Lori Gottlieb (The Atlantic) asks the question if as parents are we doing too much for our children, and can well meaning parents ruin their children?
Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?
Child-rearing has long been a touchy subject in America, perhaps because the stakes are so high and the theories so inconclusive. In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children
, Ann Hulbert recounts how there’s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles—the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered—with the pendulum swinging back and forth between them over the decades. Yet the underlying goal of good parenting, even during the heyday of don’t-hug-your-kid-too-much advice in the 1920s (“When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” the behavioral psychologist John Watson wrote in his famous guide to child-rearing), has long been the same: to raise children who will grow into productive, happy adults. My parents certainly wanted me to be happy, and my grandparents wanted my parents to be happy too. What seems to have changed in recent years, though, is the way we think about and define happiness, both for our children and for ourselves.
Nowadays, it’s not enough to be happy—if you can be even happier. The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness have morphed from a quest for general contentment to the idea that you must be happy at all times and in every way. “I am happy,” writes Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
, a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list and that has spawned something of a national movement in happiness-seeking, “but I’m not as happy as I should be.” Curious? Continue reading
Source: The Atlantic
Published: September 19, 2009
Slate   Another great piece on parenting by Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella. When there’s something you really, really want your child to do…………
As President Obama has discovered in pushing health care reform, antecedents that convey even a slight pressure or urgency and even the appearance of a reduction in choice can sometimes have the effect of strengthening opposition that would not otherwise occur or be so strong. Urgency can inspire push-back and resistance to even the most rational pitch—not by everyone, but by a lot of people. The psychological term for that reaction is normal.
In the home, a parent’s regular vigilance and responsible parenting can rise to the level of desperation and in turn lead to a reaction: a little more digging in of the heels on the part of the child. Are we merely blaming the parent here? No. What the parent is doing and the child’s reaction are both well within the normal range, even though each may see the other as perversely manipulative or unreasonably controlling. Rather, the antecedent conditions (urgency, eagerness, explicit or implicit pressure) in which the request for behavior is sandwiched now make it more unlikely to occur. continue reading
Published: March 25, 2009
A new study sheds light on the way young children think
For parents who have found themselves repeating the same warnings or directions to their toddler over and over to no avail, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder offers them an answer as to why their toddlers don’t listen to their advice: they’re just storing it away for later.
Scientists — and many parents — have long believed that children’s brains operate like those of little adults. The thinking was that over time kids learn things like proactively planning for and understanding how actions in the present affect them in the future. But the new study suggests that this is not the case.
“The good news is what we’re saying to our kids doesn’t go in one ear and out the other, like people might have thought,” said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata, who conducted the study with CU doctoral student Christopher Chatham and Michael Frank of Brown University. “It also doesn’t go in and then get put into action like it does with adults. But rather it goes in and gets stored away for later.”
A paper on their study titled “Pupillometric and Behavioral Markers of a Developmental Shift in the Temporal Dynamics of Cognitive Control” will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 23 [continue reading…]
