Post by lasagnasshole on Aug 15, 2014 8:46:45 GMT -5
I also partly blame Law & Order: SVU for this concern about letting our kids be alone. And I'm not even joking.
On the one hand, the show's popularity actually caused positive change in our society, bringing more attention to the issue of sexual assault and particularly the fact that most victims know their assailant.
But there's still a fairly high dose of pedo-snatching-kid-off-the-street factor going on, and I think it makes people assume that OMG PEDOPHILES ARE EVERYWHERE WAITING TO SNATCH MY KID!!!!!1!!1!1!
Honestly I'm so tired of this argument. Maybe parents today are more cautious than their parents because they saw first hand what happens when parents let kids have too much free reign and too little supervision?
Don't we all know kids from our childhood whose parents let them do stupid things and now they are either dead or paying the price as an adult?
Have we over corrected from the lacksidasical parenting approach of the 60s? Maybe. But I don't think this is a case of "media driven parenting" rather a simple desire of just wanting to do better for your kid than what you had or saw growing up.
And didn't I read somewhere that childhood accidents have actually decreased over the past few decades? Maybe cautious parenting has played a role.
I do and dh is a bit older than me so he had even less supervision and I could tell you so much stuff that makes me cringe from him childhood. Cringe. Between the two of us growing up we know of (IMO) too many kids in accidents that never would've happened with supervision. One is in a wheel chair, one is missing an eye , a kid in my k class passed away in k from an accident (not car accident), we actually both know of someone who froze to death outside as young teens. We grew up in the city so I'm not sure if there was more of a false sense of security because the assumption was that there was always someone around so it was deemed safe.
Obviously I'm not telling all the stories, but trust me I'm not at all interested in how things were then, especially when dh was growing up (he's 43). Listening to some of his stories, I wonder if anyone parented at all. It surely makes me look at his parents with the side eye sometimes. But to him it's how it was then, it's not like his parents were neglectful, it's just that it was the city , everyone was sent out the house in the morning and don't come back until dinner. Sometimes that's an ok parenting strategy and works out perfectly, and sometimes a kid needs an adult, and a balance would be nice.
Huh. My SIL is exactly your age and grew up with tremendous freedom and knew not a single child who was injured or killed by lax parenting. I'm ten years younger and also had tremendous freedom and the one child I knew who died did in a freak accident while on the school bus, not as a result of lax parenting.
While I do think part of the reason crimes against children are down is that parents are more aware I also think the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that many young adults no longer know how to take care of themselves, which is also scary. You need to teach kids independence as part of parenting.
Ben's best friend lives on the other end of our street, so he has the same walk, only backwards. Anyway, his older brother is two years older, and they've walked alone since 2nd/K. His mom was so worried, but it worked out.
Hmmm, that's food for thought. I think my two together could make the walk easily and the school considers them "walkers" as they aren't eligible for the bus. I wonder if they would allow Julia to "pick up" Emma. Julia's K required an adult to pick the child up but we're in a new district so the rules may be different.
If they are both walkers, they should meet up in the area where they dismiss the walkers.
The country is safer for children for two very specific reasons.
1) The crime rate has gone down.
2) We've enacted a ton of laws regarding safety. Highway safety, carseats, gates around pools, situational awareness, etc.
I do not believe kids are safer because their parents are more watchful. I mean I suppose if you want to say that putting your kid in a carseat and knowing more about concussions means being a more watchful parent, sure. But I don't. There is no doubt it my mind that had those parents been more aware of those dangers, they would have been mindful of them. But we are more watchful as a society even more so than current conventional wisdom dictates.
Hmmm, that's food for thought. I think my two together could make the walk easily and the school considers them "walkers" as they aren't eligible for the bus. I wonder if they would allow Julia to "pick up" Emma. Julia's K required an adult to pick the child up but we're in a new district so the rules may be different.
If they are both walkers, they should meet up in the area where they dismiss the walkers.
I have to see. In our old school kindergarten students were only dismissed to adults (no bus at all in our old district). We had to walk up to the building to get the kids and the teacher had to make eye contact with us. This was the case until November of 1st grade, then they were simply released.
