Simplicity Parenting (33 page)

Just as the flight attendant reminds parents to “secure your oxygen mask before you help your child with theirs,” parents need to relax in order to convey ease to their children. I would like to make a recommendation directly to parents, especially those who, like Annmarie, are often fretful: Reduce your exposure to media, and particularly media news.

This may seem sacrilegious in our age of information, but let me clarify. I’m not suggesting parents crawl under media-proof rocks, avoiding
news or any connection to the world. I have no problem with parents having what media access they need to be informed and connected. I am suggesting, however, that parents consciously say no thanks to media overexposure. Limit or cut your use of those media that alarm rather than inform. It can make a dramatic difference in your emotional life, and the emotional climate of your home, when you refuse to allow your fear to be provoked, stoked, and incited several times a day.

Yes, daily life in America (or any other country) involves risks and dangers to children. There are perhaps even more risks now than when we were growing up. I don’t know. I do know that Annmarie and many other parents today are better “informed” than their parents were, but they’re also much more nervous. Their emotional well-being is being eroded by media that, if allowed, can easily saturate their lives. Media that exploit our deepest, most primal urge to protect our children.

Yet, as parents, we need to be more than just our desire to protect, no matter how noble and important that is. We need to live with confidence, to parent with a sense of strength and openness, and perhaps most of all, a sense of humor. The primal urge to protect is our cortisol spigot; I’m suggesting we not invite it to be turned so easily and so often.

Lucy, a mother and teacher who attended one of my workshops, told me a story about a friendship that was affecting her well-being as a parent. Rena had a son the same age as Lucy’s; the two women met through their sons’ preschool. Yet, Lucy reported, she began to realize that she generally felt bad after speaking or spending time with Rena. Almost always Rena talked about something scary related to kids that she had read or seen on television. Rena talked a lot about the inadequacies of the schools, about how her son was doing in relation to other kids, about her concerns as to whether her son would get the opportunities he deserved. Lucy said that while she could understand and relate to Rena’s concerns, she found the sheer unrelenting weight of them oppressive, unleavened by humor or joy. She realized that she needed fun, some inspiration and laughter with her friends, not just a stress bath. Lucy backed off her friendship with Rena a bit, with sadness, but with an even greater sense of relief.

We can’t blame the media alone for making us more nervous as parents. There are many reasons we’ve taken to hovering. The term
helicopter parenting
was coined almost twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. It has since become so ubiquitous—as a term and a cultural phenomenon—that different degrees of hovering have been noted. (According to a study at the University of Texas at Austin, “Black Hawk
parents” are the most angry and extreme.)
²⁹
In the early 2000s, colleges began to decry the extent to which parents were exerting control over the decisions—from roommates to course teachers—of their young adult children. But that was the tip of the iceberg. Parental overinvolvement, or “hyperparenting,” is not exclusive to parents of any particular income bracket, race, or level of education. It’s also not exclusive to Americans. And kids of all ages—certainly not just college-age kids—feel its effects. Parental demands and anxieties can be heard in the preschool coatroom; they float above the eighth-grader being tutored for the SATs that she won’t actually take for three years.

It makes sense that many parents today have managed to get their helicopter pilot’s licenses. Compared with a generation or two ago, we’re having fewer children, and becoming parents later in life. As a result, our parental attention, mental and physical energy, and our expectations are more concentrated on fewer kids, not dispersed among a larger brood. Frequently parents today, mothers as well as fathers, have considerable career experience before their first child is born, and are bringing the values of the corporate world—a work ethic and sense of competition—into their parenting.

There’s also a large “Because I can” element to why this generation of parents pays such extraordinary attention to their children’s every move. With cellphones (the world’s longest umbilical cords), email, instant messaging, GPS, and other navigational programs, we can be in nearly constant contact with our children. With some software, we can plot every fluctuation of our children’s grade point average, monitor their chat room conversations, and have copies of their emails and instant messages sent directly to our computer. Technology has facilitated our overinvolvement in our children’s lives to such an extent that the line between involved and overinvolved is easy to cross. For many parents, the accepted boundaries of privacy and independence, so obvious even a generation ago, seem to have been erased.

Some people point to the effects of 9/11 and such tragedies as the
Columbine High School shootings as contributing factors to increased parental hovering. Others equate it with a pendulum swing away from what Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1981) experienced when they were children. One in six of that generation (many of whom are parents today) grew up with a single parent, and more than 40 percent were latchkey kids.
³⁰
Those factors in themselves are hardly indicators of abuse or hardship, but as a whole, the parenting style of the time was fairly hands-off. And so the pendulum has swung the other way.

Many factors combine to form a trend, a mode of thought and behavior characteristic of a particular era. Without a doubt, overinvolvement, in its many forms, is a parenting zeitgeist of our day. If the hovering parent is a descriptive image for the trend, I would point to anxiety and the pressures of competition as the fuels keeping our helicopters aloft. Parenting, education, and even childhood are now viewed as competitions. Parents feel tremendous pressure, both cultural and self-induced, to enrich, enhance, and escalate their children’s early years. Under the guise of protecting and providing, we control and cater to our children. If childhood is a “window of opportunity” for growth, we assume that means it is a “limited-time opportunity.” In a competitive vein, where more and faster are always better, our methods and our goal become clear: to “get more in” before the imaginary window closes.

