Psychological Immunity (ZZ) (转载)# Parenting - 为人父母
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【 以下文字转载自 Jan2010_baby 俱乐部 】
发信人: powerwave (YY, My heart!), 信区: Jan2010_baby
标 题: Psychological Immunity (ZZ)
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Sep 7 16:23:21 2011, 美东)
This is a great article to read:
Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says
. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in
that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains,
this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground,
but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give
her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then
briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps
even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and
will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later
in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with
an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure
out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips
on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before
going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second,
but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In
many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents
never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she
doesn’t need protection.
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against
what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a
Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’
t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long
ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “
You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond
to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle.
I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get
to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of
one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead
of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to
drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no
experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-
perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to
unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the
publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became
an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring
, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported
receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups”
because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go
their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety
for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don
’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”
Which might be how people like my patient Lizzie end up in therapy. “You
can have the best parenting in the world and you’ll still go through
periods where you’re not happy,” Jeff Blume, a family psychologist with a
busy practice in Los Angeles, told me when I spoke to him recently. “A kid
needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to grow up
and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every
day.”
But that’s a big if. Blume believes that many of us today don’t really
want our kids to leave, because we rely on them in various ways to fill the
emotional holes in our own lives. Kindlon and Mogel both told me the same
thing. Yes, we devote inordinate amounts of time, energy, and resources to
our children, but for whose benefit?
“We’re confusing our own needs with our kids’ needs and calling it good
parenting,” Blume said, letting out a sigh. I asked him why he sighed. (
This is what happens when two therapists have a conversation.) “It’s sad
to watch,” he explained. “I can’t tell you how often I have to say to
parents that they’re putting too much emphasis on their kids’ feelings
because of their own issues. If a therapist is telling you to pay less
attention to your kid’s feelings, you know something has gotten way of out
of whack.”
Last October, in an article for the New York Times Magazine, Renée Bacher,
a mother in Louisiana, described the emptiness she felt as she sent her
daughter off to college in the Northeast. Bacher tried getting support from
other mother friends, who, it turned out, were too busy picking up a
refrigerator for a child’s college dorm room or rushing home to turn off a
high-schooler’s laptop. And while Bacher initially justified her mother-hen
actions as being in her daughter’s best interest—coming up with excuses
to vet her daughter’s roommate or staying too long in her daughter’s dorm
room under the guise of helping her move in—eventually she concluded: “As
with all Helicopter Parenting, this was about me.”
Bacher isn’t unusual. Wendy Mogel says that colleges have had so much
trouble getting parents off campus after freshman orientation that school
administrators have had to come up with strategies to boot them. At the
University of Chicago, she said, they’ve now added a second bagpipe
processional at the end of opening ceremonies—the first is to lead the
students to another event, the second to usher the parents away from their
kids. The University of Vermont has hired “parent bouncers,” whose job is
to keep hovering parents at bay. She said that many schools are appointing
an unofficial “dean of parents” just to wrangle the grown-ups. Despite the
spate of articles in recent years exploring why so many people in their 20s
seem reluctant to grow up, the problem may be less that kids are refusing
to separate and individuate than that their parents are resisting doing so.
“There’s a difference between being loved and being constantly monitored,
” Dan Kindlon told me. And yet, he admitted, even he struggles. “I’m
about to become an empty-nester,” he said, “and sometimes I feel like I’d
burn my kids’ college applications just to have somebody to hang around
with. We have less community nowadays—we’re more isolated as adults, more
people are divorced—and we genuinely like spending time with our kids. We
hope they’ll think of us as their best friends, which is different from
parents who wanted their kids to appreciate them, but didn’t need them to
be their pals. But many of us text with our kids several times a day, and
would miss it if it didn’t happen. So instead of being peeved that they ask
for help with the minutiae of their days, we encourage it.”
Long work hours don’t help. “If you’ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with
your kid,” Kindlon asked, “would you rather make your kid mad at you by
arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don
’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even
though it’s better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past
generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more
from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is
where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness
(making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
“We want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them—the
banker who’s happy, the surgeon who’s happy,” Barry Schwartz, the
Swarthmore social scientist, told me, even though those professions “might
not actually make them happy.” At least for parents of a certain
demographic (and if you’re reading this article, you’re likely among them)
, “we’re not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day
with a smile on their faces,” Schwartz says. “They’re happy, but we’re
not. Even though we say what we want most for our kids is their happiness,
and we’ll do everything we can to help them achieve that, it’s unclear
where parental happiness ends and our children’s happiness begins.”
