Psychology Today Blogs - Hara Estroff Marano

For Therapists - Survey Results

Hara Estroff Marano — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:00:00 -0700

Hi!,

Last month in our newsletter, we asked you about yourselves--how you felt about your jobs, your clients, and your private lives. Now that the results are in, I'd love to share them with you and your fellow therapists. Here's what we found out:

We discovered that most of you find your work fulfilling, and that you particularly value the opportunity to set your own schedule and to see tangible improvements in the lives of clients. Dealing with insurance companies, you made very clear, is the worst part of the job. For the most part, you feel appreciated. Being a therapist even helps you navigate your own relationships--though in social situations, people tend to treat you differently once they find out what you do.

And then there were the questions we should have asked, but didn't. Some of my favorites:
- Do you find it difficult to market your practice? Do you wish there was more help for setting up, operating, including marketing, your practice?
- What profile information do you hear that clients most appreciate when searching for a therapist?
- How many hours do you work in private practice and do you have another job?

If you'd like do to see the results in more detail, you can do so by going to http://tinyurl.com/pt0808. You can see not only the general trends, but also the full range of responses to individual questions from your fellow therapists. Such are the wonders of the modern age!

Finally, I'd like to turn the floor over to you. What do you make of these responses? We'd love to hear your thoughts below.

Best,

Jay Dixit, on behalf of Hara Marano
Senior Editor, Psychology Today
http://PsychologyToday.com

Pills or Thrills?

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:29:15 -0700

On July 7, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a brand new set of cholesterol screening and treatment recommendations for children. It had last done so a decade ago, but now the country's kid doctors felt there was a "new urgency," "given the current epidemic of childhood obesity with the subsequent increasing risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease in older children and adults."

The 23-page clinical report summarizing the recommendations stated that "pediatricians must initiate the lifelong approach to prevention of CVD in their patients." They acknowledged that "diet and physical activity are equally important [as genetics] in determining the course of the disease process," but basically went on to outline procedures for testing blood-fat levels in children and recommending treatment with cholesterol-lowering drugs for those over age 8 who were placed at risk because of obesity.

The response to the new guidelines has largely been a debate focusing on the wisdom of treating children long-term with drugs that have been tested only for the short term, and then only among those children with familial cholesterol problems.

Professionalized Activity

OK, it isn't always easy to change ingrained patterns of behavior—but we are talking here about kids, for whom a "lifelong approach" to anything has not necessarily been established. And about kids who—the report acknowledges this—are experiencing low levels of physical activity in part because schools have taken away play and recess. They're also experiencing less physical activity because outside of school, activity among youth has been considerably professionalized to the point that it is dominated by the youth leagues of organized sports. There are no longer those casual neighborhood gatherings called pick-up games that anyone could join, even the many kids who just aren't good enough or coordinated enough or interested enough to want to be on a highly scheduled team. And there's less physical activity because there are now many competing demands for kids' attention in the form of X-boxes and computer games, which, by themselves, are not the end of civilization as we know it but which can confine kids indoors unless the adults in the house set up some simple rules of engagement. Of course, many parents today are quite comfortable knowing their kids are indoors, away from the predations of the pedophiles they (mistakenly) believe are lurking around every corner.

A Medicalized Approach

Still, the ideal lifelong approach would be to teach good nutrition and facilitate physical activity. Who better than the nation's pediatricians going into the schools and making the case for an institutional approach to increased physical activity—more active play, more recess, more playground time in general. They could make a swell argument on the obesity issue alone. Then there's the whole body of evidence that breaks for physical activity during the day actually increase the ability of kids to concentrate in the classroom. Yes, it's sometimes hard for schools to grasp this, but in education as in architecture, sometimes less is more; taking a little time away from instruction to add more recess actually makes the class time much more efficient; kids learn better after recess. Not incidentally, I should also point out there are studies showing that vigorous physical activity in kids stimulates brain development, boosts levels of nerve growth factors in the cortex. Admittedly it's counterintuitive, but play seems to promote growth of the very brain centers that will allow children to focus their attention and learn.

