by Betsy McMillin

I was really excited after my editor told me to check out an article in The Atlantic, “How To Land Your Kids In Therapy,” by Lori Gottlieb. Excited because I realized I had touched on something when I wrote both “The Entitled Nation“ (March 20, 2011) and “The Entitled Nation Becomes the Enabled Nation” (April 3, 2011). I was also excited because the article had so much more to say on the subject.

I was not excited about the title suggestion that no matter what we do as parents, it seems the blame is on us as soon as our kids fail in any way. The pressure is huge… everything is our fault. So here we are again, at fault, to blame. As a parent I hate to admit it, but Gottlieb has a great point. She is dead on when she suggests that parents do too much for their kids and it is causing huge problems. But her message went so much deeper and brought out more interesting points. It is a message that bears repeating (being screamed actually), and way too many parents are not listening.

Including me sometimes.

Gottlieb opens with a thought provoking question: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

The first answer comes from Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA:

…the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.  Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection.

The TIME Magazine article When Parents Give Too Much, has this to say:

The real problem, say experts, is chronic rescuing. Children who are continually bailed out never grow up. Cheryl Erwin, author of several Positive Discipline parenting books, says, “As parents, we need to be there to teach and guide, not to rescue and pamper. That is an ultimately unloving thing to do.”

How many of us have protected our kids when they didn’t need protecting? Every single one of us. Our first instinct as parents is to protect, then comfort and help out a child in pain or need. Of course we do, I would surely hope so. But we are overdoing it.

What we really need to do is quickly assess… is the child really in need? I have witnessed way too many little ones, who, after a small fall, look to see if a parent is watching and witnessed the injury. If no, many kids get up, no crying. If, when they look up and a parent is on the way, rushing over with a concerned look, kid lets out a earth shattering wail. Antibiotic cream and band aids a-plenty. This conditions kids to over-react, to make a scene when one is not warranted.

I saw it last week at the toy store. Little three-to-four-year-old girl took a very minor spill (there was NO way any injury took place) and she looked up at a nonplussed me.  When I gave no anticipated reaction, she waited in a heap until mom saw, then put on a tragedy act. Mom, of course, ate it up.

They are our babies, our sweet little (and not so little) ones.We want nothing but the best for them and to help them avoid pain and suffering whenever possible. But this “help” is coming at a premium.

Dan Kindlon, a child psychiatrist and lecturer at Harvard agrees:

Kindlon, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”

So many parents are control freaks, doing whatever it takes to “fix it.”  We have to remember that pain and disappointment are parts of growth, as well as a crucial part of learning life skills. These professionals are not telling us to let our kids lay on the sidewalk, writhing in pain as blood runs down their cut leg, barking to “suck it up!” Our kids need our comfort.  It feels good to us too, when we can take the edge off, make everything okay or help figure out a solution to a problem. I love nothing more than comforting my kids. They are telling us to pay attention to when the comforting becomes more about us and our feelings than our kids.’ When it is an instance of our kids being able to make due with a small comfort or even a quick word of encouragement, not an over-the-top drama scene. When we rush in too readily, when we were never even needed, we do our kids no chance to self help.  Allow kids to learn to figure out how to get a rough or difficult time, to even comfort themselves, as difficult as this may be. Remember too, you won’t always be there to fix everything.

It is very much like teaching a baby or toddler to fall asleep on their own. We pine for the quiet nights of putting a child down as they blissfully drift off on their own. But I know all too well how hard it can be to get there. According to the Ferber method, babies/toddlers need to know how to self-soothe and fall asleep on their own. To get there, they need to cry it out a few nights. To not be rocked, snuggled, suckey reinserted, nursed to sleep. Gut wrenching, difficult, I know, I successfully used this method with a few of my kids. Did I cry while doing it? Yep. But in the end, the child has the tools to fall asleep without any help. If we never let them go through the difficult realization that we are there, but won’t rescue them from falling asleep on their own, they will never do it. Tough love for sure. But I am realizing that tough love is way more than just a saying.

Again. from TIME:

The real problem, say experts, is chronic rescuing. Children who are continually bailed out never grow up. Cheryl Erwin, author of several Positive Discipline parenting books, says, “As parents, we need to be there to teach and guide, not to rescue and pamper. That is an ultimately unloving thing to do.

I really love being with my kids. I have said it before and I mean it. Sure, they drive me nuts most days, but I get a kick out of what they say and do. I love watching them grow and turn into their own people with their own personalities. Amazing. It turns out that a lot of parents who do too much for their kids, do so because they enjoy being with their kids, enjoy doing for them.

