by Alvin Rosenfeld, MD and Nicole Wise

King Low Heywood
February 26 & 28, 2001

INTRODUCTION

What I want to discuss today is that "Hyper-parenting" is not something "bad" parents do. Rather, it is how many good parents are raising children. That is because– perhaps inadvertently – hyper-parenting has become the prescribed way to raise children in middle and upper middle class families. Hyper-Parenting, and its logical consequence – over-scheduled families— have transmitted the belief that within every parent is the power -- and obligation -- to craft the perfect childhood for their kids – one that will guarantee a successful adulthood in the impossibly competitive new e-world.

It is a philosophy built upon the belief that the right possessions and enrichment activities, combined with regular practice and intense parental guidance will enable every one of us to raise a perfect kid who, by definition, will get into Harvard, Yale, Duke, UVa, Stanford, and Princeton, and thereafter, will lead a life of fame and fortune. Children not given these enrichment opportunities will end up hopelessly behind, losers not winners.

As a parenting method, hyper-parenting is harming our families. It keeps parents’ lives frenetic, stops kids from becoming self-reliant, and may also contribute to the large numbers of children being diagnosed as ADD and depressed, and to the many adolescents who give up and get involved with drugs, alcohol, and premature sex.

B. History of the Problem:

The social trends that have made hyper-parenting so prevalent are complex. But hyper-parenting seems connected to profound changes in the family in just the past 100 years. To understand what hyper-parenting is about, we must appreciate these profound changes in our family lives.

For millennia, the family was a mutually co-operative, productive unit where every person, whatever their age, contributed to the group’s stability and prosperity. In this system, children’s labor was essential, for instance in gathering eggs or milking the cows. The Chinese had a saying; "No man will remain poor for long if he has many sons. No man will remain rich for long if he has few sons."

Starting with the Social Security Act in 1935, the outlawing of child labor in 1938, and accelerating with our recent enormous prosperity, many parents are producing enough surplus wealth not to need children’s financial support in old age. Instead, children get inheritances that they and their siblings can fight over. So rather than children being the parent’s greatest economic asset, they have become the family’s greatest financial liability. Children don’t contribute anymore. They just cost! Which is why now the question we repeatedly hear asked is, "Do you know how much it costs to raise a child?"

Today, family life is built on consumption -- not production -- combined with the emotional relationships and the affection that develops between family members. Unfortunately, while families need affection, mutual respect, and compromise so everybody feels they are getting something, hyper-parenting has insinuated resentment into everyday life, which is not good for anyone.

Four other seemingly unrelated recent, developments have fueled this trend. First, we are the oldest, most educated generation of parents ever. When it came to raising our families, we put into it that same energetic intensity that enabled us to accomplish so many other things in our professional lives. But raising children is not like writing a dissertation, or putting together a marketing plan. It requires a different, relatively low tech, not always logical yet emotionally rich, skill set.

Second, the media proliferated. Before the explosive growth in magazine-format news programs, the word "parenting" was unknown. Today, expert-parenting information bombards us in dozens of magazines and on radio and TV. All of it is delivered with the voice of authority. It makes us anxious because experts maintain that only if we follow their sage, supposedly scientific advice precisely will we finally parent correctly. That makes us doubt our natural, gut instincts, which are the low tech tools we most need to parent well.

While magazines say that, of course we ought to let our kids be kids, in aggregate their stories insinuate the opposite. They tell us that that without Baby Einstein our children will never master math, and on and on. They actually suggest, hyper-parent or else. So we feel pressured to sign our kid up for one more activity.

What was new in what Nicole Wise and I detected was that Americans were being assaulted with a continuous pressure to plan, enrich, and do this important job the one, precisely right way. It began before parents conceived, continued through pregnancy, infancy, early childhood, and all the school years that followed. To us, these were all parts of a single phenomenon,

HYPER-PARENTING.

Hyper-Parenting contained a new, destructive emphasis. Dr. Spock had said that since anxiety brings out the worst in everyone, the one thing a parenting expert could do was to reduce parental anxiety. That is why he urged parents to trust themselves, beginning his book with, "You know more than you think you do."