Uh-Oh, There's Fun Involved

Do I have to mention that free play and physical activity (when there are more options than organized sports) are actually fun and often downright thrilling for kids? For some kids, notably boys, recess can be the single most positive thing about school. But for most kids, playing freely tends to have a highly reinforcing quality. Physical activity does all that—and probably much more that we'll be hearing about from research labs in the years ahead. But instead, the pediatricians have chosen to focus on giving kids pills—a medical solution to a much more complex issue.

The Debate

I am horrified that the debate has focused largely on the quality of the evidence for medication. "While some doctors applauded the idea," Tara Parker-Pope reported in the New York Times, "others were incredulous. In particular, these doctors called attention to a lack of evidence that the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs, called statins, in children would prevent heart attacks later in life."

Punitive but Remunerative

So the best "lifelong approach" to cardiovascular disease is to get kids on the pharmaceutical track early? This seems almost punitive to me. After all, the alternative is to push for a solution that directly targets the cause and that, by the way, kids might actually end up enjoying. Why push for physical activity when you can make short shrift of the problem by turning kids into pill poppers? Why promote a passive rather than a—literally and figuratively—active solution, when passivity is part of the problem? The irony is that pediatricians tend to be among the most humane physicians. But in this case they have chosen a solution that benefits only pharmaceutical manufacturers. I'm just astounded that everyone who cares about kids isn't up in arms over this set of recommendations and marching on the schools to get them to restore recess and build in more activity to the day. Or, at home, just pushing the kids out the door for a while. We do care about our kids, don't we? Don't we?

See you next month. And don't hesitate to post an informed comment on any of the blog entries any time.

Snapshot of Fatherhood

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:00:06 -0700

Father's day came and went and although no men reside permanently in my home anymore (my husband died, my sons fledged and have started families of their own) I had a front row seat on the spectacle of modern fatherhood right in my own dining room, more or less the nerve center of my home.

Both sons were visiting from afar, both in town on business for a week. One arrived with wife and 7-month-old son, in part to introduce the baby to the bulk of the family and friends back East. But both took much pride and pleasure in being with the baby. I'm not sure there is any reward on earth that can match what I feel when I watch the affection they openly give to each other and to their kiddies. I know, the evolutionary psychologists (Attn: Satoshi Kanazawa, Jesse Bering) will tell me it's just the long cord of my DNA as it ups and wires my brain. But I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you that at the very least, there's some kind of special juice, with its own magnetic field, that flows through those wires.

Sibling survival

Sometimes I am amazed that my sons survived into adulthood. There were times I thought they'd kill each other when younger. Something akin to murder occasionally took place in the car. I suspect there is a special toxin that thrives in the back seats of station wagons-part gasoline fumes, part confinement, part ennui, and part limited vision-and afflicts siblings even on medium hauls, because nothing akin to that mayhem took place at home, at least to my knowledge. And yet, they always had affection for each other. It especially flourished as they got older and went off to college, four years apart. I attribute that capacity for the free exchange of affection to the fact that neither one was ever compared to the other, neither was ever humiliated in the name of the other. Oh, yeah, and they are both quite articulate and share a wacky, but kind, sense of humor. But who really knows?

Frequent fliers

Make no mistake, they had their differences with each other-mostly expressed to me-even as proto-adults. If one was sweating while the other just cruised into the perfect job or the perfectly affordable house, I heard the blowing off of steam. Their girlfriends-turned-wives joined the hubbub and it helped that everyone enjoyed getting together. But nothing suggested the kind of filial affection that flowered when first one, then, four years later, the other became fathers.

There were frequent video chats, often at breakfast time, complete with Cheerios or blueberries handed off via the screen. There were trips across the country to visit each other. Sometimes I was there, too, sometimes not. One flew a few thousand miles to help the other move into his first home when the first baby was just a few weeks old. There was a first birthday when the most exiting thing all of us seemed to do was sit on the porch and sip lemonade, but the supreme ease of that weekend made all of us feel as if we'd taken a long vacation. I've already told you about a fantastic New Year's Day spent organizing a closet (yes, I said fantastic).

