Millennial parenting Will Kate and Meghan join push to be perfect?
Will Meghan and Pippa join the ranks of millennials making parenting a performance art, asks Rosa Silverman
It’s been a strong week for baby news. No sooner had we absorbed the joyous tidings that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expecting, than Pippa Matthews (née Middleton) and husband James announced the arrival of their firstborn.
There is an agreeable symmetry to the fact that the younger siblings of both William and Kate are embarking on parenthood within the same year; and Harry and Pippa will no doubt be grateful to have older siblings already some way down that path.
Because as keen as our mothers are to show us the ropes, millennial parents are in many ways a different breed: often taking a perfectionist approach both enabled and encouraged by the wealth of online advice, and the need to “perform” parenting more publicly than ever.
An internet article published the week my first child was born in 2014 – “21 amazing parenting apps that will make your life easier” – is a prime example of this anxiety-inducing information overload.
Anything that requires 21 apps to make it easier must be pretty bloody hard to begin with, I reasoned. And most other online parenting wisdom has proved equally contradictory and confusing.
As Vogue put it this year: “Millennials are the most tech-savvy generation in human history, and the most anxious. Coincidence?”
Not everything can be laid at the internet’s door, as tempting as this blame game can be. In fact, the pressure on millennials – ages ranging from 22 to 37 – started far earlier in our lives.
We are a generation whose school years were characterised by the introduction of SATS (1990) and A*s (1994). So many more of us went to university (as per Tony Blair’s 1999 pledge) that we knew we needed to accrue stellar work experience placements on top of first class degrees, to stand out from the crowd.
And when we did graduate (with thousands in debt), several career ladder rungs were swept away by the 2008 financial crisis, condemning all but the lucky few to years of internships and stagnant wages.
Perhaps this helps explain why a study of more than 40,000 university students published at the end of last year by psychologists at the University of Bath found perfectionism was more prevalent among millennials than in any previous generation.
Why wouldn’t we extend such perfectionism to our parenting? Our cohort are older when we become parents, too: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were 31 when they had Prince George, while new mum Pippa is
35 and mum-to-be Meghan, 37, reflecting broader social trends. In 2016, 54 per cent of all live births in England and Wales were to mothers aged 30 and over, meaning most new parents today spent a decade or so climbing the career ladder before starting to procreate. No wonder we cannot buy a product, be it sling, pram, crib mattress or breast pump, without carrying out a wide-ranging consultation process. We strive to micromanage the life out of our children’s behaviour, obsessing over sleeping and eating habits – all of which can be monitored by apps – and spending vast sums on baby sensory/ swimming/yoga classes. How will they succeed later in life if we don’t get them off to the very best start?
The problem, suggests parenting expert Anita Cleare, is the tendency of today’s mothers and fathers to see our children as an extension of ourselves, and our quest for personal perfection.
“Modern parents often worry about getting parenting ‘right’,” she says. “We see our children as a reflection of ourselves and our competence as parents, rather than accepting them as independent personalities. We live in a culture where individuals are regularly measured and rated – at school through SATS and at work through targets and reviews. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking of parenting, too, as a performance you can grade.”
The result is we expect “that same sense of achievement and success” we look for elsewhere. Hence, perhaps, the boom in private tuition (up
‘Modern parents often worry about getting it ‘right’ – as if they can be graded’
from 18 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent by 2016, says the Sutton Trust) as middle-class parents – priced out of the private schools they might have attended themselves – throw money at anything that can give their child the academic edge.
It’s not enough to feel we are doing the right thing, either. We need to be seen to be doing it, too. Children’s birthday parties are a prime example: parents spend an average of £166 on each child’s bash (catered disco-softplay packages are all the rage, apparently), to keep up parenting appearances. How different from the parties we attended in our Eighties and Nineties childhoods, in which a few kids played pass the parcel in the front room while eating Skips and chocolate fingers.
Other trends, meanwhile, have come full circle. Mindful homecooking is now embraced by parents who were raised on a diet of oven chips and Wagon Wheels. And, amid growing concern about adding to the mountains of plastic we discard, environmentally conscious millennial parents are embracing reusable nappies, which now come in a range of sustainable colours and materials. The hashtag #modernclothnappies had been used on Instagram more than 17,000 times at the time of writing, again indicating the need of many to be seen to be doing the right thing as well as actually doing it.
In short, presentation and display is now key. In the age of “sharenting” on social media, the pressure to portray our family life as perfect
– or at least as interestingly and hilariously imperfect – is intense.
All of which may be taking its toll on our children. Parents’ excessive mobile phone use has been linked to an increase in children’s behaviour problems – dubbed “technoference” – and thought to be behind the rise in those now starting school unable to speak in full sentences. Go figure.
Other pressures are plentiful, as well. While painstakingly curating a frequently dishonest display of our family life online, we want and need to fly high at work, make the house Ideal Home-worthy, have an active social life, keep fit and look good.
Lisa Williams, co-host of The Hotbed podcast about sex and relationships after children, says: “What we hear from our listeners are the words ‘overwhelm’ and ‘anxiety.’ I think these two things are a result being a parent who feels they have to have it all. It’s not good enough to be OK at lots of things.” Perhaps Harry and Meghan, Pippa and James, and their fellow parents of today should heed Cleare’s caution: “Trying to be a perfect parent sets up you and your child to fail, because life is messy and complex. Children and parents will get things wrong, and that’s OK.
“It’s not getting everything right that matters; it’s learning from our mistakes.”