His comment reminded me of a conversation I’d just had with a camp director
when I inquired about the program. She was going down the list of
activities for my child’s age group, and when she got to basketball, T-ball
, and soccer, she quickly added, “But of course, it’s all noncompetitive.
We don’t encourage competition.” I had to laugh: all of these kids being
shunted away from “competition” as if it were kryptonite. Not to get too
shrink-y, but could this be a way for parents to work out their ambivalence
about their own competitive natures?
It may be this question—and our unconscious struggle with it—that accounts
for the scathing reaction to Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother, earlier this year. Chua’s efforts “not to raise a soft, entitled
child” were widely attacked on blogs and mommy listservs as abusive, yet
that didn’t stop the book from spending several months on the New York
Times best-seller list. Sure, some parents might have read it out of pure
voyeurism, but more likely, Chua’s book resonated so powerfully because she
isn’t so different from her critics. She may have been obsessed with her
kids’ success at the expense of their happiness—but many of today’s
parents who are obsessed with their kids’ happiness share Chua’s drive,
just wrapped in a prettier package. Ours is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too
approach, a desire for high achievement without the sacrifice and struggle
that this kind of achievement often requires. When the Tiger Mom looked
unsparingly at her parental contradictions, perhaps she made the rest of us
squirm because we were forced to examine our own.
Chua, says Wendy Mogel, “was admitting in such a candid way what loads of
people think but just don’t own up to.” In her practice, Mogel meets many
parents who let kids off the hook for even basic, simple chores so they can
spend more time on homework. Are these parents being too lenient (letting
the chores slide), or too hard-core (teaching that good grades are more
important than being a responsible family member)? Mogel and Dan Kindlon
agree that whatever form it takes—whether the fixation is happiness or
success—parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning
generational narcissism that’s hurting our kids.
A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism
Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has
written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’
t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods
but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim
“Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but
every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything
he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he
gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his
performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to
Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s
among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what
starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of
oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like
narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have
increased right along with self-esteem.
Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with
self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger,
because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their
parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose
and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their
children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view
of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling
good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they
’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says.
“They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They
get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because
their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told
by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if
they don’t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture
where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and
makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance.
Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get
paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior
performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world
and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems
solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And
they’re right—they don’t.”
Last month, I spoke to a youth soccer coach in Washington, D.C. A former
competitive college athlete and now a successful financier, he told me that
when he first learned of the youth league’s rules—including no score-
keeping—he found them “ridiculous.”
How are the kids going to learn? he thought. He valued his experience as an
athlete, through which he had been forced to deal with defeat. “I used to
think, If we don’t keep score, we’re going to have a bunch of wusses out
there. D.C. can be very PC, and I thought this was going too far.”
Eventually, though, he came around to the new system, because he realized
that some kids would be “devastated” if they got creamed by a large margin
. “We don’t want them to feel bad,” he said. “We don’t want kids to
feel any pressure.” (When I told Wendy Mogel about this, she literally
screamed through the phone line, “Please let them be devastated at age 6
and not have their first devastation be in college! Please, please, please
let them be devastated many times on the soccer field!”) I told the coach
this sounded goofy, given that these kids attend elite, competitive schools
like Georgetown Day School or Sidwell Friends, where President Obama’s
daughters go. They’re being raised by parents who are serious about getting
their kids into Harvard and Yale. Aren’t these kids exposed to a lot of
pressure? And besides, how is not keeping score protecting anyone, since, as
he conceded, the kids keep score on their own anyway? When the score is
close, the coach explained, it’s less of an issue. But blowouts are a
problem.
He told me about a game against a very talented team. “We lost 10–5, and
the other team dominated it. Our kids were very upset. They said, ‘We got
killed!’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about? You guys beat the spread
! The team we beat last week lost 14–1!’ The kids thought about this for a
second and then were like, ‘You’re right, we were great! We rule!’ They
felt so much better, because I turned it around for them into something
positive. When you get killed and there’s no positive spin, the kids think
they’re failures. It damages their self-esteem.”
At the end of the season, the league finds a way to “honor each child”
with a trophy. “They’re kind of euphemistic,” the coach said of the
awards, “but they’re effective.” The Spirit Award went to “the
troublemaker who always talks and doesn’t pay attention, so we spun it into
his being very ‘spirited,’” he said. The Most Improved Player Award went
to “the kid who has not an ounce of athleticism in his body, but he tries
hard.” The Coaches’ Award went to “the kids who were picking daisies, and
the only thing we could think to say about them is that they showed up on
time. What would that be, the Most Prompt Award? That seemed lame. So we
called it the Coaches’ Award.” There’s also a Most Valuable Player Award,
but the kid who deserved it three seasons in a row got it only after the
first season, “because we wanted other kids to have a chance to get it.”