Guncle and Duncle

When the older one became a father, he asked his younger brother what he would like to be called. Maybe he was simply following a brand new family tradition; I had eschewed Grandma and selected from left field the short, sweet and very Dutch "Oma." Goofing around, my younger son took the first initial of his name, hooked it onto uncle and created his own silly moniker-"Guncle." And immediately retracted it. But it was too late, at least for times of high and inside silliness (which is as often as possible in my family). You can't say "Guncle" without at least smiling; it's that ridiculous a sound. We took pleasure in saying it. Turnaround being fair play, when Guncle became a father a few months ago, his brother automatically received the mock mantle of "Duncle." For all their goofiness, those monikers can't quite conceal all the affection and sensed specialness of the uncle, and brotherly, relationship.

One baby, two fathers

It wasn't supposed to be that way, but courtesy of a cancelled flight, the brothers were both at their boyhood home on Father's day morning. I woke up to find both of them on the dining room floor hacking around with one chubby baby. The older one would see his own two little ones later in the day. In the meantime, he took all his Dad and Duncle charm and focused it on the baby at hand. The baby's mama was cool enough to stand back and let the big boys have some floor time together-and to capture the moment on camera. I treasure the photo because, while you can't see the DNA, you just know that, at the very least, there's a real strong magnetic field.

See you next month. And don't hesitate to post an informed comment on any of the blog entries any time.

Imperfect Love

Hara Estroff Marano — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:11:48 -0700

I've learned a lot about love by losing it. Most recently, my mother died, midway into her ninety-eighth year. She died with all her marbles and a sharper memory than most 40-year-olds. Fortunately for her, death came swiftly. One day in February she got the flu; the next day her tired little heart gave out. As a mother, she was, as my older brother once said to me and my twin sister, "a big zero." She really wasn't a mother at all. I have no warm fuzzy memories of her; no one does. She was, I came to see as an adult, totally estranged from herself and, quite possibly, chronically depressed. I doubt she ever had a heart-to-heart talk with anyone (even my father). She filled up her mind with trivia, which powered a bottomless, sometimes infuriating, stream of small talk. It was impossible to engage her at any other level. And yet, against even my own best guess, I am bereft. What I miss most of all are our near-daily conversations that were about... nothing, virtually nothing at all.

I never cried for my mother

I long ago gave up wanting a mother. I was about 10-I can remember exactly where I was when I had the epiphany-when it struck me that I was never going to get any real caring from my mother. It was my secret alone; after all, it was heretical to even imagine that the flesh-and-blood woman inhabiting our house in no way resembled that mythical figure called Mother warming every other house I knew. I was undaunted, perhaps because we three kids were very high-spirited, good company, and had many friends, but most of all because I knew I was adored by my best friend's parents, some relatives and family friends. At the same time, I was also learning to trust my own dangerous thoughts.

Becoming the mother I never had

Somewhere in our pre-teens, my sister and I shared the secret of motherlessness. We prayed that our mother would get a job and go to work so we wouldn't have to constantly confront the anomaly of an un-mother. And so for me, becoming a mother was scary-I had absolutely nothing to go on, no idea how to be a mother. And then one difficult day, when my firstborn was barely three months old and very sick, my mother gave me a spectacular gift; she confided what torture children put parents through. She assumed she was commiserating, but her ill-will was so striking it ripped open in me a huge reservoir of love and empathy for my son that became my instruction manual. I became the mother I never had.

A shrunken world

After my father died, about 18 years ago, I began calling my mother daily. She was scared. She had panic attacks. I felt sorry for her. I sometimes rushed out of the office and up to the suburbs to calm her. My husband and I often took her with us on hiking day trips. After hip replacement surgery at 86, her hiking days were over and her world got a lot smaller. Friends and acquaintances died, and it shrank even more. I endured long tedious summer weekends of conversational minutiae in beautiful settings just to give her a change of scenery.

