The Over-Parenting Crisis
A leading attachment parenting writer says, enough already.
by Katie Allison Granju
April 16, 2007
This over-parenting has become an epidemic. Legions of well-intentioned mothers and fathers, urged on by popular media and the marketplace, are frantically striving to create an endlessly controlled, bubble-wrapped childrearing environment. From neuroses with regulating our babies' sleep habits, to insistence on antimicrobial everything, to the attempt to continue "babyproofing" our homes until our babies are well into elementary school, our current parenting zeitgeist is competitive, market-driven . . . and exhausting.
But as hard as we are on ourselves, we are even harder on our parenting peers. In its study of parenting attitudes, Public Agenda found that six in ten of us rate other parents only "fair" or "poor" in raising their children. And these days, one big way we try to out-do these "fair" and "poor" parents is to buy better stuff. Our parental anxieties now include the belief that without the hippest, newest parenting swag, successful childrearing is no longer possible.
In fact, we no longer choose a stroller, but a parenting identity. Are you a trendy BugabooAre we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect? Frog kind of mom or perhaps a Mclaren traditionalist? God forbid you show up at the playground with a straight-from-Baby-Superstore Graco. How tacky! One mother I spoke to for this article sheepishly confided to me that she had gotten a new credit card for the sole purpose of paying for her $1,000 Stokke Xplory stroller, saying it made her feel like there was at least one thing she was assured she would do "better than anyone else at playgroup" for her son.
Peggy O'Mara, publisher of Mothering magazine and a keen observer of American parents for the past two decades, says she believes the commercialization of parenting masks our insecurities.
"I think people think they need a lot of baby gear because so many people use their children as social collateral, and judge one another by what they have for them," says O'Mara.
Don't get me wrong. I know that active, involved parenting matters . . . a lot. For those of us who take it on, raising a kid is certainly among the most meaningful and important tasks we'll ever do. In fact, I happen to agree with Jackie Kennedy, who famously said, "If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much." The question becomes, however, whether the hovering, obsessive, all-consuming parenting style that has become de rigeur is actually serving our children — or us — very well. In our hyperfocus on all things parenting, are we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect?
Nearly ten years ago, author Judith Rich Harris made the cover of Time magazine with her wildly popular book, The Nurture Assumption, in which she argued that parents should stop worrying so much. But Harris took her argument several leagues further with her assertion that the reason parents should stop worrying is that ultimately, what mothers and fathers do — or don't do — has little impact on how children turn out.
But Harris was dead wrong. Parents have a huge impact on how their children turn out, and that's precisely why we need to take a hard look at the obsessive, controlling, perfectionistic parenting culture we're living in. In fact, facilitating children's ability to function independently, to figure things out, and to grow into themselves without excessive interference is in itself an essential task of parenting.
©2007 Katie Allison Granju and Nerve Media
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