September 2000

Writers Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise urge parents to put the brakes on  fast-paced child rearing by Lisa Pierce Breunig

"Thanks for allowing me to exhale." This grateful salutation greeted child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld recently as he checked his email. Although Rosenfeld has practices in New York City and Greenwich, the message was not from a client's parent. It was one of many responses to HyperParenting: Are You Hurting Your Child Trying Too Hard?, the new book he has cowritten with his friend Nicole Wise. "Everyone knows exactly what you mean," says Rosenfeld, 55, of the book title's reference to "hyper-parenting," a term he and Wise devised to describe the "belief that it is our responsibility as parents to craft the perfect childhood for our children, shielding them from failure." The writers maintain that the phenomenon has an ever-increasing number of parents in affluent areas such as ours "chauffeuring our children from morning swim practices to late-night ice time," paying for expensive enrichment programs and stressing over test scores, all in an effort to assure their offspring a competitive edge and entrance into a top college. "You have to be relatively affluent to have the resources to hyper-parent," Wise points out. "But now many parents from all economic levels are aspiring to it and are made to feel bad if they can't do it," Rosenfeld adds. "It's a child-centered universe," says Wise, 41. "And parenting is becoming the most competitive sport in America." And the authors admit they are not immune to the trend's pull. Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld with his family, Michael, 7, Lisa, 13, wife, Dr. Dorothy Levine, and Sam, 10. "We're hyper-parents in recovery," says Wise, who lives in North Stamford with her husband, Bob Sloss, executive vice president at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and four children: Ian, 16, Devin, 14, Brad, 9, and Holly, 6. Rosenfeld and his wife, Dr. Dorothy Levine, a Stamford pediatrician, have three children: Lisa, 13, Sam, 10, and Michael, 7. While the authors and their spouses still spend plenty of time on the sidelines at soccer games, they've made a conscious effort to live up to their book's advice, limiting their children's activities and making time for such off-task endeavors as picnics, movie watching and playing board games. "Lately we are hyper-parenting less and enjoying life more," Wise and Rosenfeld write in the book's introduction. Rosenfeld says life at his Westover home has improved, and he believes others can have similar success by simply relaxing. "You will enjoy spending more unproductive time with your children - playing Monopoly, shooting hoops, taking a walk, chatting - rather than rushing from activity to activity. In the end, everyone wins. You, your children and your entire family will benefit. Their self-esteem - and yours - will be higher, and the time you spend together will be far more pleasurable," Rosenfeld says. Wise, a freelance writer who grew up in North Stamford and attended Stamford public schools, began using Rosenfeld as a regular source with a I993 interview for The New York Times. Over the years, they noticed a shared concern for the growing obsession on perfectionism in parenting. "Hyper-parenting evolved from those conversations," Wise says. "The concept emerged when we began to look at the phenomenon from the children's perspective," says Rosenfeld. The pair began working on the book in 1996, meeting every week to develop chapters. "That developed into a real examination of our lives," says Wise. "I've never had such an easy collaboration," says Rosenfeld, who has written four other books. The writers sent drafts of chapters back and forth via e-mail, and were struck by how compatible their ideas and writing styles were. "The book has one voice. My friends think it's my voice and Nicole's think it's hers," says Rosenfeld, whose seamless way of conversing with Wise makes a smooth collaboration easy to imagine. Nicole Wise with her family, clockwise from top right, Brad, 9, husband Bob Sloss, Ian, 16, Holly, 6, and Devin, 14. Using direct, common-sense prose, the book offers examples of hyper-parenting extremes - mothers who begin shuttling their kids to athletic practices at 6:30 a.m. only to have the last child at piano lessons well into the evening; first-time parents who spend a small fortune on every imaginable baby gadget - to illustrate how our ultra-competitive culture is eroding parents' confidence and replacing the playful discovery of childhood with an endless series of structured activities and tasks that must be mastered. Many of the examples are taken from Rosenfeld and Wise's own experiences raising children in lower Fairfield County. The authors point out that many well-educated parents here are convinced their children cannot have happy, productive lives unless they get into a top-tier college. As they state in the book, "Every child should be above average, as though this wasn't, by definition, impossible." "The definition of normal is so narrow," says Wise. "There's one way to be - attractive, athletic, accomplished. If a child doesn't fit in - isn't social, athletic and high-achieving - parents start to ask what's wrong." As the authors state in their book, "Many of us parents today are, quite simply, too involved in our children's lives... We deprive them of the sense that they are the authors of their own lives." But, Rosenfeld says, all this emphasis on achievement stems from the best intentions. "Baby boomers are very serious about trying to do the right thing," he says. "We don't trust what our parents did, so listen to 'experts.' We're critical of what we view as the last generation's laissez-faire attitude." In addition, he points out that as generations become increasingly geographically isolated, parents are less likely to seek advice from grandparents, paving the way for the growth in parenting literature. And, as Wise observes, "We've put off childbearing. We've accomplished more and we bring that to child-rearing." The best advice, the authors say, harkens back to the late Dr. Benjamin Spock - trust yourself. "You probably are providing a pretty good life for your kids but letting yourself be driven nuts," he says. "We're not saying these are bad parents," says Wise. "We're all struggling with this." These days, when Rosenfeld and Wise make the rounds to school functions and after-school activities they are even more aware of the hyper-parenting behavior around them - coaches screaming vulgarities at kids making errors on the athletic field, parents getting intensely involved in their children's lives. Such behavior only reinforces the authors' realistic view of the impact their book is likely to have. "It's not likely to help extreme hyperparents," says Rosenfeld. "It's for the rest of us." Lisa Pierce Breunig is managing editor of Living in Stamford.