Culture can be seen as the collaborative pool we draw from in our daily lives. We’re influenced by what we see, the methods and experiences of others close to us. This is especially true among parents who compare notes on just about everything with other parents. Hyperparenting is a large part of the cultural norm today, worldwide. It is part of the parenting waters we’re swimming in. I’ll share with you a few of the more common forms of overinvolvement that I commonly see, presenting a sort of “rogues gallery” in which most any parent will catch a glimpse or two of themselves. Most of us do some of these things, sometimes. Then, and most important, we’ll look at how to back out of overinvolvement, how to bring that helicopter down.

In my work and travels I often see a parental type I think of as “Sportscasters.” Basically, a “sportscasting” parent drowns a child in words. In real time (that is, blow-by-blow) they telecast everything the child touches, does, is wearing, or even what they may be thinking. “Would you look at this! Peter, darling, look at you! In your bright red shoes you’re doing a wonderfully silly dance. Look at your arms! Like a windmill, you are! Or an elephant. And look, now! Look at you bend
down all the way like a big, hairy baboon! Is that what you’re being? Is that a baboon’s dance, darling?” (This is an abbreviated version, actually … but you get the idea.)

The “corporate parent” holds a metaphorical image of their family as a corporation, or a corporate team. Decisions are made on the basis of a mythical “bottom line.” What must be expended to get the desired results? And just what are the desired results? The ultimate goal is a “product launch”: the launching of their child into the world. But until that point, life can seem like a series of “launch meetings.” Corporate parents try to get kids excited about their own “packaging,” about their “profile” and their advantages over other kids.

The “little buddy parent” (which morphs, as a child gets older, into the “best friend parent”) sees no separation between their world—their adult conversations and activities—and their children’s. They invite their children’s involvement in decisions; they expend a lot of time and ever so many words on justifications mainly to avoid one word:
no
. Often this lack of boundaries speaks to a kind of loneliness. Some parents are so focused on their children, and isolated from adult friendships, that they seek a more equal, friendship-based relationship from their kids. The little buddy parents often want their children to be adults, or, better still, they themselves want to be children again. There is nothing new, and certainly nothing particular to parents about longing for “the fountain of youth.” The only news is that there are now multibillion-dollar industries catering to these fantasies: selling rhinestone embellished thongs to seven-year-old tweeners and low-rise “gangsta” jeans to adults.

The “clown parent” feels the need to be “larger than life,” an entertainer. They believe that childhood, in fact, needs to be “larger than life,” a sort of ever-expanding carnival of delights. There is great love behind this image, but also exhaustion. My mental image of this parent (“Honk! Honk!”) isn’t one of them entertaining, and speaking with enthusiasm and animation. I imagine them later, depleted, like a puppet that has been set down. This kind of parenting often leads to disappointment—for the child, obviously, whose expectations are elevated daily, but also for the parent, who is left feeling that they can never do enough.

Here is a critical point: There is tremendous love behind all these forms of overinvolvement. Hyperparenting may stem from an overbearing love, one that doesn’t fully respect (or sometimes acknowledge) a child’s independence. Yet out of love we can also choose to
back off from
overinvolvement. Love is also the way out. We can change direction and
vary the steps in our parent-child dance. We can learn to allow our children their own tasks, decisions, conflicts, relationships, and emotional lives. We can provide the kind of stability and security that they will internalize, a base camp that doesn’t move. This archetypal base camp will be their own strength of character, their own resiliency.

Backing Off—Talk Less

Sometimes, when I give lectures and workshops to school communities, questions are solicited for me beforehand. So when I arrive, I’m handed a basket of questions that I then try to address during the course of the day, either in my lecture or in small groups afterward. I have an all-time favorite question, though when I first read it, it really threw me. Now I think of it as a lovely little symbol, or analogy, for what we must do to simplify parental overinvolvement.

Here’s the question: “Why did Laura and Mary do what Pa said?”

If your children are seven or over, you may recognize the reference: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books. This series, based on the author’s own memories, tells the story of a family—Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary, and little Carrie—of homesteaders in Kansas. Theirs is a hard life, with monumental threats such as fire and failed crops, but also simple pleasures. The story, which extends over five books, has many ups and downs, but through all of these it can absolutely be said that yes, the girls really did do what Pa said. Without question.

Why did Laura and Mary do what Pa said? The short answer is this: Pa didn’t say too much.

Discipline was really the focus of this question. But discipline and parental involvement are intertwined. This may surprise you, but several of the suggestions and tips that I offer to help parents back out of overinvolvement boil down to this: say less.

We often bathe our children in words. By keeping a running commentary on everything they do, we mean to assure them that we’re noticing. Yet the more we’re talking, the less we are really noticing. My youngest daughter and I were walking recently in a meadow, and she pointed to a single wheat stalk that was taller than the rest, and arched over beautifully. “Look, Daddy, see that?” she asked, tugging my sleeve and pointing. “Yes,” I said, and we both stopped and looked at it for a moment or two before continuing on.

Now, I’m a garrulous fellow. I offer this snapshot not to suggest that I am always a master of Zen calm and silence. I’m using it to show the
golden possibilities in an ordinary moment. I could have responded to my daughter with a lively little talk about native plants, about the symmetry of the wheat’s kernels, and why this particular stalk had pushed up higher than the rest. I could have praised her for her lovely vision, her insight and recognition of beauty in its purest form. In fact, I could be there still, talking … though she wouldn’t still be listening.