DefenseofLawmoner xRobbing xLawnmowerParent xElephantMom x
Synthesis essay.
There are four sources to use in the synthesis essay. I will send you in order to complete the essay.
In Defense of Lawnmower Parents
By Wendy Wisner
June, 2018/ babble.com
If you’ve been seeing the term “Lawnmower Parenting” floating around the Interwebs lately, you’re not alone. The fairly new buzzword picked up extra steam recently, thanks to a viral post by an anonymous teacher on the website
We Are Teachers
. “Lawnmower Parents Are the New Helicopter Parents & We Are Not Here for It,” the title reads; and boy, does the author not hold back.
Lawnmower parents are said to be the newest breed of overbearing moms and dads, and the author — a middle school teacher who says she deals with these kind of parents on the daily — is pretty frustrated with the whole thing. Her article has since sparked quite a debate in the parenting world, with plenty of parents nodding their heads in agreement.
Others, like me, aren’t so quick to jump on board.
Instead of just hovering, as
helicopter parents
are known to do, lawnmower parents basically do anything in their power to protect their kids from struggle or adversity. But as the author argues, “if we eliminate all struggle in children’s younger years, they will not arrive at adulthood magically equipped to deal with failure.”
The teacher goes on to tell the story of a dad who rushed to school one day to drop off a water bottle his daughter had forgotten. She “kept texting [him] that she needed it,” and so he got in his car and raced right over. Unconvinced that coming to school to give your kid their favorite water bottle was an absolute necessity, the teacher (understandably) raised an eyebrow.
In fact, he or she felt it was the ultimate example of how overbearing lawnmower parents “mow obstacles down so kids won’t experience them in the first place.”
As the parent of a newly-minted
middle schooler
myself, I’ve been thinking about these sorts of issues all week. On the first day of school, for example, my son wasn’t able to find his bus home and missed it.
Some of this had to do with the entire school getting let out at the exact same time, which left my son feeling utterly lost in a crowd of 600 kids. This was compounded by the fact that the school administration didn’t really give the kids much guidance as to how to find their buses. It also didn’t help that my 11-year-old son — bless his heart — is a little scatterbrained sometimes, and isn’t quite as savvy as he will likely be a few years down the road.
When he texted me to say he was stranded at school and asked if I could please pick him up, I had two choices. I could insist that he walk home himself (one mile in the sweltering heat), or I could pick him up (which meant that I had to walk one mile in the sweltering heat to get him, since the family car was not available).
I decided to pick him up. Not because I’m a lawnmower parent, or a helicopter parent, or any kind of
parenting label
you might want to stick to me. Nope; it was because it was the
first day of middle school
for my son, he’d had a rough morning, and I wanted to sweeten things by meeting up with him and taking him out for an ice cream cone.
I was doing what felt right to me in the moment, based on many different factors, including the ever-evolving and fluid relationship between me and my son. Because there’s a myriad of ways that I decide — or don’t decide — to challenge him or push his limits.
Looking at the situation from the outside, I’m sure everyone has an opinion about what I should or shouldn’t have done in the situation. I’m sure some would label me a lawnmower parent or say that I’m smothering. The same could be said for the dad who chose to bring his daughter’s water bottle to school. Sure, you could assume that maybe he’s a bit of a push-over, who just bends to his daughter’s every whim. But maybe his daughter was having a really hard week and just needed a little bit of extra TLC that particular day.
Honestly, I don’t know, nor do I care. Because as far as I’m concerned, labeling a particular parenting situation — one you are viewing wholly from the outside, even if you think you know a parent and child — is something we all need to put an end to. It assumes a whole lot that can’t be assumed, and doesn’t really take into account that parent and child’s particular relationship.
Much as we’ve come to lean on these parenting labels, they just further divide us, placing us into black and white boxes. When the truth is, each and every child is so different. Each and every day is so different. And each instance of parenting should be looked at with a fresh set of eyes.
