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When parenting becomes too intense
This generation of mothers and fathers finds it difficult
not to program their children's lives, but there has to be a limit
ALANNA MITCHELL
Friday, May 26, 2000
Calgary -- It was the debate over blended classes that got some people in Chinook Park wondering whether parents today worry too much about controlling their children's lives.
Blended, as in two grades taught in the same classroom by the same teacher,
the kind of thing that used to be called, say, a Grade 1/2 split. Now,
the term is "multi-age classes."
Chinook Park has a bunch of them. Eileen Docekal's two sons are together in a French immersion class that takes in both Dylan's Grade 2 and Brendan's Grade 1.
For Ms. Docekal, one of the dozen or so Chinook Park families that have been participating in The Globe and Mail's Family Matters series, it was no big deal. The teacher has been great. The kids are thriving. She is relaxed about it.
"It's only first and second grade," she says one afternoon this week, sitting on the porch of her home just down the street from Chinook Park. "It's only elementary school."
But to many of the other parents in the community, the blended classrooms were the mountain to die on. They wanted proof that this type of teaching would be at least as good as the kind that has a single grade in a room.
Teresa Posyniak, another parent who has been involved in the series, was chairwoman of the school council the year before last, one of the years when this issue caught fire.
"You'd think they were trying to introduce a bomb into the classroom," she says.
The debate over blended classrooms has been bitter here, as it has been elsewhere in Calgary as school administrators grapple with the issue of dropping enrolments in older neighbourhoods. That's despite the fact that blended classrooms were common even when today's parents were in school.
To Ms. Docekal and Ms. Posyniak, the intense emotion of this debate is an example of a phenomenon that has been called "hyper-parenting." That term comes from a book, Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?, written by renowned U.S. child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld and journalist Nicole Wise and published this year.
The book contains a litany of frightening anecdotes about how many parents these days are far too involved in their children's lives.
Ms. Docekal and Ms. Posyniak see it all around them in this comfortable neighbourhood and far beyond, in much of this generation of parents.
Ms. Docekal remembers moving to Calgary from Newfoundland when her sons were about 3 and 4. It was November. She figured she would sign them up for a few skating lessons.
But when she called up a few places that offered them, the people on the other line just laughed. A space in November? they chuckled. What planet was she coming from?
The custom, it seemed, was to book ahead a minimum of six months before the lessons were to start.
"They put me on a waiting list to get on a waiting list," Ms. Docekal says, shrugging in disbelief.
Ms. Posyniak, who has a 12-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, has witnessed a similar trend. But to her, it's more a question of parents who conduct tightly researched micro-managing.
So, for instance, if you want to enroll your kid in dance classes, you do enough legwork to write a treatise on the different teachers who might be able to do the job.
For swimming, it's agonizing decisions over whether the children should be taught in chlorine-treated or salted water. Should it be indoor or outdoor pools? Which program is best: Aquaquest or Star?
"It's so hard not to do this," says Ms. Posyniak, who says she sees glimpses of herself in Hyper-Parenting.
For example, her son, Nick, who is in a fine-arts-based public school in Calgary, is an excellent athlete and an honours student. Except this year, he is a smidgen below the cutoff for the honour roll.
Ms. Posyniak found herself agonizing over this. Last week, she called her son's teacher to talk about it. Halfway through, she realized how ridiculous it was.
"She said, 'He's doing very well,' " says Ms. Posyniak, laughing now at the impulse that prompted her to call. "He's a very independent kid and I have to respect that. It's very, very hard."
Dr. Rosenfeld has been there too. He remembers signing up one of his three children for soccer when the child was 4. Three of the children on the team were picking flowers. Some of the kids didn't even know what a goal was.
"Everyone else was doing it," he said in an interview this week. "It was very hard to resist."
To his mind, the big problem with raising children this way is that almost nothing they accomplish feels good enough for them. There's always another sport to master, another feather to add to the cap.
"It leaves the kid in an impossible spot," he says.
That means the children are sometimes left without a base of values.
"The main message is: You have to look into yourself and ask what matters to you as an individual? Most people rush and rush and rush without asking the important questions."
Dr. Rosenfeld considers this primarily a phenomenon affecting modern parents. And an exacerbating factor is the way academic studies on child development have become common -- if cheap -- coin. A study comes out saying that breast-feeding raises a kid's intelligence level, and it becomes gospel. Listening to music makes a kid good at math, so every kid has to have a Mozart CD played to it in the womb.
Don't do it, and you risk stealing something from the child, the thinking goes. The problem is that much of the research is poor, Dr. Rosenfeld said. Much of it is interpreted by people -- be they journalists or instant experts -- who don't understand how children work.
"Child development isn't linear," said Dr. Rosenfeld, a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard University Medical School. He was once head of the child psychiatry training program at Stanford University. Now, he runs a private practice.
He pointed to a current client, who has allowed his story to be told. As a child, the man, now in his 40s, did not speak. His well-to-do parents trotted him around the world to see specialists. To no avail.
Finally, when the child was 6, he began to talk. Today, he is a poet who realizes the power of words. Hard to predict when he was a mute four-year-old.
Ms. Posyniak, Ms. Docekal and Barb Homer, another woman who has been involved in Family Matters, said Dr. Rosenfeld's book prompted them to think about what is "good enough" parenting, a concept they feel is necessary but elusive for some in this generation.
"There's this 'My Children are Brilliant Syndrome,' " Ms. Posyniak says.
She wishes parents would relax and enjoy their children more, even though she knows how hard that is.
Ms. Posyniak has an impish brain wave. Chinook Park's community centre should buy 600 copies of Hyper-Parenting and give them out. Parents would begin to exhale slightly. Then they would stop lining up for hours to get their kids into community programs.
Of course, then her kids would get into them, she says, laughing wickedly.
The Series
Family Matters,which has tracked the lives of Canadian families in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal for the past eight months, will come to a close on Friday, June 2.
The series is posted on:
http://www.globeandmail.com/
We invite readers to post their answers to this question:
What have you learned from the Family Matters series?
