Reply to NYT The Daily: The Parents Aren't All Right

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This article is such BS, it’s not about intensive parenting. It’s about having two working parents required to just get by, and then really expensive housing which makes everything else harder to manage and afford. There was a lot easier lifestyle where without intensive parenting, when you had a parent, who was home to take care of everything related to the kids as well as clean and cook.[/quote]

It's true that everything is crazy expensive now, and things are easier with a SAHM, but activities were also more scaled back 60 years ago. There were no travel sports leagues or 3x week practice schedule for 7 year olds. My dad played baseball with his friends in the neighborhood after school. My dad's one extracurricular was boy scouts. Mom took piano, and that was her one activity apart from summer camp. Kids had more freedom and could roam around the neighborhood, walk to and from school, etc without adult supervision. Just eliminating pick up and drop offs would feel immensely freeing for most of today's parents.[/quote]

I let my kids roam around the neighborhood and park with friends. It really aggravates some other moms who text "letting me know". I really appreciate the extra eyes but they are so close, with friends and not getting into trouble, let them be.
What is stressful is the expectation from some parents that we keep them in or supervised the way they do, outsource the way they do and choose classes or extracurriculars the way they do. I thought that kind of behavior would end after babies (formula, sleep training, schedules, swaddling...) but it keeps going well into college choices.[/quote]

Yeah it never ends. My kids go to a parochial school with a wide range of incomes and EVERYONE is a helicopter mom. Currently my phone is blowing up about a test that a lot of kids bombed and talking about contacting admin. I had to cut in with "Does it REALLY matter if our kids get a poor grade in 5th grade science? Is one tough teacher going to kill them?" Yes.  Because they have to get into Catholic high school or their lives will be over! 
And they can't just take dance lessons once a week or play floor hockey. It has to be a competitive travel team or they won't get a scholarship someday! How many kids are actually getting these scholarships?[/quote]

Very few kids are getting recruited to attend a college they would otherwise not be admitted to and very few kids are receiving scholarships. As someone who did go through the athletic recruiting process for college and played a sport at an Ivy, I have a good sense of the amount of rigor and luck required, and most people will not have enough of either to make a very intense level of commitment at a young age worth it. That said, a certain amount of specialization in a sport coupled with participation in other sports would be the best approach in 5th grade. Puberty can completely change a child’s athletic trajectory and too much specialization can lead to overuse injuries and burnout. All this specialization and pushing at a young age seems to model this fear about a poor science test. It’s a refusal to let our children fail because of our discomfort with failure as parents and the “stakes being so high”, but what we all know is that very few people fail up indefinitely and there is an inevitable fragility that comes with being protected from the consequences of one’s actions by adults as a child, teen, and young adult. George W Bush meant something different when he coined the term the bigotry of low expectations but in a way the sentiment fits here because in expecting so much from our children we end up expecting very little because we take on the burden of filling whatever gap there is between their capabilities and our expectations. In doing so we then stress ourselves out and we fail to equip our children with tools to advocate for themselves, to accept a bad grade and figure out what must be done to change that grade (i.e., study differently). It is so much better to learn good study habits in 5th then it is to get C’s in 9th. [/quote]

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