Sometimes it is appropriate to come to our kids’ rescue; other times, it isn’t. But these labels only serve to make us second-guess our instincts, which are multi-layered and complex.
Of course, I understand the importance of teaching our kids independence. But really, when you think about it, there are a million different opportunities for kids to learn independence. It’s kind of just built into life.
When my kids were babies, I was told that
if I held them too much
, they would never want to crawl, walk, or explore the world. But guess what? My kids managed to do all of those things just fine. There came a day that they literally leapt out of my arms, wanting to figure out how to grab whatever shiny object was in their path, and that was it. The human spirit is bent toward growth and independence.
In many ways, our job as parents is to provide scaffolding for our kids — to help them learn these things little by little, and at their own pace. So in many ways, I might “baby” my middle schooler, because it’s a big, scary world out there as it is. I like to think I go at his pace, with the knowledge that he is only going to feel confident if he is ready to do each new thing, not if it’s thrown in his face by some arbitrary deadline.
And in so many other ways, I step back. I let him make mistakes, learn from them, and own them. Just as I’m sure most of us “lawnmower parents” do when we feel it’s right; regardless of whether or not the world is looking.
(1090 words)
Babble.com is an online magazine and blogging network for young parents “courtesy of Disney.”
How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood
By Claire Cain Miller and Jonah Engel Bromwich
March 16, 2019/ The New York Times
Nicole Eisenberg’s older son has wanted to be a star of the stage since he was a toddler, she said. He took voice, dance and drama lessons and attended the renowned Stagedoor Manor summer camp for half a dozen years, but she was anxious that might not be enough to get him into the best performing-arts programs.
So Ms. Eisenberg and others in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., the affluent suburb where she lives, helped him start a charity with friends that raised more than $250,000 over four years.
“The moms — the four or five moms that started it together — we started it, we helped, but we did not do it for them,” Ms. Eisenberg, 49, recalled. “Did we ask for sponsors for them? Yes. Did we ask for money for them? Yes. But they had to do the work.”
She even considered a donation to the college of his choice. “There’s no amount of money we could have
paid
to have got him in,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “Because, trust me, my father-in-law asked.” (Ms. Eisenberg’s son was admitted to two of the best musical theater programs in the country, she said, along with nine more of the 26 schools he applied to.)
College has been on their radar since her son was in diapers. “We’ve been working on this since he was 3 years old,” she said. To apply, she said, “I had to take him on 20 auditions for musical theater. But he did it with me. I don’t feel like I did this. I supported him in it. I did not helicopter parent him. I was a co-pilot.”
Or was she, perhaps, a … snowplow parent?
Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.
Taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children in to elite colleges — and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.
Those are among the allegations in the recent college bribery scandal, in which
50 people were charged in a wide-ranging fraud
to secure students admissions to colleges.
According to the investigation
, one parent lied about his son playing water polo, but then worried that the child would be perceived by his peers as “a bench warmer side door person.” (He was assured that his son wouldn’t have to actually be on the team.) Another, the charges said, paid
someone to take the ACT for her son
— and then pretended to proctor it for him herself, at home, so he would think he was the test-taker.
The parents charged in this investigation, code-named Operation Varsity Blues, are
far outside the norm
. But they were acting as the ultimate snowplows: clearing the way for their children to get in to college, while shielding them from any of the difficulty, risk and potential disappointment of the process.
In its less outrageous — and wholly legal — form, snowplowing (also known as
lawn-mowing and bulldozing
) has become the most brazen mode of parenting of the privileged children in the everyone-gets-a-trophy generation.
It starts early, when parents get on wait lists for elite preschools before their babies are born and try to make sure their toddlers are never compelled to do anything that may frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running a forgotten assignment to school or calling a coach to request that their child make the team.
Later, it’s writing them an excuse if they procrastinate on schoolwork, paying a college counselor thousands of dollars to perfect their applications or calling their professors to argue about a grade.