I found a document outlining changes in child mortality in the US from 1935 to 2007. There are some great charts and graphs. To tie it back to other discussions on the board it examines the impact of socioeconomic status and race and breaks down the 2007 info by state.
From the study:
Unintentional injury mortal- ity among children includes deaths due to motor vehicle crashes, accidental drowning, and residential fires, and disparities in mortality from such injuries arise mainly due to social and environmental factors, including socioeconomic disadvantage and poor housing or living conditions (1, 2). Motor vehicle safety improvements, mandatory seat belt use, efforts to reduce drinking and driving, lower speed limits and increased enforcement, and increased availability of statewide trauma systems have been suggested as factors responsible for the long-term decline in mortality due to motor vehicle crashes (2, 9).
Despite the impressive reductions in overall child mortality over the long term, racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in child mortality remain substantial, with black children continuing to experience at least 50% higher mortality risk than their white counterparts. Moreover, socioeconomic disparities in mortality have increased over time, with children in the high poverty group currently experiencing two- to three-fold higher risks of all-cause and unintentional mortality than their more affluent counterparts, respectively. These marked disparities among social groups indicate the potential for further improvements in U.S. child mortality.
1. Mostly I'm responding to the idea that people parent based on what they see on the news or whatever Nancy Grace is frothing at the mouth over. Every day a parent is faced with many many choices regarding child rearing and we pull from many different places in making decisions, with one of those places being our own childhood. What we see on the news may be a factor but it's not the only factor and it's probably not even the dominate factor. I think what we saw growing up shape us more in how we parent (either in the neagtive or positive) than what we see on the 6 PM news.
2. Children are safer today for probably a variety reasons. I don't think you can discount a cautious parenting approach as one of those reasons.
3. I have never met or heard of a child who was not allowed away from a parent until the age 18. Let's not speak in the ridiculous.
4. Finally, and probably tangentially, I will always reject this idea that "the sky is falling" because of a certain way some parents are parenting, whether that be "a helicopter" or "free range style" or anything in between. In either choice, or in a different choice altogether, your child is going to be fine, and society will continue to thrive, as long as you give your child love, respect, kindness, boundaries, but mostly love.
Do I think the world is going to end because of bad parenting? No. Do I think we can attribute things like rape culture to bad parenting? Yes.
So yeah, I can't get on board with the idea that society will totally thrive as long as you love your children enough. The world won't end, no. But there is no doubt in my mind that society can be made a better place based primarily on the examples people learn in childhood.
4. Finally, and probably tangentially, I will always reject this idea that "the sky is falling" because of a certain way some parents are parenting, whether that be "a helicopter" or "free range style" or anything in between. In either choice, or in a different choice altogether, your child is going to be fine, and society will continue to thrive, as long as you give your child love, respect, kindness, boundaries, but mostly love.
Except your child may NOT be fine with too much helicopter parenting. Your child may actually NOT be equipped to handle risks and challenges later in life, whether they are physical or psychological.
I'm not some free range extremist who thinks three-year-olds should be left alone. I was responding to crazycakes who posted that she would "maybe" leave a 14-year-old alone in a doctor's office lobby. That is fucking nuts. That is a child who is going to grow up ill-equipped to deal with the world without her mom around.
4. Finally, and probably tangentially, I will always reject this idea that "the sky is falling" because of a certain way some parents are parenting, whether that be "a helicopter" or "free range style" or anything in between. In either choice, or in a different choice altogether, your child is going to be fine, and society will continue to thrive, as long as you give your child love, respect, kindness, boundaries, but mostly love.
Except your child may NOT be fine with too much helicopter parenting. Your child may actually NOT be equipped to handle risks and challenges later in life, whether they are physical or psychological.
I'm not some free range extremist who thinks three-year-olds should be left alone. I was responding to crazycakes who posted that she would "maybe" leave a 14-year-old alone in a doctor's office lobby. That is fucking nuts. That is a child who is going to grow up ill-equipped to deal with the world without her mom around.
I think extreme examples don't define every day, real world parenting.
Except your child may NOT be fine with too much helicopter parenting. Your child may actually NOT be equipped to handle risks and challenges later in life, whether they are physical or psychological.
