Family Ties

I read this very interesting article today in The Sun. I think its great advice and a lesson for all parents or parents-to-be out there.

Over-parenting is a CURSE

Middle class baby boomer parents are strangling their children with their apron-strings. The all controlling parents, pushy or uber-parents today have had a starring role in a number of news stories recently.

Huddersfield University in Britain has even had to set up a "family liason officer" to save the Goldman Sachs stall from a horde of angry middle-class mothers and feed information to parents round-the-clock about their kids' progress.

This smother-love is spreading so fast that it is causing a slew of social problems. Some are obvious: a major contributor to the rise in child obesity in the refusal of parents to let their kids outside - even though they are statistically no more likely to be kidnapped by a paedophile today than in 1958 and 1908.

So many people especially the rich, had parents who were still managing their lives into their 20s. University was once the breaking-point when even the most coddled kids could flee. Now mobile phones have become the longest umbilical cord in history.

The Californian child psychologist Dr. Madeline Levine has produced the most detailed studies of the consequences after she stumbled across something that seemed paradoxial in their treatment of teenagers.

"I found that kids from the wealthiest families had the highest rates of anxiety and depression and substance abuse, more than poor children", she says. "It just didn't make sense at first blush". Why would privileged kids be more miserable than poor kids?

She found that instead of being listened to and allowed to develop naturally, the wealthiest children were allowed no space to develop, except as carbuncles on the side of their parents' swollen egos. They were constantly driven from one 'Enriching Activity' to another, micromanaged by manager-parents.

Levine explains, "Paradoxically, the more [the parents] pour in, the less full many of my patients seem to be. Indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged from the outside, my young patients appeared to be inadvertently deprived of an opportunity to develop on the inside".

It's an essential part of growing up to learn to take risks, get in trouble and sort it out on your own. But pushy parents are determined to strip any risk from their child's life. In the end, it produces 2 kinds of children: the puffed-up and the paranoid.

The latter is the more worrying. These children have been raised behiind closed doors and taught to see the outside world as unseen menace. The London-based clinical psychologist Dr. Cecilia D'Felice explains," I see young people in my consulting room all the time now who are incredibly anxious about life. It's learning behaviour. They have been fussed over all their lives and they've internalised that parental anxiety. If you try to have a germ-free environment your child will actually get sick because she wont develop any resistance to germs. If you try to havea risk-free environment your child will become psychologically sick

The rise in bulimia, aneroxia and self-harm among teenagers is partly a product of all this over-parenting. As Levine says of a typical teenage sel-harmer she treated, a 15 year-old girl who carved the word "empty" on her arm with an old razor: "She felt little control over what happend to her. Cutting was one of the few things over which she did feel control".

Why is this happening? Why have so many of the baby-boomers turned out to be baby-Fuhrers, strangling their kids with their apron-strings? Their children are the safest who have ever lived. They are more likely to die in their beds of old age than any generation in history, yet their parents fear, constantly. There is no detailed research explaining their paranoia but there are some prosaic explanations.

Parents are having fewer children, later in life, often after gruelling fertility treatments. We live in a paranoid culture where every negligible risk is blown-up by a 24/7 media into a drum-beat of doom. We live in a hyper consumerist culture where we define ourselves by what we own.

Children are inevitably drawn into this vortex, as another glittering status symbol. 'Have you seen my handbag? Have you seen my child?'

Most parents crash-land into their childrens' lives for another burst of command-and-control, it's clear this is not about their child's needs but their own. They need their children to be dependent on them (and Successful with a capital-S) because they see their kids as extensions of their own ego, not as separate individuals with their own lives to live.

This isn't love. It is narcissism. It's time we told these middle-class Boomer parents: you need to grow up or your children never will.