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The bribery scandal has “just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can be,” said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of “Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies or ‘Fat Envelopes.’”
“They’ve cleared everything out of their kids’ way,” she said.
In her practice, Dr. Levine said, she regularly sees college freshmen who “have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don’t have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college.”
One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room. Some didn’t like their roommates. Others said it was too much work, and they had never learned independent study skills. One didn’t like to eat food with sauce. Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce, calling friends before going to their houses for dinner. At college, she didn’t know how to cope with the cafeteria options — covered in sauce.
“Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they’re not,” Dr. Levine said.
Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from toddlers to avoid temper tantrums or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.
If children have never faced an obstacle, what happens when they get into the real world?
They flounder, said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”
At Stanford, she said, she saw students rely on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm or complain to their child’s employers when an internship didn’t lead to a job. The root cause, she said, was parents who had never let their children make mistakes or face challenges.
Snowplow parents have it backward, Ms. Lythcott-Haims said: “The point is to prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid.”
Helicopter parenting is a term that came into vogue in the 1980s and grew out of fear about children’s physical safety — that they would fall off a play structure or be kidnapped at the bus stop. In the 1990s,
it evolved into intensive parenting
, which meant not just constantly monitoring children, but also always teaching them.
This is when parents began filling afternoons and weekends with lessons, tutors and traveling sports games. Parents now spend more money on child rearing than any previous generation did,
according to
Consumer Expenditure Survey data
analyzed by
the sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg.
According to time-use data analyzed by Melissa A. Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, today’s working mothers
spend as much time
doing hands-on activities with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Texting and social media have allowed parents to keep ever closer track of their progeny.
Snowplow parenting is an even more obsessive form.
“There’s a constant monitoring of where their kid is and what they are doing, all with the intent of preventing something happening and becoming a barrier to the child’s success,” said Laura Hamilton, the author of “Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond” and a sociologist at the University of California, Merced.
The destination at the end of the road is often admission to college. For many wealthy families, it has always been a necessary badge of accomplishment for the child — and for the parents. A college degree has also become increasingly essential to earning a middle-class wage.
But college admissions have
become more competitive
. The number of applicants
has doubled since the 1970s
, and the growth in the number of spots has not kept pace, remaining basically unchanged at the very top schools.
At the same time, it’s no longer guaranteed that children will do as well as their parents. Children born in 1950 had an 80 percent chance of making more money than their parents,
according to work
by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty at Harvard. Those born in 1970 had a 61 percent chance. But since 1980, children are as likely as not to earn less than their parents did.
It’s painful for any parent to watch their child mess up, or not achieve their (or their parents’) goals. Now, however, the stakes are so much higher.
“Increasingly, it appears any mistake could be fatal for their class outcome,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist studying parenting and inequality at the University of Maryland.
The problem is: Snowplowing is a parenting habit that’s hard to break.
“If you’re doing it in high school, you can’t stop at college,” Ms. Lythcott-Haims said. “If you’re doing it in college, you can’t stop when it comes to the workplace. You have manufactured a role for yourself of always being there to handle things for your child, so it gets worse because your young adult is ill-equipped to manage the basic tasks of life.”
In
a new poll by The New York Times and Morning Consult
of a nationally representative group of parents of children ages 18 to 28, three-quarters had made appointments for their adult children, like for doctor visits or haircuts, and the same share had reminded them of deadlines for school. Eleven percent said they would contact their child’s employer if their child had an issue.
Sixteen percent of those with children in college had texted or called them to wake them up so they didn’t sleep through a class or test. Eight percent had contacted a college professor or administrator about their child’s grades or a problem they were having.
“Some of them think they’re doing the right thing by their children,” said David McCullough, Jr., a high school teacher and the author of “You Are Not Special and Other Encouragements,” who helped popularize the “snowplow” term. “Parents understand that going to a highly prestigious college brings with it long-lasting advantage.”
It’s not just the wealthy. Recent research suggests that parents across lines of class and race are
embracing the idea of intensive parenting
, whether or not they can afford it.