The coach acknowledged that everyone knew who the real MVP was. But, he said
, “this is a more collaborative approach versus the way I grew up as a
competitive athlete, which was a selfish, Me Generation orientation.”
I asked Wendy Mogel if this gentler approach really creates kids who are
less self-involved, less “Me Generation.” No, she said. Just the opposite:
parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they
deserve special treatment. “A principal at an elementary school told me
that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she
said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so
much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in
the name of our children’s self-esteem.”
Paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might
actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less
amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing”
her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that?
Instead of acknowledging their daughter’s flaws, her parents, hoping to
make her feel secure, denied them. “I’m bad at math,” Lizzie said she
once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently
more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. “You’re not bad
at math,” her parents responded. “You just have a different learning style
. We’ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you
naturally understand.”
With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still
knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn’t. “I didn’t
have a different learning style,” she told me. “I just suck at math! But
in my family, you’re never bad at anything. You’re just better at some
things than at others. If I ever say I’m bad at something, my parents say,
‘Oh, honey, no you’re not!’”
Today, Wendy Mogel says, “every child is either learning-disabled, gifted,
or both—there’s no curve left, no average.” When she first started doing
psychological testing, in the 1980s, she would dread having to tell parents
that their child had a learning disability. But now, she says, parents would
prefer to believe that their child has a learning disability that explains
any less-than-stellar performance, rather than have their child be perceived
as simply average. “They believe that ‘average’ is bad for self-esteem.
”
The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content
a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant
accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to
Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment
and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities
that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.
Earlier this year, I met with a preschool teacher who told me that in her
observation, many kids aren’t learning these skills anymore. She declined
to be named, for fear of alienating parents who expect teachers to agree
with their child-rearing philosophy, so I’ll call her Jane.
Let’s say, Jane explained, that a mother is over by the sign-in sheet, and
her son has raced off to play. Suddenly the mother sees her kid fighting
over a toy with a classmate. Her child has the dump truck, and the other kid
grabs it. Her child yells, “No! That’s mine!” The two argue while the
other kid continues to play with the truck, until finally the other kid says
, “This one is yours!” and tosses her child a crappy one. Realizing the
other kid won’t budge, her child says, “Okay,” and plays with the crappy
toy.
“Her kid is fine,” Jane said. “But the mother will come running over and
say, ‘But that’s not fair! Little Johnnie had the big truck, and you can’
t just grab it away. It was his turn.’ Well, the kids were fine with it.
Little Johnnie was resilient! We do teach the kids not to grab, but it’s
going to happen sometimes, and kids need to learn how to work things out
themselves. The kid can cope with adversity, but the parent is reeling, and
I end up spending my time calming down the parent while her kid is off
happily playing.”
Jane told me that because parents are so sensitive to how every interaction
is processed, sometimes she feels like she’s walking on eggshells while
trying to do her job. If, for instance, a couple of kids are doing something
they’re not supposed to—name-calling, climbing on a table, throwing sand
—her instinct would be to say “Hey, knock it off, you two!” But, she says
, she’d be fired for saying that, because you have to go talk with the kids
, find out what they were feeling, explain what else they could do with that
feeling other than call somebody a “poopy face” or put sand in somebody’
s hair, and then help them mutually come up with a solution.
“We try to be so correct in our language and our discipline that we forget
the true message we’re trying to send—which is, don’t name-call and don’
t throw the sand!” she said. “But by the time we’re done ‘talking it
through,’ the kids don’t want to play anymore, a rote apology is made, and
they’ll do it again five minutes later, because they kind of got a pass.
‘Knock it off’ works every time, because they already know why it’s wrong
, and the message is concise and clear. But to keep my job, I have to go and
explore their feelings.”
Another teacher I spoke with, a 58-year-old mother of grown children who has
been teaching kindergarten for 17 years, told me she feels that parents are
increasingly getting in the way of their children’s development. “I see
the way their parents treat them,” she said, “and there’s a big
adjustment when they get into my class. It’s good for them to realize that
they aren’t the center of the world, that sometimes other people’s
feelings matter more than theirs at a particular moment—but it only helps
if they’re getting the same limit-setting at home. If not, they become
impulsive, because they’re not thinking about anybody else.”