Contemporary hyper-parenting advice -- in magazines, newspapers, on television and the radio -- carries an entirely different tone, one of urgency. The message now is, "You know so little and if you don't come up to speed quickly by listening to my sage advice, you and your child are very likely to fall hopelessly behind the rest of the parents who are listening and applying this "hot off the press" information right now, as we speak!!!!!"

Third, though it seemed impossible to imagine for those of us who came of age in the flower child years, the 1980s saw society become even more materialistic and market-driven. "Stuff" would solve emotional dilemmas. Child rearing information focused parental attention on products and services to build the perfect child. Parents became convinced that all this stuff was needed to raise our kids in the new, accelerated fashion.

The fourth development spurring hyper-parenting involved significant technological advances that altered the emotional focus, of pregnancy. In generations past, only in the last days or weeks before birth did mothers began to think of the fetus as a child. But with the Doppler stethoscope and ultrasounds that allow parents-to-be to see their fetuses sucking their tiny thumbs and kicking their little legs, parents began to bond with them immediately. In 2001, we know exactly what is happening at what week in pregnancy.

Mothers-to-be used to be indulged with pickles and ice cream whenever they wanted them; today, pregnant women are asked to consider not only whether, like 3 stiff martinis, particular foods harm an embryo, but also whether they are actually good for the developing fetus! His majesty the fetus has become the centerpiece of pregnancy. Martyrdom is now the model for good mothering. Rather than treating pregnant women as special, in a vulnerable situation, today mothers are simply better or worse, more or less devoted, vessels for carrying the special being.

All this new, and very helpful technology also created a conviction that we have enormous control over pregnancy. Today, parents are made to feel responsible for everything. Watch every mouthful of food you eat. Ask "Is this good for my baby," advises the best seller in the field What to Expect When You are Expecting, now read by an astonishing 93% of pregnant women.

So if anything goes wrong and the baby is born imperfect, it just might be those M & M's you ate. With this potential guilt and anxiety, Parents are becoming very careful. They also are being made anxious at the very time when they most need to have their confidence in themselves bolstered. They ought to read our book as an antidote to what to expect.

Contemporary hyper-parenting begins with this extreme vigilance in pregnancy; like a crystal that retains the same fundamental shape as it grows larger, the process continues in the same anxious, frenetic shape, expressed in different forms at different developmental levels as children mature.

Along with this pregnancy anxiety came a linear view of child development, one unsupported by much reliable evidence. The contention was that if a child did something earlier than peers, he or she would keep that lead. The child who learned how to read early would ultimately score highest on the verbal SAT. A child who excelled at a sport early would star later. None of which is, in fact, true. So parents tried to accelerate child development.

C. Who Does Hyper-parenting and over-scheduling Affect?

Hyper-parenting and over-scheduling children is what most of us mothers and fathers do. We do it because we sincerely want what’s best for our kids and are willing to do whatever it takes to give them the best possible shot at success in life. For millennia, parents felt an obligation to feed, clothe, and educate their children. If you did those, you were a "good" parent. Times have changed. We may be the first generation that also feels that responsible for assuring our child’s emotional well-being, self-esteem, and future career success.

D. Why It Exists:

Contrary to positions we may have trained for years to get, we come to this job of being parents with no experience. Many, if not most, of us are insecure. We worry that we just might not have inside ourselves the love and skills we need to raise children right. Furthermore, many of us feel we were under-parented. Our parents were more concerned with their parties, clubs, relatives, and friends. We were simply appendages, and we swore to do it differently with our kids.

There also is a notion today that a child’s success –no longer defined as becoming a decent, good person, but as being a standout in public achievements (like getting the lead in the school play or being placed in the top math group) -- is the measure of how good a parent is. We want to be good parents so badly that we have changed the most competitive adult sport from golf to parenting.

We know that prematurity is bad for infants – yet we applaud it in children! If our three-year-old is ahead of the pack, reciting the alphabet perfectly or riding a two-wheeler, many of us see it as a sign of giftedness. It means that we have taken an early lead in competitive parenting. We also take a child’s failure to excel at even a simple developmental milestone, like crawling or learning to read at five, as a sign of personal failure. We must have ignored some crucial obligation. We need to hire tutors or to get further enrichment or find some solution to the problem, which may not be a problem at all. Otherwise, we are being really remiss as parents. We secretly want a baby Einstein, but most of us would panic if we had one: Although Einstein the adult was a genius, the baby Albert Einstein seemed to be slow learner who talked late and did poorly at school. Today he’d probably be on Ritalin.

