When Ava was a baby, I worried about EVERYTHING. I think my exhaustion as a new parent was due primarily to this stress—even more so than relatively sleepless nights.
I’m not completely reformed, but I do remind myself of two things quite regularly: People are generally good, and my children will be fine. This mantra of sorts puts my mind at ease, letting me focus on what is here and now.
I’m not terribly concerned that the girls probably watch a bit too much TV. I’m pretty darn sure they aren’t going to be kidnapped as they play in the back yard. I don’t drill Spanish flashcards at the dinner table. And, I figure that no matter what their preschool curriculum entails, they’ll probably still have the opportunity to rack up student loans in college.
There’s a catch 22, though, and that’s I sometimes worry that I don’t worry enough. Will my apparent lack of energy and effort on the parenting front will have negative consequences down the road?
Maybe not, at least according to the article “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting” in Time. The story is long, but I think it’s worth a read if you have kids of any age. Here are a few excerpts that I found especially noteworthy (or at a minimum, self affirming).
Perhaps my kids really will be fine!
“…We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it’s never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as “crispies,” who arrived at college already burned out.
…We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s “pencil-holding deficiency,” hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. But too many parents have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million.
…Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader’s race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he’s headed off to college.
…We can fuss and fret and shuttle and shelter, but in the end, what we do may not matter as much as we think. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. “Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store,” they argued in USA Today. “By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it’s too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.”
If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”
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