I'm not some free range extremist who thinks three-year-olds should be left alone. I was responding to crazycakes who posted that she would "maybe" leave a 14-year-old alone in a doctor's office lobby. That is fucking nuts. That is a child who is going to grow up ill-equipped to deal with the world without her mom around.
I think extreme examples don't define every day, real world parenting.
Maybe not, but I'm not convinced it's not an issue. We already had one person in this thread state that she is pretty extreme.
How many times have we seen posters here stating that they wouldn't let their 10-year-old walk 1/2 a mile (aka 10 minutes) to a friend's house?
Hell, MrsA's own husband doesn't want to let theird 7-year-old walk 2 blocks to school by himself.
I'm not telling anyone to panic, but in my own world, I'm seeing a trend toward parents giving their children less and less independence, and I think there are unintended psychological consequences regarding future anxiety and openness to the world.
Hell, MrsA's own husband doesn't want to let theird 7-year-old walk 2 blocks to school by himself.
I'm not telling anyone to panic, but in my own world, I'm seeing a trend toward parents giving their children less and less independence, and I think there are unintended psychological consequences regarding future anxiety and openness to the world.
Unless you can point to some longitudinal study that suggests any of the above will lead to some ultimate societal harm, I think we have to just disagree about wrongness or rightness of the above. Are they choices I would make? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the situation and child. But I don't think we are going to hell in a hand basket because some* parents are doing the above.
*in spending time with my huaband's large extended Mexican American family I can tell you, as an anecdote only, this type of over cautious parenting is non existent! Just because it's happening in some American communities doesn't mean it's happening in all.
Post by 2curlydogs on Aug 15, 2014 11:42:45 GMT -5
This is the point in the conversation where I point out my parents "free range" parenting style resulted in the following:
* my sister being hung (she was literally dangling from the ceiling when mom found her. she's fine) and nearly poisoned (brother tried feeding her silver polish) by her two older siblings * my older brother smacking me across the face with a 2x4 (resulted in a skin graft and stitches. I was 4) * my younger sister eating poisonous berries - she would have died if I hadn't found her and dragged her in and forced ipecac down her throat (I was 7, she was 5. I have no idea where my mom was. I have no idea how I knew to give her ipecac. probably something I read.) * a myriad of other serious injuries (broken bones, stitches, blown out knees, etc.)
And:
* my brothers derailing a fucking freight train. No, I am not kidding.
So... were we all PERMANENTLY harmed or disabled? Well... no. We are all hale and healthy folk and mostly mentally stable. It's become something of a family joke that it's amazing all 7 of us survived our childhoods... but I would say a few of us are fairly bitter towards our parents for their lack of supervision. Because there's a shitton of TRUTH in that joke. We all played a lot of stupid games and it's nothing short of miraculous that at lest one of us didn't win a stupid prize.
I do know kids from my community who were seriously injured. One as a result of a riding mower accident, several from ATV accidents.
That said, lasagnasshole is completely correct that swinging the pendulum so far in the opposite direction will have negative psychological impact. Both on the kid AND the parent. I know someone whose paranoia about her kids is concerning and, in fact, debilitating.
This article claims the "hyperconcern" of parents with their children is preventing them from developing leadership skills, causing anxiety, increased drinking, and destructive behaviors during college years, and extending adolescence.
Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path... at three miles an hour. On his tricycle.
Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And... wait a minute... those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.
Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children.
Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational "accommodations" he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written—and obviously costly—one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. "She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious—the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old "couldn't see the big picture." That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT.
Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."
Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.
"Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."
No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps.
The Fragility Factor
College, it seems, is where the fragility factor is now making its greatest mark. It's where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. It takes a variety of forms, including anxiety and depression—which are increasingly regarded as two faces of the same coin—binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection. The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that, says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "it is interfering with the core mission of the university."
The severity of student mental health problems has been rising since 1988, according to an annual survey of counseling center directors. Through 1996, the most common problems raised by students were relationship issues. That is developmentally appropriate, reports Sherry Benton, assistant director of counseling at Kansas State University. But in 1996, anxiety overtook relationship concerns and has remained the major problem. The University of Michigan Depression Center, the nation's first, estimates that 15 percent of college students nationwide are suffering from that disorder alone.