E. Examples from Everyday Life:

Contemporary parenting advice also dehumanizes our children and us in a subtle way. Since the prescribed, scientific child-rearing program is a foolproof system, "a" invariably creates "b", which always creates "c", we are encouraged to see "enrichment" as software, and our children as computers. The hyper-parenting advice model teaches us to distrust our instincts and to aim for precise scientific calibration, as if it were better. Supposedly helpful products may actually put distance between our child and us. (Small example of ducky thermometer.)

The hyper-parenting method, with its inherent belief that we can control what our kids become has gotten us to strange places. Today, we plan to plan to get pregnant. We enrich the fetal environment. Georgia’s Governor Zell signed a bill to send every newborn in the state home with a Mozart CD, because he believed the latest "research" that listening to that kind of music enhances mathematical ability.

If that were true, Governor Zell would have been right and forward thinking. But like much that passes for scientific fact today, this research has recently come into question, since the Mozart effect, which has sold literally millions of dollars of dubiously "educational" products, is questionable, at best! That research was done on college students.

Furthermore, does any data show that Mozart is better than Willy Nelson or, for that matter, Smashmouth?

Another example: My wife, who is a pediatrician, and I, are strong advocates of breast feeding. Yet we recognize that similarly questionable research has gotten some lactation consultants urging mothers to breastfeed – even if they had great difficulty with it or intense, personal discomfort with the idea. Otherwise, they warn, new Mom's would be depriving their newborns of precisely 8 IQ points. Does it really help any infant to experience an anxious mother who hates the idea of breastfeeding but does it out of a deep moral sense of duty, to God and country? This absolutist viewpoint, which emphasizes an action rather than its emotional meaning and the relationship between the two participants, has gotten lactation consultants labeled, in a New Yorker article by Wendy Wasserstein, as "nipple Nazis."

Over-scheduling children and hyper-parenting has gotten four year olds, kids too young to understand the rules of the games, let alone master the complex physical challenges of controlling a ball and running down a field, or even which goal they are aiming at, enrolled in competitive leagues.

Today, it makes a weird sort of sense to schedule our kids’ piano lessons at 7 o’clock in the morning so we can fit in even more enrichment into our afternoons and evenings.

In education, we act as if no child can be average. Our children can be either gifted or learning disabled.

It has convinced many adults that a ten-year-old’s ice hockey practice, scheduled for 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, should take precedence over, say, a candlelight dinner with our cherished spouse, not once, but every week.

And it has gotten high school students and their parents busy shaping the teen-agers' resumes so they fit what elite colleges are supposedly looking for. It makes kids into frauds. One ninth-grader told me that her aunt told her to volunteer to teach art to the deaf because it would look good on her college application. What would she feel like if she complied?

EXAMPLE: I asked a 14 year old boy who was a very good athlete but a so-so student what it was like to excel at sports, expecting to hear how good it felt. Instead, he said that it was nice in some ways, but he would prefer just playing ball with some of his friends, no adults around. "Why?" I asked. "I'm judged in school work," he replied. "I'm judged when I play ball for my school and travel teams. I just want some place where I'm not judged!"

Like this boy, kids are constantly rushed from organized activity to activity, and are judged at each of them. Many of us have outrageously expensive wooden play sets, and now of course, trampolines, in our backyards. But whose kids have time to play on them? What does hurrying and over-scheduling tell our kids that we expect them to become? Hyperactive, over-achieving, over-scheduled workaholics! Down time is wasted time. They can never escape the stress. Would you buy into that kind of life or would you, like a senior in a prestigious NYC high school I saw, start to ask why you are doing it and find yourself too depressed to get out of bed? Oh, by the way, he is first in his class and is being recruited for every prestigious college in America.

