OK, I picked the blog title largely to share one of my favourite Seinfeld clips:
The title has a little more meaning than that. In recent weeks, I have had a number of people share this quote with me that has gone viral on social media:
This quote really has me thinking. I am not sure. I get this is the popular opinion. We are quick to want to pile-on that parents today have lowered their expectations and increased the enabling of their children. These kinds of issues are not simple. Yes, adults have changed, but so has the world around us. We need to be careful not to romanticize the return to a past that had its share of challenges and deficiencies.
There is no shortage of parenting books out there with advice for how adults should act with their children. Last week we had Dr. Shimi Kang speak in our community. Her book, The Dolphin Parent, is a National Bestseller. She notes that there are numerous new pressures on parents of the twenty-first century, suggesting issues like tougher school admissions, globalization and in-turn greater competition, the boom in technology and economic uncertainty are causing parents to act differently. She says, “These uncertainties are unsettling; they unmoor us and make us question some of the basic truths we have lived by. Even the best-intentioned parents among us are confused and frightened.”
So perhaps it is out of this fear that parents have, which emerges what Martin sees in the changing parents.
The best book I have read on the topic is How to Raise and Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims. She spent a decade as the Dean of Freshman at Stanford.
She sets the context which she sees in parents today:
Too many of us do some combination of overdirecting, over-protecting, or over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives. We treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens and provide a deliberate, measured amount of care and feeding while running interference on all that might toughen and weather them. But humans need some degree of weathering in order to survive the larger challenges life will throw our way. Without experiences the rougher spots of life, our kids become exquisite, like orchids, yet are incapable, sometimes terribly incapable, of thriving in the real world on their own. Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to protecting them from life, which means they’re not prepared to live life on their own?
It is this context that Martin’s quote seems to be speaking to.
Lythcott-Haims outlines numerous steps, small and large, parents can do to change things and allow children to chart their own path. She says:
As parents our dream was to have a child, but we can’t forget that our children have the right to dream for themselves. There is much more to each precious, unique child than we can possibly know, and that unique person – that self is for each young person to discover. We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to millstone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But over helping causes harm. It can leave young adults without strengths of skill, will, and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.
The more I read about the changing world with greater unpredictability and uncertainty I definitely appreciate urges to want to do more for our children, and not less. Especially when I am sure our neighbours are definitely doing more for their children – at least it sure looks that way on social media.
As a parent in these times I have empathy for the adults that Martin calls out. And I don’t think it is simple. But Kang and her reasoned approach to parenting and Lythcott-Haims and her view that we need to give our children’s lives back to them are important messages. They are ones we all likely know and agree with but ones we need to keep repeating.
cultureofyes.ca 
Reblogged this on EitnerEducation.com presents: The Sup's Scoop and commented:
My kids are 27 months (you can tell they are young because I am still describing them in months) and I still consider myself to be a ‘new’ parent. This is a great read. Check it out!
Thanks Jay. This makes me laugh . . . I think you only get a couple more months of describing your kids in months – of course you will then get a few years where you can describe them in half-year chunks . . . 🙂
Another great read – thanks! Bruce Perry’s quote “Resilience = stress + support” is a good one too. Life’s challenges are key for a happy, productive life. So too are the “supports” like stress management and caring adults to lean on for support.
Thanks Cindy – so true. I was in a very interesting conversation this past week about “stress” – a word that has become a terrible word. There was an important reminder in this conversation that stress is not the problem – as problematic perhaps is if we don’t feel any stress.
I know that with my own kids, one has better academic rigour than I ever had, another has a wider empathic connection than I ever had and my youngest has some amazing social capital that she is developing. And I know my kids are learning a broader curriculum than I had to and they are all much more globally-aware than I was. I am looking forward to seeing what they do in their futures as their education path continues to evolve as they grow older!
Very nice Ian. You rightly point out the differences we always see with each of our kids. And just as our kids are different, our approaches and supports we offer our kids need to be different. There is no science that if parents only did this our that there would be a particular result. We need to be careful about making blanket statements about “parents” just as we do about “kids today” or any other group. It loses the point that these issues are never simple.
Well said. As I read the Martin quote, it certainly empowers people to play the “kids these days” card or “dump on millennials” which seems to be an emerging sport. Having him pictured in an angry rage on the image adds to that notion.
It’s complex because even specific examples and strategies on how to parent/teach need to be considered on an individual basis. I know with my own four children the way I taught them to drive a car or ride a bike varied depending on the child. Even then, I don’t know I did things perfectly.
The way you’ve written about it here speaks to the complexity and nuance of the topic. The extreme approach that Martin addresses can’t be countered with the general mentality of the past when kids were often left to figure life out on their own. Somewhere there is thoughtful, caring parenting and teaching that includes the opportunity to fail and fall down and one where a supportive adult intervenes at the right time.
Thanks Dean. I hadn’t really thought about the photo that was chosen to accompany the quote and you are right just how influential that is – the quote with a different photo could have an incredibly different meaning. I do find the entire conversation about youth sports (I know this is larger but Martin is definitely speaking to this particular issue) to be one where we seem to gleefully want to label parents as crazy and over-involved. And while yes, we have all seen or heard of them extreme examples – there is a huge group in the middle that are trying to adjust to their specific child and show the right levels of support. Too often we seem to start with an important truth like we need to allow students the opportunity to be increasingly independent and make statements about how kids used to do X but now they do Y and the world is just not as good as it used to be.
The TV commercial on ‘go RV’ing’ speaks to these comments; great visuals with succinct comments.
Good connection. I didn’t know the commercials but I looked them up . . . Here: https://gorving.com/discover-rving/our-commercials and yes, they make the point well!
Very thoughtful. Now, our challenge is to get this message to as many parents as possible!
Thanks Margot. I know many of us do the best to spread the word. Of course as a parent, even though I write the words, they are hard to live by every day. Thanks for reading and commenting.
Thanks for this post, it’s on a topic that i wonder about a lot these days, as both a teacher and as a parent.
Did either Kang or Lythcott-Hairns give specific examples of where we do too much parenting, or don’t allow our kids to fail? I feel like I have almost no idea where this boundary is.
No, that is a really good question. One item I do struggle with is that we seem to have a lot of people saying “we need to let kids fail” – but not a lot of people being clear about exactly what this looks like.
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