Calculated calls

In the last few years, I took to calling her evenings after I left work, as I was walking to the subway or in a cab going home. Save your applause, please; my little filial act was carefully calculated. I knew the calls would be time-limited by my need to go underground or give a cab driver directions to my house. Sometime in the last year, my mother began ending the calls with "I love you." At first, it sounded tentative, like a question. It took her 97 years to utter those words. I couldn't say them back. I didn't make a big deal about it. I just let the opportunity slip.

Ashes to ashes...

And then she died. At a Jewish burial, even in snowy February, you pick up dirt with your bare hands and toss it on the lowered coffin. You literally grasp the finality of death. It shreds the hardest heart. The timelessness of this ancient ritual lifts some of the burden of sadness off an individual shoulders and merges it with all the losses that have ever been, and it connects you deeply with the endless cycle of life and death. But it is still plenty sad. I threw an extra handful of dirt, just to say a final, private good-bye. And then, I thought, that was it. After all, it had been decades since I'd lost my mother.

Mindless moments

But over the past few weeks, as my third book was published and there were tiny triumphs to be marked and little worries to be noted, I felt a sadness creep over me. I leave the office and I reach for my cell phone and then have to correct myself. It isn't just that old habits die hard. The minute fluctuations of experience-the mindless moments of daily life, psychologist John Gottman once called them, noting they were a powerful kind of relationship glue-those are the things I shared with my mother. They were things too small to warrant dialing my far-flung friends. They were all that connected my mother and me. And now that's gone.

Not the way we want it

Love-it doesn't always come the way we want it, or need it. I am grateful I got to take the little there was. It was all my mother could scrape together. I had no idea how much I'd miss it.

Happy Mothers Day! Now Get Out of Here!!

Hara Estroff Marano — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:00:23 -0700

Happy Mothers Day! To all those folks who believe that good parenting is highly involved parenting, take the day off. Let your kids figure out how to manage themselves. You owe it to yourself. And especially to your kids.

Parents, like lovers, must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. But many now step way over the line into controlling, and a large segment of America’s children are suffering from overparenting. They lead highly pressurized lives that are rigidly structured and managed by their parents. They are pushed to achieve, not for the pleasure of learning but for the grades that will get them into brand-name colleges. Today’s parents brandish the achievements of their children like a badge, turning tots into trophies, thereby subordinating the developmental needs of the children to the psychological needs of adults.

In this hothouse environment, every obstacle is typically cleared from the path to achievement. Should Jonah or Emma leave a workbook or assignment home, Mom is likely to run it over to school. And should a child get a grade on a test or paper that disappoints, Mom or Dad might call the school to see what can be done to fix it. As the assistant principal of one well-known public high school told me, “I have hundreds of stories—from five-page e-mails from parents detailing all the ways a son's teachers have failed to recognize his learning style to a seven-phone-call exchange taking up over four hours to explain why a parent's daughter was asked to stay after class to talk to a teacher.”

The number-one problem of school counselors today, a Nebraska educator informed me, is “overinvolved parents, thereby creating extremely dependent young people.” (Of course, the number two problem is under-involved parents, who create “young people with no moral or academic compass.” That’s why we need to find a way to care for all children, not just pour all our resources into our own privileged children.)

And indeed, the young people are suffering. When they leave the protective cocoon of home for college, they are breaking down psychologically in record numbers. Campus counseling centers are overwhelmed with students suffering from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, and self-mutilation. “By the eleventh week of a semester, all appointments are filled,” says the director of counseling at one southern university. “But the students don’t stop coming.” Increasing numbers need hospitalization.

In some outposts of affluence, the pressures to achieve are especially acute and the students don’t wait until college to break down. “I'm scared for the kids at my school and for my own daughter, who isn't even two yet,” the assistant high school principal told me. “I am tired of sending kids to mental hospitals.” By early February, he “had 11 students hospitalized and tomorrow will likely yield number 12. This number includes only the students on my caseload. I'm not sure what the number is for my counterpart, but I'd guess it is similar.”

How is it that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them?

