farmdoc's blog post number 258

I found Joan Acocella’s article ‘The Child Trap: The rise of overparenting’ in the 17 November New Yorker fascinating. She reviews five books on ‘overparenting’. Overparenting’s recipe? A portion of old-fashioned spoiling, a liberal dash of parental anxiety, and a drizzle of achievement anxiety. It’s the parent’s problem and ‘the heck with the child’s feelings’. ‘Overparenting’, Acocella writes, ‘is the subject of a number of recent books, and they deplore it in the strongest possible terms’. Research evidence debunks baby DVDs (e.g. ‘Baby Mozart’, ‘Baby Einstein’), kids’ antibacterial hand gels, the US’s US$46b per annum tutoring industry much of it servicing pre-elementary children, excessive extracurricular activities, consultants who pre-manage and prepare college applications, closed circuit TV monitoring study activities, etc. The root cause of overparenting is ‘transfer of the parent’s identity to the child’. And though ‘the average baby’s environment provides all the stimulus he or she needs’, overparenting parents think more is better. However stimulation’s ‘primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world’. Insufficient trial-and-error learning literally shrinks nervous systems. The message? I think it’s that in parenting, like most or all human endeavours, the middle ground is preferable to either extreme. But I suggest you click this link and read the article yourself. It’s lengthy but worth it.