Parents Alerted To Adolescent Self-harm

By FRANK LUONGO fluongo@bcnnew.com
Child psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld advised more than 250 parents at Saugatuck Elementary School last Wednesday to be aware of the growing problem of cutting, self-mutilation and other forms of self-harm among teen-agers.

"It is a well-kept secret how many kids cut themselves," Rosenfeld said. He placed this problem in the same category as teen-age use of illegal drugs and alcohol as efforts, especially among affluent adolescents, to relieve the stress in their lives.

Rosenfeld is on the editorial board of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), which on its Web site has attributed this self-injury to emotional tension, physical discomfort, pain and low self-esteem.

A recent study by the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University of 6,000 adolescents, 15 to 16 years-of-age, found that more than 10 percent of those surveyed had deliberately harmed themselves.
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However prevalent such behavior proves to be, Rosenfeld sees it as symptomatic of the pressure that weighs upon families in communities like Westport, where what he called "hyper-parenting" has become a "cultural disease" in the lives of children.

He urged parents to see childhood as a time of preparation for a happy life, not a time of performance enhancement for competitive success.

"Is there room any more for the good kid?" he asked, suggesting that parents too often insist on over-scheduling their children to produce what he called "great kids."

The paradox, he said, is that childhood itself is becoming the victim in the child-centered world of affluent communities, where the successful and achieving child has become the premium prize for parents.

The most predictive variable in the achieving of a good and happy life is one good relationship, according to Rosenfeld.

For that reason, he challenged parents to "rush less, and reflect" more on how to restore joy to family life so that children will develop the "inner conviction that they don't have to be perfect to be loved by us."

The over-scheduled, over-programmed child, he said, is receiving the subliminal message that he or she is never good enough for parents.

"This is a lack of faith in themselves that they will live up to. It is self-fulfilling," Rosenfeld said.

An antidote to the damaging effects of hyper-parenting for Rosenfeld is for parents to spend more of their time living their own lives, instead of living through the lives of their children.

"Parents deserve their own lives, with appropriate sacrificing for their children, and children deserve to believe that they are living their own lives," he said.

Rosenfeld has taught for many years at Columbia, Harvard and Stanford Universities and has published five books on parenting, including most recently as the co-author of The Over-Scheduled Child, which came out in paperback in 2001 and has been, or is being, translated for distribution in Belgium, China, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain.

Rosenfeld maintains a private practice in child and adult psychiatry in Greenwich and New York City. The Westport PTA council sponsored his talk.