Hyperinvolvement is always counterproductive; it breeds fragility as it directly transmits anxiety to the kids—and they have no coping skills for handling it. With all the lumps and bumps taken out of life for them, they have never learned any way of handling life’s challenges. When they hit the slightest impediment, they feel overwhelmed.

Despite inhabiting a world characterized by uncertainty, the children of overinvolved parents increasingly lack tolerance for uncertainty. As a professor in one highly regarded Midwestern business school told me, “We seem to have at least two segments of MBA students—those sincerely interested in a rigorous learning experience and those who seek a more straightforward, streamlined education that simplifies the world for them. They have a tremendous desire to reduce uncertainty in learning (to have things summarized and linearized for them). That segment is growing; it is now large enough to be having a real impact on learning experiences, norms, and student culture.”

Being bred in a hothouse environment and highly programmed from an early age also makes young people overly compliant. Over dinner one night, I asked a group of six undergraduate students at that same Midwestern university whether it was true that a new silence was falling over classrooms. I told them I had heard that students now saw speaking up as too great a risk, even in courses like philosophy and ethics that normally demand discussion. They all shrugged, as if granting a unanimous “of course.” Finally one looked me straight in the eye and said emphatically, “We didn’t get here by rocking the boat.”

It is a sad day for American culture when one of its most vibrant features—speaking up to voice an opinion—is “rocking the boat.” Keep in mind that these are the very students who are being trained as the future leaders of business and society. That’s what makes hothouse parenting so destructive. It doesn’t just undermine the kids; it threatens the future of democracy. Does it need mentioning that it’s difficult to sustain the economy without risk-taking?

How you and I care for our children has far-reaching implications. It’s time to consider lengthening the leash and allowing the kids, judiciously, to learn how to care a bit for themselves. Children come equipped with an enormous drive to demonstrate their competence, if we don’t subvert it.

So take the day off. And send the kids out to play—by themselves. The value of play is almost entirely counterintuitive, but it is the very thing that most facilitates creative adaptation to the fast and fluid world our kids are inheriting and the problem-solving skills that success increasingly demands. In today’s world, success hinges less on getting everything right than on how you handle getting things wrong. The future success of the children—that’s what it’s really all about anyway, isn’t it?

A Troubling Trend of Quitters in the Ivy League

Hara Estroff Marano — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:35:19 -0700

I want to share with you a totally unsolicited letter I just received from a coach at an Ivy League university, one of many people now "on the front lines of dealing with overparented young people." It spotlights a terrible trend that affects all of us.

"Hello from the [name of university] [name of sport] office and congratulations on getting the book A Nation of Wimps out to the general public. I love the book and have been promoting it within my circle of friends.

" Working at an Ivy League institution I feel like I am almost at the proverbial front line in dealing with over-parented young people. I'm always loathe to stereotype people but I have definitely noticed declining levels of initiative, drive and resilience in the kids today as compared to ten or fifteen years ago. It's amazing and appalling to me that we have to
"spoon-feed" so many things to young adults that for all intents and purposes should be common sense. However I am forced to concede that coming from protected environments where initiative and risk-taking are not readily learned, these young people are largely blameless for being clueless!!

"I am finding (and I certainly don't think I am alone here) that the young folks I work with are wonderful, polite, compliant people who will do whatever they are asked or told. They believe they are talented and capable (because they have been incessantly told so!) but in reality they are often riddled with self-doubt and hesitancy, especially when
put in a truly competitive or "dog-eat-dog" environment. Having informally canvassed my colleagues around the country I find that this phenomenon is not isolated to elite academic institutions or the Northeast; it is everywhere.

"Competition makes people uptight because there's a chance that you might not win. The old fashioned value was to
compete in order to experience the feeling of stretching oneself to one's limits in order to enjoy the elation or satisfaction of winning. Losing was a risk that was worth taking. That still exists in today's kids to some extent but fear of failure or feeling inadequate or inferior is always lingering. The consequence is that there are more and more young people who will quit sports rather face the indignity of losing or rather, not winning, and the result is the parental salve provided by the "ninth place medal."