This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her
job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when
actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get
ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our
day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and
the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s
opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me
tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year,
parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t
she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an
answer, because the answer is never no!’”
Barry Schwartz, at Swarthmore, believes that well-meaning parents give their
kids so much choice on a daily basis that the children become not just
entitled, but paralyzed. “The ideology of our time is that choice is good
and more choice is better,” he said. “But we’ve found that’s not true.”
In one study Schwartz and his team conducted, kids were randomly divided
into two groups and then asked to draw a picture. Kids in one group were
asked to choose a marker to use from among three; kids in the other group
were asked to choose from among 24 markers. Afterward, when the pictures
were evaluated by an elementary-school art teacher who did not know which
group had produced which pictures, the drawings rated the “worst” were by
and large created by kids in the 24-marker group. Then, in a second part of
the experiment, the researchers had the kids pick one marker from their set
to keep as a gift. Once the kids had chosen, the researchers tried to
persuade them to give back their marker in exchange for other gifts. The
kids who had chosen from 24 markers did this far more easily than those who
had chosen from only three markers. According to Schwartz, this suggests
that the kids who had fewer markers to select from not only focused better
on their drawings, but also committed more strongly to their original gift
choice.
What does this have to do with parenting? Kids feel safer and less anxious
with fewer choices, Schwartz says; fewer options help them to commit to some
things and let go of others, a skill they’ll need later in life.
“Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one
thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options
open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your
kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices,
but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want,
you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100
percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives
that way as adults, too.” He sees this in students who graduate from
Swarthmore. “They can’t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest
or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years
hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don’t understand is
that they’re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for
the good-enough answer.”
The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are
entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from
Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should
be another option.” Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are
creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she
describes as “handicapped royalty.”
As a parent, I’m all too familiar with this. I never said to my son, “Here
’s your grilled-cheese sandwich.” I’d say, “Do you want the grilled
cheese or the fish sticks?” On a Saturday, I’d say, “Do you want to go to
the park or the beach?” Sometimes, if my preschooler was having a meltdown
over the fact that we had to go to the grocery store, instead of swooping
him up and wrestling him into the car, I’d give him a choice: “Do you want
to go to Trader Joe’s or Ralphs?” (Once we got to the market, it was “Do
you want the vanilla yogurt or the peach?”) But after I’d set up this
paradigm, we couldn’t do anything unless he had a choice. One day when I
said to him, “Please put your shoes on, we’re going to Trader Joe’s,” he
replied matter-of-factly: “What are my other choices?” I told him there
were no other choices—we needed something from Trader Joe’s. “But it’s
not fair if I don’t get to decide too!” he pleaded ingenuously. He’d come
to expect unlimited choice.
When I was my son’s age, I didn’t routinely get to choose my menu, or
where to go on weekends—and the friends I asked say they didn’t, either.
There was some negotiation, but not a lot, and we were content with that. We
didn’t expect so much choice, so it didn’t bother us not to have it until
we were older, when we were ready to handle the responsibility it requires.
But today, Twenge says, “we treat our kids like adults when they’re
children, and we infantilize them when they’re 18 years old.”
Like most of my peers, I’d always thought that providing choices to young
children gave them a valuable sense of agency, and allowed them to feel more
in control. But Barry Schwartz’s research shows that too much choice makes
people more likely to feel depressed and out of control.
It makes sense. I remember how overwhelmed and anxious I felt that day I
visited the parenting aisle at Barnes & Noble and was confronted by all
those choices. How much easier things would be if there weren’t hundreds of
parenting books and listservs and experts that purport to have the answers,
when the truth is, there is no single foolproof recipe for raising a child.
And yet, underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we
just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our
kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us
happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters,
it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for
different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very
different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can
expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to
protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection
and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these
things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy
childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up.
Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some
letting go.
As Wendy Mogel likes to say, “Our children are not our masterpieces.”
Indeed. Recently, I noticed that one of my patients had, after a couple of
sessions of therapy, started to seem uncomfortable. When I probed a bit, he
admitted that he felt ambivalent about being in treatment. I asked why.
“My parents would feel like failures if they knew I was here,” he
explained. “At the same time, maybe they’d be glad I’m here, because they
just want me to be happy. So I’m not sure if they’d be relieved that I’
ve come here to be happier, or disappointed that I’m not already happy.”
He paused and then asked, “Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded like a therapist, and then I answered like a parent who can imagine
her son grappling with that very same question one day. “Yes,” I said to
my patient. “I know exactly what you mean.”
