Robyn Malcolm with her son Pete
Cover
The parent trap
by Mary Jane Boland
Parenting is hard work, and liberal “hyper-parents” are actually damaging their children’s chance of a successful future.
“The little bastards are in the car.” And with that, a harassed mother threw her car keys onto the counter of Ian and Mary Grant’s newly opened Parents Place in Auckland last month.
Laughing now, Ian says it was parents like this who motivated them to build the centre. After a chat, some advice and the rescue of the children from the car, the mother calmed down. Mary says often mothers simply need someone to listen.
The Grants – who run Parents Inc – are almost synonymous with parenting in New Zealand. They have three children, and Ian is known as “chiefy” to their nine grandchildren, who are scattered between Shanghai, North Carolina and London. Despite the distance, he says, they try to see the grandchildren as often as possible. “We don’t want our old age to be a relationship junkyard. Grandparents have time to invest in their grandchildren and that wisdom is hard to find.”
It’s exactly that advice and caring that the Grants believe many parents want.
Mary believes three things make life particularly hard for modern parents: exhaustion, high (read, almost impossible) expectations and financial stress.
The Parents Inc philosophy is to ensure parents maintain their personal values and pass them onto their children. With their strong Christian faith, the Grants believe that marriage – or at least a strong relationship – is fundamental, as is ensuring that children respect their parents. That Christian tenet is the reason, Ian says, that the Government refused to give any funding to the Parents Place. He believes Labour is ideologically opposed to such views. As it was, the centre grew using donations from the likes of Timaru businessman Allan Hubbard, who gave $6 million, and The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall’s charity, which gave $300,000.
That focus on ensuring you’re doing a good job has added to the stress many parents feel – are they actually doing a good job or are they sentencing their children to poor performance socially and educationally? The anti-smacking debate over the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act last year also raised the question of what is “good” and “bad” parenting. Other issues, such as this year’s screening of preschoolers for criminality, add to the pressures.
New Zealand is following a global trend with its focus on parenting. Nearly every bookshop has shelves of self-help books for parents. Bookselling website Amazon has more than 84 million references for parenting books: Scream-free Parenting, Playful Parenting, Grace-based Parenting, Parenting with Love and Logic, the Kazdin method, parenting without tears, parenting for the religious, parenting for atheists, parenting for those with children who have ADHD or autism. Television networks screen Supernanny or Little Angels. Other programmes deal with the teen years – boot camp, anyone?
And then there is the new terminology. Those in the 1950s followed Dr Benjamin Spock – mothers: “You know more than you think you do” – but half a century later there are hyper-parents and helicopter parents.
Little surprise, then, that parents are sometimes confused about what’s the best approach.
In his new book Under Pressure: How the epidemic of hyper-parenting is endangering childhood, London-based writer and father Carl Honoré calls on parents and teachers to allow children to grow up at a slower pace.
He refers to the various names given to child-rearing in different parts of the globe: “Helicopter parenting” – because mom and dad are always hovering overhead. Hyper-parenting. Scandinavians joke about “curling parents” who frantically sweep the ice in front of their child. In Japan, “education mothers” devote all their time to steering their children through the school system.
Honoré says such attention has led to niche industries that cater for parents’ desire to improve their children physically, mentally, emotionally and educationally. Older, wealthier parents are more likely to become helicopter or hyper-parents, he says.
“The urge to upgrade our children has taken on a Frankenstein edge. Inspired by research showing that taller people tend to be more successful, some parents pay to inject growth hormone into their healthy, normal kids, with every inch of height costing $US50,000 … plastic surgeons have to watch out for teenage patients being pressured by their parents to get that nose job or ear-pinning procedure …
“This micromanaging, all this pampering, hot-housing and medicating is failing to produce a new raft of alpha children,” Honoré writes. “Teachers across the world report that pupils now find it hard just to sit still and concentrate. Employers complain that many new recruits are less flexible, less able to work in teams, and less hungry to learn.”
They can’t problem-solve and don’t persevere.
Christchurch Girls’ High School principal Prue Taylor, a teacher for 30 years, couldn’t agree more. In a recent speech to launch a book by Kathrine Switzer, who broke ground by running in the all-male Boston marathon in 1967, Taylor bemoaned the arrival of helicopter parents.
“I commented that Kathrine had been an intrepid person, that’s how we were in the late 60s and 70s. I fear for today’s young women; because of their helicopter parents, they’re not going to be of that ilk. Women are going to lose a lot of ground.”
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