Relationship problems haven't gone away; their nature has dramatically shifted and the severity escalated. Colleges report ever more cases of obsessive pursuit, otherwise known as stalking, leading to violence, even death. Anorexia or bulimia in florid or subclinical form now afflicts 40 percent of women at some time in their college career. Eleven weeks into a semester, reports psychologist Russ Federman, head of counseling at the University of Virginia, "all appointment slots are filled. But the students don't stop coming."
Drinking, too, has changed. Once a means of social lubrication, it has acquired a darker, more desperate nature. Campuses nationwide are reporting record increases in binge drinking over the past decade, with students often stuporous in class, if they get there at all. Psychologist Paul E. Joffe, chair of the suicide prevention team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contends that at bottom binge-drinking is a quest for authenticity and intensity of experience. It gives young people something all their own to talk about, and sharing stories about the path to passing out is a primary purpose. It's an inverted world in which drinking to oblivion is the way to feel connected and alive.
"There is a ritual every university administrator has come to fear," reports John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. "Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm's way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy."
Heavy drinking has also become the quickest and easiest way to gain acceptance, says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, professor at Indiana University Southeast and founder of its Shyness Research Institute. "Much of collegiate social activity is centered on alcohol consumption because it's an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills," he says. "Plus it provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong."
Welcome to the Hothouse
Talk to a college president or administrator and you're almost certainly bound to hear tales of the parents who call at 2 a.m. to protest Branden's C in economics because it's going to damage his shot at grad school.
Shortly after psychologist Robert Epstein announced to his university students that he expected them to work hard and would hold them to high standards, he heard from a parent—on official judicial stationery—asking how he could dare mistreat the young. Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, eventually filed a complaint with the California commission on judicial misconduct, and the judge was censured for abusing his office—but not before he created havoc in the psychology department at the University of California, San Diego.
Enter: grade inflation. When he took over as president of Harvard in July 2001, Lawrence Summers publicly ridiculed the value of honors after discovering that 94 percent of the college's seniors were graduating with them. Safer to lower the bar than raise the discomfort level. Grade inflation is the institutional response to parental anxiety about school demands on children, contends social historian Peter Stearns of George Mason University. As such, it is a pure index of emotional overinvestment in a child's success. And it rests on a notion of juvenile frailty—the assumption that children are easily bruised and need explicit uplift," Stearns argues in his book, Anxious Parenting: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.
Parental protectionism may reach its most comic excesses in college, but it doesn't begin there. Primary schools and high schools are arguably just as guilty of grade inflation. But if you're searching for someone to blame, consider Dr. Seuss. "Parents have told their kids from day one that there's no end to what they are capable of doing," says Virginia's Portmann. "They read them the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You'll Go! and create bumper stickers telling the world their child is an honor student. American parents today expect their children to be perfect—the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can't get the children to prove it on their own, they'll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are."
What they're really doing, he stresses, is "showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit."
And subjecting them to intense scrutiny. "I wish my parents had some hobby other than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child's day, eager to solve every problem for their child—and believe that's good parenting. "If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."
Arrivederci, Playtime
In the hothouse that child raising has become, play is all but dead. Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees.
"So many toys now are designed by and for adults," says Tufts' Elkind. When kids do engage in their own kind of play, parents become alarmed. Anderegg points to kids exercising time-honored curiosity by playing doctor. "It's normal for children to have curiosity about other children's genitals," he says. "But when they do, most parents I know are totally freaked out. They wonder what's wrong." Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they've never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. "They've been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who's won and what's fair. Kids are losing leadership skills."
A lot has been written about the commercialization of children's play, but not the side effects, says Elkind. "Children aren't getting any benefits out of play as they once did." From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it's in play that cognitive agility really develops. Studies of children and adults around the world demonstrate that social engagement actually improves intellectual skills. It fosters decision-making, memory and thinking, speed of mental processing. This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, the human mind is believed to have evolved to deal with social problems.
The Eternal Umbilicus
It's bad enough that today's children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are overmonitored and oversheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college—or perhaps especially at college—students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: "Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?"
"Kids are constantly talking to parents," laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they're not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. "They're not calling their parents to say, 'I really went wild last Friday at the frat house and now I might have chlamydia. Should I go to the student health center?'"
The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, "they're constantly referring to their parents for guidance," reports Kramer. They're not learning how to manage for themselves.
Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"
Some psychologists think we have yet to recognize the full impact of the cell phone on child development, because its use is so new. Although there are far too many variables to establish clear causes and effects, Indiana's Carducci believes that reliance on cell phones undermines the young by destroying the ability to plan ahead. "The first thing students do when they walk out the door of my classroom is flip open the cell phone. Ninety-five percent of the conversations go like this: 'I just got out of class; I'll see you in the library in five minutes.' Absent the phone, you'd have to make arrangements ahead of time; you'd have to think ahead."
Herein lies another possible pathway to depression. The ability to plan resides in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive branch of the brain. The PFC is a critical part of the self-regulation system, and it's deeply implicated in depression, a disorder increasingly seen as caused or maintained by unregulated thought patterns—lack of intellectual rigor, if you will. Cognitive therapy owes its very effectiveness to the systematic application of critical thinking to emotional reactions. Further, it's in the setting of goals and progress in working toward them, however mundane they are, that positive feelings are generated. From such everyday activity, resistance to depression is born.
What's more, cell phones—along with the instant availability of cash and almost any consumer good your heart desires—promote fragility by weakening self-regulation. "You get used to things happening right away," says Carducci. You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendship and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail—perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression.
From Scrutiny to Anxiety... and Beyond
The 1990s witnessed a landmark reversal in the traditional patterns of psychopathology. While rates of depression rise with advancing age among people over 40, they're now increasing fastest among children, striking more children at younger and younger ages. In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.
While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.
There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life's day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies. "Children need to be gently encouraged to take risks and learn that nothing terrible happens," says Michael Liebowitz, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and head of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. "They need gradual exposure to find that the world is not dangerous. Having overprotective parents is a risk factor for anxiety disorders because children do not have opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world." They never learn to dampen the pathways from perception to alarm reaction.
Hothouse parenting undermines children in other ways, too, says Anderegg. Being examined all the time makes children extremely self-conscious. As a result they get less communicative; scrutiny teaches them to bury their real feelings deeply. And most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to be experimental and playful. "If every drawing is going to end up on your parents' refrigerator, you're not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes," says Anderegg.
Parental hovering is why so many teenagers are so ironic, he notes. It's a kind of detachment, "a way of hiding in plain sight. They just don't want to be exposed to any more scrutiny."
Parents are always so concerned about children having high self-esteem, he adds. "But when you cheat on their behalf to get them ahead of other children"—by pursuing accommodations and recommendations—you just completely corrode their sense of self. They feel 'I couldn't do this on my own.' It robs them of their own sense of efficacy." A child comes to think, "if I need every advantage I can get, then perhaps there is really something wrong with me." A slam-dunk for depression.
Virginia's Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in—less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.
Endless Adolescence
The end result of cheating childhood is to extend it forever. Despite all the parental pressure, and probably because of it, kids are pushing back—in their own way. They're taking longer to grow up.
Adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends, according to a recent report by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank F. Furstenberg and colleagues. There is, instead, a growing no-man's-land of postadolescence from 20 to 30, which they dub "early adulthood." Those in it look like adults but "haven't become fully adult yet—traditionally defined as finishing school, landing a job with benefits, marrying and parenting—because they are not ready or perhaps not permitted to do so." Using the classic benchmarks of adulthood, 65 percent of males had reached adulthood by the age of 30 in 1960. By contrast, in 2000, only 31 percent had. Among women, 77 percent met the benchmarks of adulthood by age 30 in 1960. By 2000, the number had fallen to 46 percent.
Boom Boom Boomerang
Take away play from the front end of development and it finds a way onto the back end. A steady march of success through regimented childhood arranged and monitored by parents creates young adults who need time to explore themselves. "They often need a period in college or afterward to legitimately experiment—to be children," says historian Stearns. "There's decent historical evidence to suggest that societies that allow kids a few years of latitude and even moderate [rebellion] end up with healthier kids than societies that pretend such impulses don't exist."