发信人: powerwave (YY, My heart!), 信区: Jan2010_baby
标 题: Psychological Immunity (ZZ)
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Sep 7 16:23:21 2011, 美东)
This is a great article to read:
Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says
. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in
that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains,
this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground,
but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give
her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then
briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps
even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and
will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later
in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with
an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure
out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips
on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before
going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second,
but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In
many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents
never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she
doesn’t need protection.
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against
what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a
Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’
t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long
ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “
You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond
to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle.
I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get
to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of
one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead
of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to
drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no
experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-
perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to
unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the
publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became
an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring
, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported
receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups”
because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go
their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety
for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don
’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”
Which might be how people like my patient Lizzie end up in therapy. “You
can have the best parenting in the world and you’ll still go through
periods where you’re not happy,” Jeff Blume, a family psychologist with a
busy practice in Los Angeles, told me when I spoke to him recently. “A kid
needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to grow up
and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every
day.”
But that’s a big if. Blume believes that many of us today don’t really
want our kids to leave, because we rely on them in various ways to fill the
emotional holes in our own lives. Kindlon and Mogel both told me the same
thing. Yes, we devote inordinate amounts of time, energy, and resources to
our children, but for whose benefit?
“We’re confusing our own needs with our kids’ needs and calling it good
parenting,” Blume said, letting out a sigh. I asked him why he sighed. (
This is what happens when two therapists have a conversation.) “It’s sad
to watch,” he explained. “I can’t tell you how often I have to say to
parents that they’re putting too much emphasis on their kids’ feelings
because of their own issues. If a therapist is telling you to pay less
attention to your kid’s feelings, you know something has gotten way of out
of whack.”
Last October, in an article for the New York Times Magazine, Renée Bacher,
a mother in Louisiana, described the emptiness she felt as she sent her
daughter off to college in the Northeast. Bacher tried getting support from
other mother friends, who, it turned out, were too busy picking up a
refrigerator for a child’s college dorm room or rushing home to turn off a
high-schooler’s laptop. And while Bacher initially justified her mother-hen
actions as being in her daughter’s best interest—coming up with excuses
to vet her daughter’s roommate or staying too long in her daughter’s dorm
room under the guise of helping her move in—eventually she concluded: “As
with all Helicopter Parenting, this was about me.”
Bacher isn’t unusual. Wendy Mogel says that colleges have had so much
trouble getting parents off campus after freshman orientation that school
administrators have had to come up with strategies to boot them. At the
University of Chicago, she said, they’ve now added a second bagpipe
processional at the end of opening ceremonies—the first is to lead the
students to another event, the second to usher the parents away from their
kids. The University of Vermont has hired “parent bouncers,” whose job is
to keep hovering parents at bay. She said that many schools are appointing
an unofficial “dean of parents” just to wrangle the grown-ups. Despite the
spate of articles in recent years exploring why so many people in their 20s
seem reluctant to grow up, the problem may be less that kids are refusing
to separate and individuate than that their parents are resisting doing so.
“There’s a difference between being loved and being constantly monitored,
” Dan Kindlon told me. And yet, he admitted, even he struggles. “I’m
about to become an empty-nester,” he said, “and sometimes I feel like I’d
burn my kids’ college applications just to have somebody to hang around
with. We have less community nowadays—we’re more isolated as adults, more
people are divorced—and we genuinely like spending time with our kids. We
hope they’ll think of us as their best friends, which is different from
parents who wanted their kids to appreciate them, but didn’t need them to
be their pals. But many of us text with our kids several times a day, and
would miss it if it didn’t happen. So instead of being peeved that they ask
for help with the minutiae of their days, we encourage it.”
Long work hours don’t help. “If you’ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with
your kid,” Kindlon asked, “would you rather make your kid mad at you by
arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don
’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even
though it’s better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past
generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more
from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is
where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness
(making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
“We want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them—the
banker who’s happy, the surgeon who’s happy,” Barry Schwartz, the
Swarthmore social scientist, told me, even though those professions “might
not actually make them happy.” At least for parents of a certain
demographic (and if you’re reading this article, you’re likely among them)
, “we’re not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day
with a smile on their faces,” Schwartz says. “They’re happy, but we’re
not. Even though we say what we want most for our kids is their happiness,
and we’ll do everything we can to help them achieve that, it’s unclear
where parental happiness ends and our children’s happiness begins.”
