Back Off and They Will Bloom:
The Pressured Parent 

By MARY AMOROSO
 
 

Here we are, the best-educated generation of American parents ever. Information on the best parenting techniques and latest research comes at us from newspapers and magazines, television and radio, and the Internet. Many of us have delayed childbearing so we are older and, hopefully, wiser parents.

We have fewer children per family, and so can focus more attention on each of our offspring. Many of us have greater financial resources than our parents had, and so we can provide our children more of the luxuries, such as $140 sneakers and the latest eagerly awaited version of PlayStation.

We often come to parenting after a history of competence and achievement at work. And so we play classical music to the fetus in the womb to stimulate brain development. We arrange French lessons and gymnastics sessions for our infants.

Our middle-schoolers attend soccer and basketball camps, and we phone the coach to wheedle more playing time for our child. Homework is a daily marathon parent-child session, and when we are on a business trip, we have the child fax his homework to our hotel for our review.

We pay to have our high school juniors and seniors prep intensively for the SATs. We are used to turning out a quality product at work; our children will be a quality product, too.

What possibly could be wrong with this picture?

A lot, says Nicole Wise, Connecticut mother of four, family issues journalist, and co-author of the new book,"Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?"with Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D. (St. Martin's Press, $ 22.95).

She writes: "This generation of American parents has swallowed, and is choking on, a vision of child-rearing as a skill that requires the right equipment, access to the right research, the right books and magazines, and the right pediatrician and psychologist or psychiatrist, to get the right information and advice on everything, from tone of voice to toilet training. Then, and only then, will parents get the right relationships and... the right results."

But, says Wise, when you micromanage your child's schedule, do homework with him every night and correct his errors, set up his play dates, get the research for his project due next month, buy him whatever he wants, and critique his every move on the playing field, you are not being an attentive parent: You are being a smothering one. You may kill his drive, his sense of adventure, his ability to experience things, even that mother of all teachers, failure, firsthand.

"If our kids don't make mistakes," Wise says, "they won't learn."

Wise acknowledges that our hyper-parenting comes from good motivation. "We love these kids. We want to raise them right, and we want to keep them safe and keep them from all harm. The problem is, our level of anxiety is so high and the kids feel it, too."

Wise believes that to step away from the practice of hyper-parenting, we need to change our mind-set. First, she says, we need to accept that "the skills that have done so well for us in the workplace may not be appropriate at home."

We may feel most productive when we are"multi-tasking", making lunches for tomorrow, folding laundry, and supervising homework.

But, says Wise, "We need to spend time doing nothing with our kids. We need to be unproductive. We need to back off and let them have their own lives."

Second, we need to look at parenting not as a set of skills, but as a relationship, with its ups and downs. "A human relationship is not a matter of getting to a place where it's all perfect," she says.

And human relationships function and develop more by intuition than by the mission statements and precepts of workplace-oriented managerial relationships. Parenting is largely a matter of you being you to your developing child.

Finally, says Wise, you have to analyze your own values and respect the very real individuality of your child.

Winning isn't everything. Neither are monetary success and awards. As Wise writes, "Life and development are not linear processes. Success in academics, sports, or business is not really the measure of a person.

Furthermore, test scores in the fifth grade have little to do with performance in the adult world. We know all these things from our own experience... but we have a hard time trusting our instincts and living by that knowledge."

Your child will reveal himself to you in his own time and his own fashion. Your job as parent is to have faith that he will and be receptive to him, while giving him plenty of unmanaged time and space for him to manage himself. And ultimately, you don't have to live his life. He does.

For more information, visit the website www.hyper-parenting.com.