A Nation of Wimps The High Cost of Invasive Parenting Hardback - 2008

Excerpt

ONE
Welcome to the Hothouse


I've just been in the emergency room for two and a half hours," Sarah announced, pushing on as we passed on the street, "and I've got to see my daughter." I had seen Sarah, the daughter of a neighbor, grow up, a few years ahead of my two children, and nowadays run into her only when she comes to visit her parents with her own family. Her right foot was freshly cradled in the clunky contraption doctors call a walking boot but is more accurately a limping boot.

"How old is your daughter now?" I asked.

"Almost four," she said. "And," she added, her voice suddenly shaky with panic, "I've never been separated from her this long before. And she's never been away from me."


***

There was a time when two and a half hours away from one's four-year-old would not have been seen as a separation. It would have been sought after and thought of as a respite, a reprieve, a welcome break for both mother and child. It would have been seen as a small but necessary step on the long march toward independence, toward a child's adaptation to a world composed of people who are not biologically devoted to satisfying her every wish and making her happy. And it would have been seen as a chance for a parent to reconnect, however briefly, with interests in the world at large.

But this is 2008 and the children—or at least many of them—are never safe enough, never happy enough, unless they are directly in the laser sights of Mommy, and sometimes Daddy. The perpetual presence of Mom is supported by a burgeoning belief that only she is competent enough, that no one can provide care for the children or meet their needs as well as she can, that depriving the child of her direct attention in the first few years could, in fact, cause psychological damage for life. For this, a growing number of successful women are giving up significant careers to stay at home with the little ones, demographers report. It seems that to justify such application of their skills and education, they have to elevate child rearing to a challenge worthy of their time.

Parental hyperconcern about safety and well-being turns a two-and-a-half-hour interlude of what once, in calmer days, may have been looked on as a break from the kids into a window of intense worry. Hyperattendance to children falsely breeds a sense of control and erroneously endows every action of the child with an importance it does not have. It also violates a cardinal rule of development: attentive and responsive care to an infant is absolutely necessary, but there comes a point when it is oppressive, robbing children of the very thing they need for continued growth. In small doses at first, and larger ones later, separation is essential to activate the system the infant will call on for exploring the world and mastering inner and outer life. Buried in overattachment and overinvolvement is an assumption of fragility, the belief that by not having some nuance of need met, the child will be irrevocably harmed. The paradox of parenting is that the pressure to make it perfect can undermine the outcome.

Parents, nevertheless, will not have to relinquish scrutiny of their children to others, even trained professionals, when the kids enter school. Many live in a school district that maintains a Web site just for parents and runs a computer program that allows them to keep an obsessive eye on their kids throughout the school day, from the minute they enter kindergarten to the day they graduate from twelfth grade. Zangle is one such program favored by a number of midwestern school districts. Parents in affluent areas like Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, Michigan, where up to 70 percent of the highly educated mothers may be stay-at-home moms, are so tickled by the remote control it provides them that they spend hours "zangling" their kids--and comparing the results with other parents passing their days the same way. With a secret password, they log on and check whether their kids have turned in their homework assignments, review the grades they are getting on tests and reports and daily homework assignments, discover whether there have been any "behavioral incidents," and even find out whether their kids chose chocolate milk or Pepsi with their burger and fries in the school cafeteria.

Programs like Zangle are "feeding parental obsessiveness," insists a parent of two young girls in Birmingham, Michigan, who "forced myself to pull back and not do what everyone else does—because I'm not the one who has to prepare for college. The parents spend all day checking in on their kids. They demand to see all their kid's assignments. Sometimes the teachers are forced to say, 'It's your son's homework, not yours.' "


"Do We Need a Speech Therapist?"

Parental pushiness and protectionism gain momentum as children move from preschool to primary school to high school. Not long ago, parents might have thought their function was, say, to provide good nutrition at home, recognize that direct parental control extends only so far, and, on a sliding scale from begrudgingly to confidently, grant their kids increments of freedom along with allowance money to make choices on their own outside the house, even if the choices were sometimes less than perfect. Zangle and other monitoring programs beginning with kindergarten train parents in intrusiveness and normalize it, even celebrate it, without accommodating so much as a whimper of protest—all the while disrupting the fragile flow of trust that development toward independence has always required and still does.

"I noticed it immediately with my then-one-year-old when we moved to suburban Connecticut from a more alternative community in the Southwest," reports the mother of a four-year-old boy and a seventeen-month-old daughter. "How many words was my child saying? Did he know his alphabet? When could he write his name? Do we need a speech therapist? I know parents of a three-year-old who monitor their child so obsessively they send him to an occupational therapist two times a week to work on scissor skills—for no discernible reason." The mother of two confesses that she herself "took my son in to the occupational therapist to be evaluated after his preschool teacher said something about his fine motor skills. Now, mind you, he is highly verbal, he can read, he is a fine artist. But I took him in for an evaluation. I'm not proud of it. It forced me to do some soul-searching, and we never went back."

