Intensive parenting is driving parents (and their kids) crazy

Parenting doesn't have to be exhausting, write psychologists Camilio Ortiz and Julia Martin Burch in The Free Press. It is not a task that requires perfection.

Many parents believe in three crazy-making fallacies, they write.

The first is that more parenting is better parenting. "Today’s working mothers spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in 1975."

The second is that parents should protect their children "from the four D’s: discomfort, disappointment, distress, and a bit of danger."

The third fallacy "is that misbehavior in children is driven by underlying sadness, anxiety, or anger, which then becomes the job of parents (and often highly paid therapists) to uncover and fix."

Photo: Jeremiah Lawrence/Unsplash

Until recently, they write, parents have seen misbehavior as "kids testing the waters, blowing off steam, and. . . being kids." Now a generation of "attached" and "gentle" parents are constantly alert for "a veiled but vital message from their children’s inner psyche."

The surgeon general's 2024 report, Parents Under Pressure, spent 30 pages on parental stress without telling parents to lighten up, write Ortiz and Burch. Their advice: Do less.

Give your child fewer commands. If your five-year-old goes outside without a coat and feels cold, but doesn't get frostbite, that's OK. "Don’t rush in to save the day" when a child makes a mistake, they write. "Examples include letting kids forget their lunches, letting them walk out the door without their cleats, and allowing them to take the cookies out of the oven." It's the family version of FAFO.

Ortiz developed Independence Therapy to help anxious children, inspired by the nonprofit Let Grow. It starts by asking: “What would you like to do on your own that you don’t already do?” Children pick activities to try without parental supervision, such as "baking muffins, riding a bike to the park with friends, and whittling with a knife."

When something goes wrong, kids learn from it. An anxious 9-year-old girl took a city bus to school but missed her stop. The woman sitting next to her told her to get out at the next stop and walk back two blocks. The girl did that. That night, she decided that she wasn't scared to sleep in her own bed, they write. "When asked why she was suddenly sleeping on her own, she said that she had just taken a bus by herself, so she didn’t need to sleep in her parents’ bed."

Ortiz and Burch also recommend the "when/they" gambit to cure overparenting: “When you clean up the Legos on the kitchen floor, then we can have dessert.”

If they don't, no dessert. If they get angry, do nothing. Eventually, kids figure it out.

I decided when my daughter was a baby that the greatest gift I could give her was a sane mother. So my parenting style maximized maternal sanity. I hate brats. I vowed that annoying behavior -- nagging, whining and sulking -- would be ineffective. This worked very well for both of us.

Helicopter parents are following their kids to college, writes Russell Shaw in The Atlantic. "Trailing parents," as college administrators call them, may rent an apartment or buy a condo near campus so they can see their child frequently. "Some parents trail their study-abroad kids across the world, moving for a semester to Florence or Barcelona."

A Colorado couple "bought an apartment in Portland, Oregon, and moved there to live with their daughter while she attended college," he writes.

A mother rented a D.C. condo near George Washington University so she could live with her daughter, Danielle Lico, a student affairs staffer, told him. She walked her to class. “We had to tell the mom that she wasn’t actually permitted to sit next to her kid in class,” Lico said. “She would sit outside of the classroom, and then they would walk back to the apartment together every day for four years.”

These people are crazy.