His comment reminded me of a conversation I’d just had with a camp director
when I inquired about the program. She was going down the list of
activities for my child’s age group, and when she got to basketball, T-ball
, and soccer, she quickly added, “But of course, it’s all noncompetitive.
We don’t encourage competition.” I had to laugh: all of these kids being
shunted away from “competition” as if it were kryptonite. Not to get too
shrink-y, but could this be a way for parents to work out their ambivalence
about their own competitive natures?
It may be this question—and our unconscious struggle with it—that accounts
for the scathing reaction to Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother, earlier this year. Chua’s efforts “not to raise a soft, entitled
child” were widely attacked on blogs and mommy listservs as abusive, yet
that didn’t stop the book from spending several months on the New York
Times best-seller list. Sure, some parents might have read it out of pure
voyeurism, but more likely, Chua’s book resonated so powerfully because she
isn’t so different from her critics. She may have been obsessed with her
kids’ success at the expense of their happiness—but many of today’s
parents who are obsessed with their kids’ happiness share Chua’s drive,
just wrapped in a prettier package. Ours is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too
approach, a desire for high achievement without the sacrifice and struggle
that this kind of achievement often requires. When the Tiger Mom looked
unsparingly at her parental contradictions, perhaps she made the rest of us
squirm because we were forced to examine our own.
Chua, says Wendy Mogel, “was admitting in such a candid way what loads of
people think but just don’t own up to.” In her practice, Mogel meets many
parents who let kids off the hook for even basic, simple chores so they can
spend more time on homework. Are these parents being too lenient (letting
the chores slide), or too hard-core (teaching that good grades are more
important than being a responsible family member)? Mogel and Dan Kindlon
agree that whatever form it takes—whether the fixation is happiness or
success—parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning
generational narcissism that’s hurting our kids.
A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism
Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has
written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’
t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods
but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim
“Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but
every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything
he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he
gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his
performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to
Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s
among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what
starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of
oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like
narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have
increased right along with self-esteem.
Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with
self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger,
because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their
parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose
and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their
children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view
of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling
good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they
’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says.
“They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They
get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because
their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told
by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if
they don’t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture
where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and
makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance.
Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get
paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior
performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world
and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems
solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And
they’re right—they don’t.”
Last month, I spoke to a youth soccer coach in Washington, D.C. A former
competitive college athlete and now a successful financier, he told me that
when he first learned of the youth league’s rules—including no score-
keeping—he found them “ridiculous.”
How are the kids going to learn? he thought. He valued his experience as an
athlete, through which he had been forced to deal with defeat. “I used to
think, If we don’t keep score, we’re going to have a bunch of wusses out
there. D.C. can be very PC, and I thought this was going too far.”
Eventually, though, he came around to the new system, because he realized
that some kids would be “devastated” if they got creamed by a large margin
. “We don’t want them to feel bad,” he said. “We don’t want kids to
feel any pressure.” (When I told Wendy Mogel about this, she literally
screamed through the phone line, “Please let them be devastated at age 6
and not have their first devastation be in college! Please, please, please
let them be devastated many times on the soccer field!”) I told the coach
this sounded goofy, given that these kids attend elite, competitive schools
like Georgetown Day School or Sidwell Friends, where President Obama’s
daughters go. They’re being raised by parents who are serious about getting
their kids into Harvard and Yale. Aren’t these kids exposed to a lot of
pressure? And besides, how is not keeping score protecting anyone, since, as
he conceded, the kids keep score on their own anyway? When the score is
close, the coach explained, it’s less of an issue. But blowouts are a
problem.
He told me about a game against a very talented team. “We lost 10–5, and
the other team dominated it. Our kids were very upset. They said, ‘We got
killed!’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about? You guys beat the spread
! The team we beat last week lost 14–1!’ The kids thought about this for a
second and then were like, ‘You’re right, we were great! We rule!’ They
felt so much better, because I turned it around for them into something
positive. When you get killed and there’s no positive spin, the kids think
they’re failures. It damages their self-esteem.”
At the end of the season, the league finds a way to “honor each child”
with a trophy. “They’re kind of euphemistic,” the coach said of the
awards, “but they’re effective.” The Spirit Award went to “the
troublemaker who always talks and doesn’t pay attention, so we spun it into
his being very ‘spirited,’” he said. The Most Improved Player Award went
to “the kid who has not an ounce of athleticism in his body, but he tries
hard.” The Coaches’ Award went to “the kids who were picking daisies, and
the only thing we could think to say about them is that they showed up on
time. What would that be, the Most Prompt Award? That seemed lame. So we
called it the Coaches’ Award.” There’s also a Most Valuable Player Award,
but the kid who deserved it three seasons in a row got it only after the
first season, “because we wanted other kids to have a chance to get it.”