"I know a couple in Wisconsin whose son was so distraught at not winning a trophy in his under 10 year old soccer league that they felt the only way to quell his post-game tantrum was to stop on the way home and buy him his own trophy. To me that is beyond spoiling a kid...that is ruining him!"

Death by Hovering

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:50:13 -0700

Death by hovering is not how the coroner's report will list it. But the murder of a student at Indiana University-Purdue, the first act of violence in the 40-year history of the Fort Wayne campus, may well be the first documented case of death from helicopter parenting.

According to police reports, 22-year-old Liette Martinez was found stabbed to death in her dorm suite on April 18. The leading suspect, now in police custody, is Tina Loraine Morris, the mother of one of her two roommates. The mother had taken up residence—illegally—in the dorm for two weeks before the slaying. According to court documents, she was unhappy about something Miss Martinez had said to her daughter the night before and "confronted" her.

“I’m afraid this may be the ultimate and tragic result of hovering,” the VP of Student Affairs at another university wrote me, in bringing my attention to the report, which I had already seen, in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

Stories of helicopter parenting are rampant. A father books a hotel room on campus for a month while his son changes majors. A mother protests a student’s grade on a paper; it turns out that she wrote it. Parents and students exchange multiple cell phone calls each day, some initiated by students, at least as many initiated by their parents. Every little flicker of experience is reported. Students don’t get to sit with and manage their own emotions. And parents put themselves on the receiving end of a steady stream of unfiltered, undigested negative experience from their precious child.

“It raises questions about emancipation,” observes Richard Ling, a research scientist at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on cellphones. He believes that cellphones strengthen already existing ties to friends and family, but, because they limit interactions with outsiders, could narrow a user’s understanding of the world. They are forces of conservatism and deepen the status quo. Another scientist, Switzerland’s Hans Geser, calls them forces of “regressive social insulation.”

Whenever college administrators get together, tales of the latest outrage in helicopter parenting abound. But usually the reaction is little more than a roll of the eyeballs. Maybe it’s time to understand that there is a lot more that goes on in helicopter parenting and a real social transformation taking place here.

Let’s start with trust, that fragile interpersonal link that turns out to be the bedrock of a civil society. As I discuss in my just-published book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, constant monitoring of grown children’s experience undermines the belief in and what should be growing reliance on the competence of the young one. Trust entails expectation, a small leap of faith, a prediction about how someone will behave. And since it is future-oriented, it is predicated on optimism.

Hovering is not trust. It is cynicism embodied. It is antithetical to the development of autonomy—excuse me, but isn't that still the goal of childrearing?. And it threatens the character and strength of the next generation.

It’s time for parents to back off and, at a minimum, let the kids settle their own roommate hassles.

Welcome to a Nation of Wimps

Hara Estroff Marano — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:30:53 -0700

Today is a much-anticipated day. Not just for every American taxpayer, including me, for whom the annual bill is due. April 15 has long been on my calendar for an entirely different reason: it marks the date of publication of my newest book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, which was stimulated by an article I wrote for Psychology Today. The book examines the culture of overparenting that now prevails among the middle class and above, and it looks deeply at its causes. But I wrote the book because I'm especially concerned about the consequences, which have major implications for all of us.

Way out of balance

Parents, like lovers, must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. But in the past decade, they've stepped way over the line into controlling. They find a million ways to justify it: They're worried about their kids' success, or their safety. We love our kids. We want them to succeed in life. We know that the world has changed on our watch. None of us knows what the world is going to look like in 10 years. We're worried that our kids somehow will be left behind, that they won't achieve our standard of living.

Tots as trophies

So we push them to achieve. In school. On the soccer field. We schedule their days. We try to cram everything in that might give them a shot at a brand-name education, because we think that's the best guarantee of success. We take away free play and recess. We create a hothouse and we hover over them. We clear the path for them and clean up in their wake. If they leave a book or a paper at home, we run it over to school for them. If a kid gets a grade that disappoints, we don't ask, what do you think you need to do as well as you want? We call the school to get the grade changed. We write their essays. And from their achievements we take our meaning and our status, subverting their developmental needs to our own psychological needs. Sometimes it's because our own adult relationships are less than satisfying.