Since family life no longer leaves children with concrete ways to repay a parent’s devotion and sacrifice – after all they cannot contribute labor to the family finances -- kids with the ability often try to repay parents with achievement -- good grades, athletic accomplishment, or both. But some can not, and get despondent as a result – "In my family, it’s Harvard, Yale, or nothing. And I just can’t measure up!" one boy told me.

Others do win the brass ring and get to the Ivies. Some break down in the first year. Because often they are left confused about whom they are as individuals and what they themselves want, whether they accomplished all this for us or for themselves. For years they ignored the stress and left no time to relax or enjoy themselves. They felt they had been duplicitous, sucking up to teachers who wrote college recommendations, doing community service to help themselves – not the poor or handicapped,-- and that getting to the elite schools had involved never saying what they really thought or felt. They delay the emotional breakdown until they have the prize they have sought for so long and feel completely lost.

Even the elite schools are decrying the process. Harvard’s admissions department recently published a paper urging students admitted to Harvard to take off time, even a year or two, so they could figure out who they really are and what they want to do with their lives. What is even frightening is the number of 20 to 40 year olds my colleagues and I see who have done it all right, succeeded, and then are lost.

F. The Harm It Causes:

Hyper-parenting is damaging children and parents. This constant enrichment and rushing gives children a subliminal message, "If I am as good as my parents make a point of telling me I am, how come I need constant self-improvement? I must not be very good at all." So they either try to get away from us -- and bury themselves in Gameboy -- or in the teen-aged years give up and drop out. I think this contributes to teen-aged depression, substance abuse, and sex problems.

Think about how this pressure looks from a kid's vantage point. What can a child gather from being judged on how fast he grows and achieves milestones as infants, to how early she learns to read, to how good they are at tennis or ballet or creative writing? How would you feel if you were scrutinized and graded on every action you took? Have you ever had a micro-managing boss? What reaction did it evoke in you?

This culture of get the gold is all around us. I must emphasize it to get all of us to focus on the pressures we – and our children -- are exposed to. Magazine, newspapers, radio, and television shows celebrate precocity as if it were the goal. Subliminally, children are urged to aim for premature, competitive accomplishment, and parents are urged to push them there. The media stage a big hoopla about the twelve-year-old national Little League stars or some Internet whiz kid. They create an atmosphere where winning early is everything, and then are shocked when a little girl, only seven years old, one who has been followed for weeks by a gaggle of reporters and has been celebrated in magazines everywhere, crashes and burns in the plane she is trying to fly cross country. That was Jessica Dubroff.

Let's look at contemporary kids’ athletics for a moment. Hobbies and passions are great. Athletics and physical fitness can make important contributions to children’s health and self-esteem. They give children – some of whom are not such splendid students-- another place to feel competent. But in becoming so serious, in subjecting everything our kids do to scrutiny and judgment, in giving a high or low score to their every move, kids’ sports show how we adults have lost sight of an essential truth.

Children are, by definition, immature and unfinished.

Childhood is a preparation, not a full performance.

They are not supposed to excel, or even be good, at anything. That's why they are learning.

We have destroyed so much that was good in athletics in allowing hobbies and passions to become full time, unpaid jobs. Some coaches tempt parents with the hope that their beloved child might just get a college scholarship. ……Perhaps. But only 1% of kids who start competing end up getting scholarships. What of those who do get them? Almost none make the pro's. So their lives will depend on their education. But some never get that either because they practice so ceaselessly -- which accounts for Emerge magazine's Hall of Shame issues (the 50 schools that graduate the fewest black scholarship athletes – 13 at each school -- all graduated 0%.).

What ought to be fun and relaxing, becomes a full time, anxiety ridden job. That is why some kids on athletic scholarships who have the means, give them up because they want to become, say, a pediatrician and can not do school work on a six hour a day diving practice schedule.

An even more destructive idea is hidden in the cheers and applause. Take last year’s Olympics. They had lots of positives. But they also taught our children subliminally, without ever saying it, that in our society’s assessment, being extreme to win is good! There is one, and only one, real winner. Everyone else, except maybe numbers two and three, are absolutely nothing, inconsequential, real losers.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently warned parents and doctors about the dangers of girls competing in demanding, incredibly competitive sports. They strongly advised that children play multiple sports and specialize in one only after puberty. But will anyone listen? Should we be concerned that competitive gymnasts – like the ones we applauded in the Sydney Olympics – have physical development that is significantly delayed? They get their first menstrual period a year or two later than their non-gymnast schoolmates. Are they short because they are selected for that or because of what the sport does to them? No one knows for sure. Should we be alarmed by the long list of injuries and surgeries each girl has had? It’s the price for competing. Should we accept it without question because they "are going for the gold"?

