The Talk about Intensive Parenting

You have probably heard about a recent report entitled “Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents” that warns “intensive parenting” has created an urgent public health crisis in our country.  An insightful discussion of the report was the subject of the October 9th edition of The Daily podcast. Reporter Claire Cain Miller defined intensive parenting according to the work of sociologist Sharon Hayes: “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive… [based on the belief] that kids need to be constantly educated, enriched, and engaged.” Miller says that intensive parenting has now “extended across the income spectrum,” and Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, says that it causes significant anxiety, stress, and depression.  This pressure is all the more multiplied by the power of social media and Instagram accounts posting the doings of high  achieving, prize winning, polished children and families.  The social media dynamic of projecting (and comparing) perfect, idealized children reminds me of the negative impact social media also has particularly on adolescent girls as idealized lives and appearances are continually the subject of up and down votes.

An example of how intensive parenting has become more extreme flows from sources such as the American Academy of Pediatrics stating that “when children watch TV, it should be ‘co-ed.’ The parent should be sitting with them, hitting pause to talk about what’s happening on TV, what they can learn from it.”  It also has increased in intensity as data has accumulated saying that children born in the mid-1990’s and later have less certain chances that they will do better economically than their parents – and their parents before them. The neuroscience evidence of how long children’s brains remain moldable and how ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) have long term impacts on children’s lives have also propelled intensive parenting. In addition, the guilt that can seize busy working parents can lead to the feeling that because “you’re working, you have to spend all your other time with your children.” Data has shown that all this comes “at the expense of parents’ sleep, parents doing things for their own health, and spending time with their spouse or friends.”

A statistic cited in the podcast I found astounding is that working mothers today spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970’s.  The Surgeon General cites data showing that nearly half of parents say that most days they feel completely overwhelmed by the stress or become numb or non-functional (compared with a quarter of people for those who aren’t parents and say they experience similar levels of stress). The podcast went on to say that “today it’s much, much more likely that your children are involved in your leisure time, … in your exercise time… and that they’re no longer playing on the playground while you’re playing tennis with your friends. They’re instead playing tennis with you.”

Naturally, “Nobody says that parents being engaged with their children, spending time with them, teaching them things is a bad thing.” But it’s balance that is the key and that the Surgeon General says is all too often missing. As Miller concludes, “There is science that connects kids’ lack of independence today to some of the mental health crisis we’re seeing among kids. There’s something to be said for kids being out there getting into a conflict, being scared, having to solve a problem on their own that helps them understand that stress and anxiety are something that they can cope with.”