Crisis on the campus

But once they leave the protective cocoon of home for college, kids are breaking down psychologically in record numbers. Depression, anxiety disorders, panic attacks. Eating disorders, which are really disorders of perfectionism. Self-mutilation. This isn't hypothetical. Six years ago I broke the story of the "crisis on the campus." How colleges were reeling from the number of kids who were developing serious psychological problems. In 2004 I found that things had only gotten worse. More kids suffering, more severe problems. And it's worse now. I began asking why. The answer was an article in Psychology Today called A Nation of Wimps. It hit a nerve. The article wound up being the starting point of the book.

Anxiety unleashed

The question we need to ponder is, why is it that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them? I think anxiety has accompanied parenting from the very beginning. The difference is, now parents feel free to transmit their anxieties to their kids. Of course, parents are not exclusively to blame for overinvolvement in children's lives. Schools have ushered them right through the front door, asking them to oversee basic activities like homework that kids should be managing on their own.

An absence of coping skills

But parental scrutiny combined with parental anxiety only creates fragility in the kids. Hyperinvolvement is always counterproductive. To double the whammy, the kids have never been allowed to develop coping skills, because all the lumps and bumps are being taken out of life for them. They never have had to figure their own way through any little challenges of life. They hit a minor impediment and they feel overwhelmed. They have never had to learn to solve problems. And because their parents hover and clear the path and take over tasks, they figure "there must really be something wrong with me."

Kids too compliant

Our kids have been on this track from infancy with no known way to get off, and so not only are they psychologically fragile, they grow up overly compliant. Debate and dissent are not even part of their classrooms. They can't tolerate uncertainty, despite the uncertain world that we live in. They don't want to take risks and they don't know how to problem-solve. How do you sustain an economy without risk-taking innovators? How do you have a democracy without a tolerance for lively debate?

So it's time to back off and give kids a chance to develop their own passions and display their own competencies. We need to let them play and to mess up. And we have to stop acting like everything will matter on their permanent life resume. I could have filled the book with eyeball-rolling anecdotes of the ways parents are keeping their kids from learning how to function-like the couple who bought a roll of bubble wrap and lined their hotel room with it to protect their toddler daughter. But instead, I decided to devote a chapter to all the things that parents can do to help their kids without sacrificing anyone's sanity. I'm hoping the book starts a national conversation about how we're raising our kids. We're overdue.

If you wish to buy the book, you can click right here on the title A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting.

No Single Solution?

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:18:54 -0700

Last night I got a phone call from one of my two sons. "Today I got a phone call with information that was both great news and bad," he said. I could hear him wanting to air a dilemma with me. I'm close to both of my boys and their wives, and they both have very young children. My Los Angeles son called to tell me what turns out to be every young parent's dream. He and his wife had just been offered a very coveted slot in his company's highly reputable and very convenient childcare program.

The dilemma

Quality childcare-it's what every parents wants for a child and it's in such short supply, especially in the nation's major cities. We are very sensitized to the issue here in New York City, where machinations by an executive to win a coveted slot in a highly rated preschool nearly brought down Citigroup a few years ago. But now, on another coast, there was a full-time opening for my son's son. An occasion for rejoicing, right? Well, not so fast. The offer, it turns out, came just about a year too soon, long before my son and his wife expected the wait list to ever inch down to them. Their baby is one very adorable creature (I'm admittedly prejudiced), but he's not quite five months old, and he's still exclusively breast-feeding. What's more, my daughter in law is not quite ready to jump back into her work full-time. She was planning on a more gradual re-entry with time to rebuild the client base she deliberately tapered during pregnancy.

