The Telegraph |
Are 21st-century parenting techniques harming our children, asks Susie Mesure
If permission to stop parenting sounds like the solution to surviving the rest of the summer holidays, then Alison Gopnik is your saviour. The US psychology professor and grandmother of three thinks too much “parenting” risks ruining your relationship with your children. It is also churning out a generation of young adults afraid to take risks.
What’s more, all that fussing and fretting over the daily minutiae is pointless: it won’t affect how your children turn out. Decades of research into how kids develop means that Gopnik, 61, can back up her claims; this is no mere backlash against overbearing “helicopter” parents.
Gopnik isn’t absolving parents of all responsibilities; children still need looking after. But parents should stop trying to “shape” their offspring into particular types of adults. “That is a doomed project and maybe even counterproductive,” she says via Skype from her home in Berkeley, northern California.
In her new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, Gopnik launches a manifesto “against parenting”, a noun she points out first emerged only in 1958, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. “Parenting is a terrible invention. It hasn’t improved the lives of children and parents, and in some ways it’s arguably made them worse. It’s made relationships more intense, particularly in this latest generation of parents and children. The time that they are together is much more fraught and unhappy and guilt-ridden than it should be.”
She thinks older, middle-class mothers and father have turned parenting into an occupation to match the jobs they did before having children. This makes them hungry for results they can measure, like the degrees they notched up while studying.
“One reason why the parenting phenomenon emerged in the twentieth century was because really for the first time in history people were off trying to be parents on their own who had never taken care of children but who had gone to school and worked, so therefore they think, ‘OK, this is like another class I take at school.’”
Cue frustration when babies and small children turn out to be unpredictable. “You don’t know what your children are going to be like, and you can’t control what you’re going to be like as a parent. That’s kind of terrifying in a world where we are used to knowing how things are going to turn out.”
And yet, children are the last thing we should be trying to control. Gopnik, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs a cognitive science laboratory, has pored over the science and struggled to find any empirical evidence to suggest parents should bother. “All those tiny differences in parenting that parents obsess over – co-sleeping versus letting the baby cry it out, putting the stroller frontward or backwards, exactly how much homework children do – the data show that none of that makes any difference in how the children turn out in the long run.”
In short, parents should stop worrying. “Leaving them alone is not a bad idea. We know children will innovate. When they organise a game, like football, then it’s not just that they’re learning how to play football, but are also learning who is a leader, who is a follower, how to divide people up. If they are in a sports league, all that stuff is being done for them.”
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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