The coach acknowledged that everyone knew who the real MVP was. But, he said
, “this is a more collaborative approach versus the way I grew up as a
competitive athlete, which was a selfish, Me Generation orientation.”
I asked Wendy Mogel if this gentler approach really creates kids who are
less self-involved, less “Me Generation.” No, she said. Just the opposite:
parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they
deserve special treatment. “A principal at an elementary school told me
that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she
said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so
much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in
the name of our children’s self-esteem.”
Paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might
actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less
amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing”
her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that?
Instead of acknowledging their daughter’s flaws, her parents, hoping to
make her feel secure, denied them. “I’m bad at math,” Lizzie said she
once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently
more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. “You’re not bad
at math,” her parents responded. “You just have a different learning style
. We’ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you
naturally understand.”
With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still
knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn’t. “I didn’t
have a different learning style,” she told me. “I just suck at math! But
in my family, you’re never bad at anything. You’re just better at some
things than at others. If I ever say I’m bad at something, my parents say,
‘Oh, honey, no you’re not!’”
Today, Wendy Mogel says, “every child is either learning-disabled, gifted,
or both—there’s no curve left, no average.” When she first started doing
psychological testing, in the 1980s, she would dread having to tell parents
that their child had a learning disability. But now, she says, parents would
prefer to believe that their child has a learning disability that explains
any less-than-stellar performance, rather than have their child be perceived
as simply average. “They believe that ‘average’ is bad for self-esteem.
”
The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content
a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant
accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to
Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment
and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities
that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.
Earlier this year, I met with a preschool teacher who told me that in her
observation, many kids aren’t learning these skills anymore. She declined
to be named, for fear of alienating parents who expect teachers to agree
with their child-rearing philosophy, so I’ll call her Jane.
Let’s say, Jane explained, that a mother is over by the sign-in sheet, and
her son has raced off to play. Suddenly the mother sees her kid fighting
over a toy with a classmate. Her child has the dump truck, and the other kid
grabs it. Her child yells, “No! That’s mine!” The two argue while the
other kid continues to play with the truck, until finally the other kid says
, “This one is yours!” and tosses her child a crappy one. Realizing the
other kid won’t budge, her child says, “Okay,” and plays with the crappy
toy.
“Her kid is fine,” Jane said. “But the mother will come running over and
say, ‘But that’s not fair! Little Johnnie had the big truck, and you can’
t just grab it away. It was his turn.’ Well, the kids were fine with it.
Little Johnnie was resilient! We do teach the kids not to grab, but it’s
going to happen sometimes, and kids need to learn how to work things out
themselves. The kid can cope with adversity, but the parent is reeling, and
I end up spending my time calming down the parent while her kid is off
happily playing.”
Jane told me that because parents are so sensitive to how every interaction
is processed, sometimes she feels like she’s walking on eggshells while
trying to do her job. If, for instance, a couple of kids are doing something
they’re not supposed to—name-calling, climbing on a table, throwing sand
—her instinct would be to say “Hey, knock it off, you two!” But, she says
, she’d be fired for saying that, because you have to go talk with the kids
, find out what they were feeling, explain what else they could do with that
feeling other than call somebody a “poopy face” or put sand in somebody’
s hair, and then help them mutually come up with a solution.
“We try to be so correct in our language and our discipline that we forget
the true message we’re trying to send—which is, don’t name-call and don’
t throw the sand!” she said. “But by the time we’re done ‘talking it
through,’ the kids don’t want to play anymore, a rote apology is made, and
they’ll do it again five minutes later, because they kind of got a pass.
‘Knock it off’ works every time, because they already know why it’s wrong
, and the message is concise and clear. But to keep my job, I have to go and
explore their feelings.”
Another teacher I spoke with, a 58-year-old mother of grown children who has
been teaching kindergarten for 17 years, told me she feels that parents are
increasingly getting in the way of their children’s development. “I see
the way their parents treat them,” she said, “and there’s a big
adjustment when they get into my class. It’s good for them to realize that
they aren’t the center of the world, that sometimes other people’s
feelings matter more than theirs at a particular moment—but it only helps
if they’re getting the same limit-setting at home. If not, they become
impulsive, because they’re not thinking about anybody else.”