Agonizing choices

What an agonizing decision they had to make! Turn down the opening now and probably not get another offer for several years, if at all. Take the offer despite being psychologically and practically unprepared, in order to have access to a proven, quality preschool program. I wondered how many other young parents around the country faced the same difficult choices-that is, if they were as lucky as my kids were. High-quality childcare programs are not exactly a dime a dozen. Most families have to settle for whatever they can get, and then they typically have to endure the constant stress of a patchwork quilt of arrangements on days when a child has the sniffles, or Mommy does. This, of course, for our most precious natural resource-our children, our future.

My role

This was one telephone conversation where I didn't say very much. I listened, mostly. I listened to my son air the pros and cons of putting his son in daycare now or turning down the offer. He was still reeling from the surprise of receiving the offer months, if not years, before he thought he'd be lucky enough to get it. He still hadn't talked it out completely with his wife, although, of course, they had already talked about it some. There was much more for them to say to each other. I listened because I didn't have any specific wisdom to impart, at least not yet. And I don't know whether anyone does. (If you do, please share it with me!)

One true way?

I don't know that there is any one course of action in this situation that is right for all families all the time. A lot, I know, depends not only on the parents' preparedness but their sense of the strength of their attachment to their baby and the baby's security in his attachment to his mommy and daddy. This much I do know: Much of his future-his basic sense of security in the world, the ease with which he will feel free to explore his environment and to take in information, his sense that the world is a benign place, his expectation that he can have an effect in the world-will rest on that. In other words, much of his future psychological health.

A Strong Foundation

As therapists, you probably deal with the fallout of this fact all the time: The quality of what comes first has a lasting impact. A strong foundation of attachment between parent and child is irreplaceable. It doesn't determine everything, but it certainly has a powerful influence. No question about it, a strong bond is definitely in place. But it isn't finished yet. So what's the right choice? Some parents can spend all day with their children and never form a strong attachment bond. For other parents, early months of the kind of intense closeness of breast-feeding create a psychological as well as physiological synchrony that will be impossible to undo. There are many other variables of parent background and infant temperament that factor into the attachment process, of course. But its importance can't be disputed. How it will play out in this situation I can't yet say. I'm hoping my son and daughter in law want to continue the conversation; at best, I can be the sounding board against which they can hear themselves think their own way to a solution.

Feel free to chime in with your thoughts below.

The Wimps Checklist

Hara Estroff Marano — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:47:41 -0800

Like lovers, parents must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. But many parents these days step way over the line into controlling, engineering their children’s lives from an early age. Hyperinvolvement, however, is always counterproductive, as parents transmit anxiety to their kids and create psychologically fragile creatures who, once they leave the protective cocoon of home for college, can’t handle the normal vicissitudes of life. It’s ironic that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them. Here's how to know whether you are one of those parents:

You have an image of your child silk-screened onto a tote bag.

You have a Nannycam.

You have thought of hiring a consultant, or actually hired one, to child-proof your home.

If asked, you might describe your role as executive manager of your child’s life.

You will not seat your kid in a shopping cart unless you bring a shopping cart liner.

You have a life plan mapped out for your three-year-old.

You believe that free play is a waste of time that detracts from achievement.

You believe there are far too many sex perverts out there to let your kids play outdoors.

You have done your child’s homework or written a paper on one or more occasions.

You have emailed or called a teacher or administrator to protest a grade your child received.

You have called school demanding that your child be given a part, or a better part, in a play.

Your baby is more than three months old but you won’t leave him even with your own parents.

You’ve hired a psychologist to test your child in the hopes of finding a problem.

When your kid struggles with something, that’s your cue to take over the task.

You pay your kid every time he or his team wins a game or every time he gets a good grade.

You’ve made a trip to school just to bring a paper or homework your child left at home.

You’d feel like a failure if your kid didn’t get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale or some other Ivy.

You have GPS on your kid’s cellphone.

You’ve told your son or daughter he or she is brilliant.

You’ve told your child that second best is not good enough.

You call the dean of student affairs rather than coach your kid how to handle a roommate problem.

You suspect you might be doing too much for your child—after all, no one did so much for you and you turned out OK—but you fear that without your vigilance your child will be “left behind.”