The push for achievement in all quantifiable realms, especially the academic, begins so early that preschools all around the country are focusing less and less on the development of social skills and self-regulation and more and more on academics. However, children of that age are so unready for curricular focus that preschools report a rising tide of behavioral problems—-and wind up expelling six out of every thousand students. Imagine: expelled from preschool! With so much expected of them when they have not yet mastered socialization and self-regulation—two skills that are intricately interconnected and both of which foster academic excellence—more of them are acting out. Expectations for children have gone completely haywire, untethered from any reference to children's developmental needs, referenced only to deep adult anxieties. "The great effect of Head Start was to convince the upper middle class that their children need a head start and they could do it better," says the historian Steven Mintz, professor at the University of Houston and author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood.


Inside the Hothouse

Childhood under the constant gaze of adults is a new and growing phenomenon. The idea that a life—anyone's life—is on some precise schedule amenable to control is a by-product of the syllogisms of success that parents today are frenetically writing for their children.

The giant Citigroup company was rocked by scandal in 2002 when one of its superstar stock analysts, Jack Grubman, bragged in an e-mail that he had upgraded the rating of then-flagging AT&T stock to curry favor with Citigroup's then chairman, Sanford Weill. Grubman's overarching goal was to get Weill, a prominent New York figure, to exert his influence to get Grubman's twin toddlers into one of New York's prestigious preschools. (AT&T's chairman sat on the board of Citigroup and was a client of Citigroup, and Weill sat on the AT&T board.) What made the preschool so essential, apparently, was its track record in sending its graduates to the elite private grammar schools that in turn feed the prestigious prep schools which in turn dump their graduates into the Ivy League. It was the first logical step in the syllogism of academic success that parents construct for their children: if this is the right kindergarten for Harvard and Elijah gets into it, then he will be on track for Harvard. In the hothouse that child raising has become, nothing is left to chance. (Weill made the call, and the Grubman twins were admitted, once Citigroup pledged a million dollars to the school's umbrella organization.)

In the hothouse, parents plan out the lives of their children and propel them into a variety of programmed activities that are intended to have Ivy League appeal; they then ferry the kids around to classes and activities. The critical element in this setup is not that it leaves the kids with little unstructured time but that there is no way of opting out. Someone is always there to see that they get to the next stop in the circuit of activities. Playing hooky, daydreaming, or just kicking back is out of the question, and the programming starts early in order to carve the groove as deeply as possible. "My neighbor's boy goes to karate, soccer, swimming, and baseball after going to school four days a week from 8:30 to 2:30," says one mother in suburban Connecticut. "He's five years old. And he has no free time." Neither does his mother.


The Hottest of Hothouses

The ultimate in hothouse parenting is undoubtedly homeschooling, a phenomenon so appealing to today's parents that it is growing at the rate of 7 to 15 percent a year. To the best that anyone knows, well more than 1.1 million children in the United States are now schooled at home by their parents, perhaps 2.1 million, with or without additional tutors. Homeschooling is now legal in every state in the United States, but it is not uniformly regulated, and in some states it is not regulated at all; whatever parents choose to do, they can. The adults often provide many rationales for homeschooling, from the inculcation of religious or political values to inferior public school instruction to the avoidance of educational regimentation that does not keep pace with their child's needs. Their children may even excel academically.

That is not its danger. Whatever else it does, homeschooling deprives children of any chance to breathe, of opportunities to discover themselves on their own and to escape from parental vigilance, parental bias, or parental ignorance. It gives parents license to micromanage every detail of their children's lives. It gives children a false sense of their own preciousness; many parents, in fact, choose to homeschool their children because they feel their kids are "special," surveys show. There is a deeper, more subtle issue: the nonstop scrutiny that comes with making the home a school disables in children the mental mechanism that is activated only by separation from parents, the mechanism that will endow children with the eventual ability to navigate securely on their own in the world.


"I'm My Parents' Hobby"

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 John Portmann, an assistant professor who teaches in the religious studies department at the University of Virginia. "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 a child 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 other hobby than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. The author of Worried All the Time, Anderegg finds parents are anxious and 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 ten-year-old who has metaphorical gas, you don't have to burp them. You have to let them sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. They then learn to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."

And "best" now means only one thing. "I have found, both as a [former] student and in working with students, that young adults are pushed by parents and society to be 'the best,' " says Alison Malmon, founder of Active Minds, an organization devoted to improving campus mental health. "But 'the best' means only: get into the best college, excel once there, and get a high-paying job right after graduation."


Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

Talk to a college president and you're almost certainly bound to hear tales of the parents who call at 2:00 a.m. to protest Johnny's C in economics because it's going to damage his life. The thinking is, "If my son doesn't get this course, then he's not going to get the internship he wants, he's not going to get into the grad school he wants, and he's not going to get to become a judge." Too often, say administrators, that's how detailed the parents have gotten in their thinking about collecting "the right combination of stuff," foreclosing the possibility their child might by serendipity discover something that interests him.

Not long ago, Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College, wrote an article in the New York Times urging parents to back off their desire to manage all aspects of their children's college lives. "One mother," she recounted, "accompanied her daughter to a meeting with her dean to discuss a supposedly independent research project." Then there was the father who called his daughter's career counselor so he could contact her prospective employers to extol her qualifications. And the one who took a year off to supervise the preparation of his daughter's admissions portfolio.
Shortly after the California 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 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.

Media reviews

"Most of us agree that some parents are overbearing and that their children may be both fragile and burdened as a result. Ms. Marano, you had us at 'wimps.'" —The Wall Street Journal

"A scathing commentary on contemporary parenting." —The Boston Globe


From the Trade Paperback edition.