The Olympics had another insidious, unspoken message. They said that everything should be sacrificed for a peak experience. Most of us have peak experiences in our lives ... Maybe every decade or two! If life is about the super-highs, no wonder so many people are seeking cheap, but costly thrills, and find everyday life, and time alone, boring. Use cocaine, climb Everest. That's really being alive. (Hemingway quote)

Not only does the "succeed at all costs" mentality diminish the meaning of our everyday lives. It also contradicts other values we supposedly hold dear. If there is only one right way to succeed, where do cooperation, generosity, and kindness fit in? Should schools be teaching children primarily tooth and nail competitiveness?

All this emphasis on winning, on accomplishments in activities, makes the most important factor – our relationship with our children and the quiet, unplanned time it takes to develop -- less important. What is wealth without relationship? As a very wealthy friend of mine -- on his I don't know what number marriage – said, "what you get with money if you don't have a good relationship is being miserable in much nicer surroundings."

Is there really only one winner, one good psychiatrist, great teacher, or great cardiologist in the world? Is there only one pilot worth flying with, one successful investment banker, industrialist, ski instructor, or painter? If there is, most of us are in desperate trouble. But it is a big world with room for lots of people to play important, valuable roles. So why do we push an idea that there is only one real winner and, often, only one right way of winning at life?

No. Each individual needs to, and can in our very affluent country, find his or her personal niche. Princeton is great for some students. OSU is far better for someone interested in aeronautics. Sure you ought to have ambitions for your child and the expectation that they will make something of their lives. But if we also give our children the sense that we know who they are and trust that they eventually will find a good place in life for themselves, we maximize the odds of this happening. If we say, through actions and gestures, that we are very nervous about their futures, we may create a self-fulfilling prophecy and diminish the odds that they will do well.

The winning is everything mentality has another flaw. It devalues inner life, creativity, and imagination. Kids need free time, to think, to create an inner life, to hear their inner voice, the one that makes them draw this unique picture or to write that unusual story. They need to just veg out. They need time to grouse with friends, about us. (Tom Sawyer)

2. There is a solution that allows you and them to thrive

Leave unscheduled time. Everyone needs it. Cut back 5-7% in scheduled activities. That's all you need to recapture sanity. Relax and enjoy your child, your life, and your unscheduled time. Be unproductive sometimes. Spend time when you have no real expectations. Play Monopoly, shoot hoops (with no coaching), draw pictures, take a walk, or watch a movie. Maybe you can even smell the roses once in a while. Make character and relationship count. Live your values.

And do things that have no product that has to be produced at the end other than the joy of spending time together. That gives the child a message that you like the kid as he or she is – "No need for clever conversation," as the Billy Joel song goes. "I love you just the way you are." I, your Mom or Dad, love you even when you are not performing. This truly bolsters a child's self-esteem and is the greatest gift we can give our children, the deep, inner conviction that they don’t have to perform for us to love and cherish them. Once upon a time, that was called "unconditional love." We all, adult or child, still need it.

3. Conclusion:

There Is No Single, Right Way To Parent. Every family is unique and must find its own way in the world - its own values and priorities, its own strengths, its own interests. So disregard the experts who believe they have the one right answer. With some caveats, we should all feel free to raise our children our own way - but in order to figure out what that way is, each of us needs to invest some time and energy into learning what our lives are about, what we believe in, and what we value. Rush a little less; reflect a little more. [Please see "12 Ways to Avoid the Hyper-Parenting Trap" also posted on this website.]

Hyper-parenting and over-scheduling take our focus off what is crucial. We have so much to be pleased about. We live in affluent times, wake up in safe neighborhoods, have a good educational system, and have food, shelter, and an opportunity for meaningful relationships and lives. Maybe it is high time we started appreciating our and our children's enormous good fortune.

THE END