McGill offers breather in the age of anxious parenting
Are you a Tiger Mother or an Elephant Mom?
Do you practise attachment, freerange, mindful or helicopter parenting?
Did you let your baby cry it out or did you cosleep? Did you babywear or babyled wean?
Yelling is the new spanking when it comes to the longterm scars of child discipline. And dirty is the new clean when it comes to protecting our kids from lethal superbugs, according to the new book Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child From an Oversanitized World, by microbiologist B. Brett Finlay.
Welcome to the age of angstridden parenting, where the most important job of our lives has become a highstakes blood sport of competing (and often contradictory) styles, philosophies and choices that we’re convinced will make or break our kids.
While our own parents’ childrearing resources were limited to Dr. Spock, the parents of today are addled by evershifting advice that is making us anxious, guiltridden and mistrustful of our own instincts. From stacks of selfhelp books to competing philosophies to knowitall blogs to selfstyled gurus (who promise they can sleeptrain your baby in a week if you pay up and follow their patented system), there has never been so much information about parenting. Or so much confusion.
Fortunately for Montrealarea moms and dads, McGill University is here to try to help us make some sense of it all. For the second year in a row, it is running a lecture series, starting this week, intended to cut through the noise that is causing so many of us so much grief.
Academics who study topics like helping children manage stress, autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, navigating the digital world and that persistent challenge, sleep, will be sharing their knowledge. Parents will get practical guidance and have a chance to question the experts. It costs $75 for all the talks and you must register ahead of time. Dr. Jeffrey Derevensky, chair of the department of educational and counselling psychology at McGill, said parents today crave accurate advice about how to raise healthy, happy, well-adjusted children. “Parenting is one of the most difficult things we do in life and yet we get no training,” he said. Derevensky said he gets cold calls “all the time” from members of the public seeking his counsel and input on how to handle various issues with their kids. And when the department has run parenting conferences in the past, the events grew from 70 participants to more than 800. “It kind of tells you how desperate parents are for information,” Derevensky said. “Parents call me as a child psychologist and ask me ‘what do I do about this?’ We all live in a very hurried world and we’re all looking for shortcuts and easy answers.” We parents tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves — and feel social pressure — to make sure we are doing right by our kids. We often feel responsible, not only for making sure we don’t screw them up, but for ensuring their optimum development on every level. As Montreal writer Bunmi Laditan — author of the MomLit bestseller Confessions of a Domestic Failure, a children’s book called The Big Bed, and the searingly funny @HonestToddler Twitter account — so aptly put it (tongue-in-cheek) in a Facebook post that has since gone viral: The work of a modern parent is to “make sure your children’s academic, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual, physical, nutritional and social needs are met while being careful not to overstimulate, under stimulate, improperly medicate, helicopter or neglect them in a screen-free, processed foods-free, GMO -free, negative energy-free, plastics free, body positive, socially conscious egalitarian but also authoritative, nurturing-but-fostering-of-independence, gentle but-not-overly permissive, pesticide-free, two-storey, multilingual home, preferably on a cul-de-sac, with a backyard, and 1.5 siblings spaced at least two years apart for proper development. Also don’t forget the coconut oil.”
There are so many conundrums and caveats, it’s hard enough to maintain our sanity. Yet the judgment of society and other parents when we do try to follow our own guy often seems to confirm our fears that we’re doing everything wrong.
We try to breastfeed to optimize our babies’ brain development, but we are shooed to the public restroom if we lift our shirts. We want to raise children who are independent. Yet parents have been arrested for letting their kids walk to the park by themselves. Meanwhile, Utah just passed a law protecting the rights of free-range parents to do just that.
Giving your kid a timeout is as good as abandoning our children when they need you most, we’re now told. But if we don’t set limits and impose consequences, they’ll grow up spoiled, entitled and depressed. The virtues of teaching our children grit are extolled, but we’re afraid to let them fail. In fact, in many cases the school system won’t even allow a failing grade.
Derevensky said parents today are often left feeling “inadequate” by the constant comparisons and the flood of unsolicited recommendations. But our Type-A approach to parenting may be leading many of us to commit some rather predictable mistakes.
The tendencies to overschedule our children’s lives and “overdiagnose” normal kid problems as serious pathologies are two examples, Derevensky cited. But most crucially, he warned: “I’m also not convinced we listen to our kids as well as we should.”
Perhaps it’s because many of us are coming to parenthood later in life. (The average age of new mothers rose to 30 for the first time in 2011.) And we’re having fewer children than in the past. So maybe that makes them all the more precious to us on a subconscious level and worthy of our all-in emotional, physical and financial investment.
Whatever the cause of our mania, the prescription for good parenting is probably a big dose of common sense.
“Parents as a whole have to sit back and spend time with their children,” Derevensky said.
“And listen to their children.”