This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her
job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when
actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get
ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our
day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and
the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s
opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me
tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year,
parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t
she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an
answer, because the answer is never no!’”
Barry Schwartz, at Swarthmore, believes that well-meaning parents give their
kids so much choice on a daily basis that the children become not just
entitled, but paralyzed. “The ideology of our time is that choice is good
and more choice is better,” he said. “But we’ve found that’s not true.”
In one study Schwartz and his team conducted, kids were randomly divided
into two groups and then asked to draw a picture. Kids in one group were
asked to choose a marker to use from among three; kids in the other group
were asked to choose from among 24 markers. Afterward, when the pictures
were evaluated by an elementary-school art teacher who did not know which
group had produced which pictures, the drawings rated the “worst” were by
and large created by kids in the 24-marker group. Then, in a second part of
the experiment, the researchers had the kids pick one marker from their set
to keep as a gift. Once the kids had chosen, the researchers tried to
persuade them to give back their marker in exchange for other gifts. The
kids who had chosen from 24 markers did this far more easily than those who
had chosen from only three markers. According to Schwartz, this suggests
that the kids who had fewer markers to select from not only focused better
on their drawings, but also committed more strongly to their original gift
choice.
What does this have to do with parenting? Kids feel safer and less anxious
with fewer choices, Schwartz says; fewer options help them to commit to some
things and let go of others, a skill they’ll need later in life.
“Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one
thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options
open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your
kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices,
but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want,
you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100
percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives
that way as adults, too.” He sees this in students who graduate from
Swarthmore. “They can’t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest
or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years
hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don’t understand is
that they’re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for
the good-enough answer.”
The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are
entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from
Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should
be another option.” Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are
creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she
describes as “handicapped royalty.”
As a parent, I’m all too familiar with this. I never said to my son, “Here
’s your grilled-cheese sandwich.” I’d say, “Do you want the grilled
cheese or the fish sticks?” On a Saturday, I’d say, “Do you want to go to
the park or the beach?” Sometimes, if my preschooler was having a meltdown
over the fact that we had to go to the grocery store, instead of swooping
him up and wrestling him into the car, I’d give him a choice: “Do you want
to go to Trader Joe’s or Ralphs?” (Once we got to the market, it was “Do
you want the vanilla yogurt or the peach?”) But after I’d set up this
paradigm, we couldn’t do anything unless he had a choice. One day when I
said to him, “Please put your shoes on, we’re going to Trader Joe’s,” he
replied matter-of-factly: “What are my other choices?” I told him there
were no other choices—we needed something from Trader Joe’s. “But it’s
not fair if I don’t get to decide too!” he pleaded ingenuously. He’d come
to expect unlimited choice.
When I was my son’s age, I didn’t routinely get to choose my menu, or
where to go on weekends—and the friends I asked say they didn’t, either.
There was some negotiation, but not a lot, and we were content with that. We
didn’t expect so much choice, so it didn’t bother us not to have it until
we were older, when we were ready to handle the responsibility it requires.
But today, Twenge says, “we treat our kids like adults when they’re
children, and we infantilize them when they’re 18 years old.”
Like most of my peers, I’d always thought that providing choices to young
children gave them a valuable sense of agency, and allowed them to feel more
in control. But Barry Schwartz’s research shows that too much choice makes
people more likely to feel depressed and out of control.
It makes sense. I remember how overwhelmed and anxious I felt that day I
visited the parenting aisle at Barnes & Noble and was confronted by all
those choices. How much easier things would be if there weren’t hundreds of
parenting books and listservs and experts that purport to have the answers,
when the truth is, there is no single foolproof recipe for raising a child.
And yet, underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we
just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our
kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us
happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters,
it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for
different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very
different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can
expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to
protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection
and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these
things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy
childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up.
Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some
letting go.
As Wendy Mogel likes to say, “Our children are not our masterpieces.”
Indeed. Recently, I noticed that one of my patients had, after a couple of
sessions of therapy, started to seem uncomfortable. When I probed a bit, he
admitted that he felt ambivalent about being in treatment. I asked why.
“My parents would feel like failures if they knew I was here,” he
explained. “At the same time, maybe they’d be glad I’m here, because they
just want me to be happy. So I’m not sure if they’d be relieved that I’
ve come here to be happier, or disappointed that I’m not already happy.”
He paused and then asked, “Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded like a therapist, and then I answered like a parent who can imagine
her son grappling with that very same question one day. “Yes,” I said to
my patient. “I know exactly what you mean.”