Marriage is one benchmark of adulthood, but its antecedents extend well into childhood. "The precursor to marriage is dating, and the precursor to dating is playing," says Carducci. The less time children spend in free play, the less socially competent they'll be as adults. It's in play that we learn give and take, the fundamental rhythm of all relationships. We learn how to read the feelings of others and how to negotiate conflicts. Taking the play out of childhood, he says, is bound to create a developmental lag, and he sees it clearly in the social patterns of today's adolescents and young adults, who hang around in groups that are more typical of childhood. Not to be forgotten: The backdrop of continued high levels of divorce confuses kids already too fragile to take the huge risk of commitment.
Just Whose Shark Tank Is It Anyway?
The stressful world of cutthroat competition that parents see their kids facing may not even exist. Or it exists, but more in their mind than in reality—not quite a fiction, more like a distorting mirror. "Parents perceive the world as a terribly competitive place," observes Anderegg. "And many of them project that onto their children when they're the ones who live or work in a competitive environment. They then imagine that their children must be swimming in a big shark tank, too."
"It's hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now," says Elkind. "How best do you prepare kids for that? Parents think that earlier is better. That's a natural intuition, but it happens to be wrong."
What if parents have micromanaged their kids' lives because they've hitched their measurement of success to a single event whose value to life and paycheck they have frantically overestimated? No one denies the Ivy League offers excellent learning experiences, but most educators know that some of the best programs exist at schools that don't top the U.S. News and World Report list, and that with the right attitude—a willingness to be engaged by new ideas—it's possible to get a meaningful education almost anywhere. Further, argues historian Stearns, there are ample openings for students at an array of colleges. "We have a competitive frenzy that frankly involves parents more than it involves kids themselves," he observes, both as a father of eight and teacher of many. "Kids are more ambivalent about the college race than are parents."
Yet the very process of application to select colleges undermines both the goal of education and the inherent strengths of young people. "It makes kids sneaky," says Anderegg. Bending rules and calling in favors to give one's kid a competitive edge is morally corrosive.
Like Stearns, he is alarmed that parents, pursuing disability diagnoses so that children can take untimed SATs, actually encourage kids to think of themselves as sickly and fragile. Colleges no longer know when SATs are untimed—but the kids know. "The kids know when you're cheating on their behalf," says Anderegg, "and it makes them feel terribly guilty. Sometimes they arrange to fail to right the scales. And when you cheat on their behalf, you completely undermine their sense of self-esteem. They feel they didn't earn it on their own."
In buying their children accommodations to assuage their own anxiety, parents are actually locking their kids into fragility. Says the suburban teacher: "Exams are a fact of life. They are anxiety-producing. The kids never learn how to cope with anxiety."
Putting Worry in its Place
Children, however, are not the only ones who are harmed by hyperconcern. Vigilance is enormously taxing—and it's taken all the fun out of parenting. "Parenting has in some measurable ways become less enjoyable than it used to be," says Stearns. "I find parents less willing to indulge their children's sense of time. So they either force-feed them or do things for them."
Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they've maintained over their children. The goal of parenting, Portmann reminds, is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later, he says, most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity. Parents may find it easier to give up some control if they recognize they have exaggerated many of the dangers of childhood—although they have steadfastly ignored others, namely the removal of recess from schools and the ubiquity of video games that encourage aggression.
The childhood we've introduced to our children is very different from that in past eras, Epstein stresses. Children no longer work at young ages. They stay in school for longer periods of time and spend more time exclusively in the company of peers. Children are far less integrated into adult society than they used to be at every step of the way. We've introduced laws that give children many rights and protections—although we have allowed media and marketers to have free access.
In changing the nature of childhood, Stearns argues, we've introduced a tendency to assume that children can't handle difficult situations. "Middle-class parents especially assume that if kids start getting into difficulty they need to rush in and do it for them, rather than let them flounder a bit and learn from it. I don't mean we should abandon them," he says, "but give them more credit for figuring things out." And recognize that parents themselves have created many of the stresses and anxieties children are suffering from, without giving them tools to manage them.
While the adults are at it, they need to remember that one of the goals of higher education is to help young people develop the capacity to think for themselves.
Although we're well on our way to making kids more fragile, no one thinks that kids and young adults are fundamentally more flawed than in previous generations. Maybe many will "recover" from diagnoses too liberally slapped on to them. In his own studies of 14 skills he has identified as essential for adulthood in American culture, from love to leadership, Epstein has found that "although teens don't necessarily behave in a competent way, they have the potential to be every bit as competent and as incompetent as adults."
