating the rules that they then agree to subordinate their impulses to. I mean, that's extraordinarily powerful. But that doesn't hit you in the face when you see kids playing. It looks like, oh, we could use this time for workbook work.

Read the rest of the interview.

Doesn't sound good at all. How are kids supposed to learn to be self-sufficient and to rely on their own inner strength if they never face challenges or tough situations? My parents were no picnic, but they allowed me to fall down a lot (literally and figuratively) and, often enough, to figure out for myself how to pick myself up and carry on.

If this author is telling us the truth, we could end up with a generation of people who have no personal skills and sense of self -- perfect material for marketers to sell to.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That "invasive parenting" extends even further than just the parents. Look at all the toys that get recalled today. Lead paint. Pieces too small. Magnets that can perforate intestines. When I look back on my own toys, they look like lethal weapons in comparison. And yet, I never heard of any classmates who did anything stupid like chew on an action figure to the point of lead poisoning or swallow magnets and die. If we were playing with something small, our parents watched us and taught us not to put those things in our mouths. We weren't left completely alone, but we weren't over-protected either. We were allowed to learn things. Yes, falling down and skinning your knee hurts! I wonder if kids today even do that anymore... You certainly don't see very many Band-Aids on skinned knees.

I'm reminded of "The Simpsons" episode where Homer had to have his new-found father figure teach him not to touch the stove because it was hot. Sometimes it seems like we have a whole generation of kids who've been protected so much that they don't even know how to think for themselves. They haven't learned anything, either.