Consider this, from Gottlieb’s Atlantic article:

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country.  Wendy Mogel says that colleges have had so much trouble getting parents off campus after freshman orientation that school administrators have had to come up with strategies to boot them. At the University of Chicago, she said, they’ve now added a second bagpipe processional at the end of opening ceremonies—the first is to lead the students to another event, the second to usher the parents away from their kids. The University of Vermont has hired “parent bouncers,” whose job is to keep hovering parents at bay. She said that many schools are appointing an unofficial “dean of parents” just to wrangle the grown-ups. Despite the spate of articles in recent years exploring why so many people in their 20s seem reluctant to grow up, the problem may be less that kids are refusing to separate and individuate than that their parents are resisting doing so.

I can only imagine the void I will feel when my last kid leaves for college—not to mention the sadness and emptiness I will feel when my first goes. Yet, isn’t this what we prepared them for?

Another aspect of parents doing too much is not making kids responsible for jobs or pulling their own weight around the house. Too many enabled kids. Kindlon has one obvious explanation:

Long work hours don’t help. “If you’ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with your kid,” Kindlon asked, “would you rather make your kid mad at you by arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it’s better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”

It is so much easier to do it ourselves, or to blow off being a tough, responsible parent to be a fun, casual one. Who wouldn’t want to? The operative word is want. No, we don’t want to, but we have to. It is our job. It is not our job to raise our best buddies, but to raise responsible adults.

Gottlieb points out another thing we as parents do to entitle and enable our kids. No matter what kind of a job a kid does, it is okay just for trying. This is the “good for you for giving it a try.”  I use this one all the time at my house, I had no idea it might not be the best route. So do we say instead… “gee kiddo, that last pitch really sucked… try throwing higher.”  No, I couldn’t do that, but maybe a gentler, “try throwing higher” would work. In the long run, it doesn’t teach kids to realize when they have failed versus when they have done an okay job, versus a great job. Don’t they need to know if their pitch stunk it up? If we hand out “atta-boys (or girls)” at every turn, won’t this make our kids think they are all-that for no reason? For not doing their best?

I took a break from writing to go watch my seven-year-old work on riding her two-wheeler. It has been difficult for her and the fact that her little brother has been doing it for a year doesn’t  help any. So here she was, trying her hardest, but not doing well. At all. I stopped myself from saying “Great job!” and thought “What do I want to say?  What do I really mean?” and I found myself calling out to her “Don’t get discouraged!  It isn’t easy, just keep trying!” I was thrilled as soon as I said it. I pushed her on, helped her know that while it wasn’t easy, she had what it took to keep trying. No “super job kiddo!! Wow are you great on that bike!” which would have been a lie. It would have falsely pumped her up when she knew full well she wasn’t doing so hot. And the best part?  When she came in, after trying and actually doing better, she said breathlessly and with a huge (toothless) grin, “I am so proud of myself!” Proud because she knew she earned it.

Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem has a lot to say about this topic:

… what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”

In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says. “They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if they don’t get a constant stream of praise. Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know
The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.

Good God, I feel like I can do nothing right any more. Not even “Good job trying!” is okay.  After reading Ms. Gottlieb’s article, I had to rethink some of my parenting style and choices. Not that I am going to change all my ways because of one essay, but it’s important to take an honest look at how I deal with my children. I do this every time I write too. I feel obligated to practice what I preach.

Am I guilty of doing too much for my kids? Yes, in some instances. I hate to admit it, have been known to tweak the rules so they don’t miss that long-awaited sleepover even though they had clearly lost the privilege due to bad behavior. Do I rush in to swoop up a non-threatening injury? No. Well, maybe with my two-year-old.  Do I give credit for tries that are not resulting in best effort? Sometimes. Do I pump them full of self-esteem? Definitely.

I see the pitfalls of doing too much for our kids. It is a thin line sometimes; other times completely obvious. What I do know is that too many of us are doing too much.

Just as I did after writing “The Entitled Nation,” I took inventory of my parenting and my kids. I need to let my kids find their own things, instead of me doing it (even though there is a great chance I know better than them where they are). I realized that I needed to let them help more with laundry. They need to step it up when it comes to doing their daily jobs without being reminded. When I hold back and don’t do these things, I see their resistance, their look of “but aren’t you going to do it?”

No, I am not, not anymore.

TIME Magazine: Parents Who Give Too Much: Moreover, the children themselves, left unschooled in the arts of delayed gratification and self-help, may be more hurt than helped by their parents’ love.

Hurt by our love. Hurt by us wanting to do so much, too much for our kids. Who would have thought it possible?