Parental anxiety has its place. But the way things now stand, it's not being applied wisely. We're paying too much attention to too few kids—and in the end, the wrong kids. As with the girl whose parents bought her the Gestalt-defect diagnosis, resources are being expended for kids who don't need them.
There are kids who are worth worrying about—kids in poverty, stresses Anderegg. "We focus so much on our own children," says Elkind, "It's time to begin caring about all children."
catmt, that article is all anecdotes and a lot of "look at all these problems on college campus' today; must be all that helicoptering" that's really just sloppy non science. A lot of those kids probably grew up on organic food, vaccines, and Sesame Street too. Maybe that's why there are "all these problems."
catmt, that article is all anecdotes and a lot of "look at all these problems on college campus' today; must be all that helicoptering" that's really just sloppy non science. A lot of those kids probably grew up on organic food, vaccines, and Sesame Street too. Maybe that's why there are "all these problems."
Really, I thought this part was interesting and verifiable.
In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.
While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
catmt, that article is all anecdotes and a lot of "look at all these problems on college campus' today; must be all that helicoptering" that's really just sloppy non science. A lot of those kids probably grew up on organic food, vaccines, and Sesame Street too. Maybe that's why there are "all these problems."
Really, I thought this part was interesting and verifiable.
In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.
While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
That's interesting. Did I miss that when I was skimming your article? (Probably).
I think I would need to read the study because I would like to know how his study defined "overprotected." And how large was his sample? And also have his findings been replicated by other studies?
Really, I thought this part was interesting and verifiable.
In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids table level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
That's interesting. Did I miss that when I was skimming your article? (Probably).
I think I would need to read the study because I would like to know how his study defined "overprotected." And how large was his sample? And also have his findings been replicated by other studies?
Yes it was in the article. I went back and bolded portions of it.
i agree more information on the study would be beneficial to the conversation.
I don't think that's it. And it's not even published in a scientific journal. "Published online"? Is that a reputable thing in the scientific community? In any case I don't think it was the over protected study. But the print was hard to read on my phone.
Really, I thought this part was interesting and verifiable.
In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.
While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
That's interesting. Did I miss that when I was skimming your article? (Probably).
I think I would need to read the study because I would like to know how his study defined "overprotected." And how large was his sample? And also have his findings been replicated by other studies?
Here's some other studies...but both are based on small groups of study and how they perceived their parenting vs. their own success.
A WVU study showed this:
Surveys with different series of questions were given to both males and females between the ages of 18 and 25. Odenweller, with the help of Keith Weber, Ph.D., developed the scale titled, “The New Helicopter Parenting Instrument.” This scale involves 10 questions and asks information such as “My parent monitors my daily activities,” “My parent thinks he/she should remove obstacles that impede my success,” and “My parent discourages me from making decisions that he/she disagrees with.”
The results have demonstrated Odenweller and Booth-Butterfield’s hypotheses were correct. Helicopter parenting can interfere with the process of children becoming independent and has negative and potentially damaging effects on children’s development. They also found that perceptions of helicopter parenting are associated with an authoritarian parenting style, a style in which parents enforce stricter rules, have high expectations and use power over negotiation with their children. This can impede children’s social and emotional development and problem solving abilities as well.
Also a University of Mary Washington study looked at how college-aged kids' parents acted and how successful those children percieved themselves:
Researchers warn that the overbearing parenting style, known as 'helicopter parenting' - where parents hover over their children and become too involved in their lives - affects a child's ability to get on with others.
While some parental involvement helps children develop, too much can make them more likely to be depressed and less satisfied with their lives, they say.
But this is a really good article from The Atlantic on The Overprotected Kid: A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution. By Hanna Rosin March 19, 2014. It has a lot of stats and cites some psycology reserach that shows that milleneals are having more depressive/mental issues and attributes that to the style of parenting, but it's not hard-core research IMO.
Post by curbsideprophet on Aug 15, 2014 15:29:54 GMT -5
Not a scientific study, but an article on helicopter parents from Duke Magazine. I admit I have not read the article recently, but I thought it had interesting points, so I thought I would share. dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/helicopter-parents