Often, that involves intervening on behalf of their children. In
a recent study
that surveyed a nationally representative group of parents about which parenting choices they thought were best, people, regardless of race, income or education, said children should be enrolled in after-school activities so they
wouldn’t have to feel bored
. If a child didn’t like school, they thought parents should talk to the teacher to get the child different work.
Still, true snowplow parenting is done largely by privileged parents, who have the money, connections and know-how to stay two steps ahead of their children. Families without those resources don’t necessarily have the money to invest in lessons and college counselors, and may not have experience navigating college admissions or ultracompetitive job markets.
Carolyn O’Laughlin worked as a director of resident life at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and now does a similar job at St. Louis Community College, Meramec.“I don’t talk to parents nearly as much here, where parents are down the street, as I did when the parents were across the country,” she said.
At the elite schools, Ms. O’Laughlin said, a mother once called her to ask her to list the items in the school salad bar so she could choose what her daughter should eat for lunch, and another parent intervened over video chat to resolve a dispute with a roommate over stolen peanut butter.
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Now, many of the students she works with are immigrants or first-generation college students.
“As I read about the scandal, I feel for those parents, I do,” she said. But “first-generation students coming through here are figuring out how to navigate an educational system that hasn’t always been built for them,” she said. “It is changing the course of their lives and the lives of their families.”
Cathy Tran, 22, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of people who immigrated from Vietnam who did not attend college. “They do give me a lot of emotional support, but they haven’t really been able to tell me about what I should be doing, like next steps,” she said.
Clearing her own path to college had some benefits, Ms. Tran said. “I actually think that I have a sense of independence and confidence in myself in a way that some of my friends whose parents attended college might not have,” she said. “I had some friends who didn’t even know how to do laundry. I guess in some ways I feel like I was forced to be an adult much earlier on.”
Learning to solve problems, take risks and overcome frustration are crucial life skills, many child development experts say, and if parents don’t let their children encounter failure, the children don’t acquire them. When a 3-year-old drops a dish and breaks it, she’s probably going to try not to drop it the next time. When a 20-year-old sleeps through a test, he’s probably not going to forget to set his alarm again.
Snowplowing has gone so far, they say, that many young people are in crisis, lacking these problem-solving skills and experiencing record rates of anxiety. There are now classes to teach children to practice failing,
at college campuses
around the country and
even for preschoolers
.
Many snowplow parents know it’s problematic, too. But because of privilege or peer pressure or anxiety about their children’s futures, they do it anyway.
Felicity Huffman, an actress charged in the college admissions scheme, has long
extolled the benefits
of a parenting philosophy in which children are to be treated as adults. On her parenting blog, What the Flicka (which was taken down this week), she described raising children as “one long journey of overcoming obstacles.” In another post, she praised schoolchildren “for walking into a building every day full of the unknown, the challenging, the potential of failure.”
This week, Ms. Huffman was accused of paying $15,000 for an SAT proctor to secretly inflate her daughter’s test scores.
The Rise of the Lawnmower Parent
by
Karen Fancher
June 25, 2016/ Pittsburg Moms Blog
It happened again this week. Several times, in fact.
I’m a professor at a well-known local university, and my office is located directly across from the elevators. Because I maintain a literal “open-door” policy for my students, visitors often mistake me for the department secretary, as I am the first person they see when the elevator doors open. At this time of year, the same scenario happens repeatedly:
I’m concentrating on something, but out of the corner of my eye I see the elevator doors slide open. It’s a teenage girl and a middle-aged woman, presumably her mother. The parent walks into my office, with the girl trailing sheepishly behind. The mother says, “My daughter will be starting here in the fall. We’ve got a problem with her class schedule.” I try to make eye contact and address the girl as I politely give them directions to the Office of Student Services down the hall, but it’s the mother who apologizes for interrupting me. They leave my office, Mom leading the way with the class schedule in her hand.
Do you see the problem here? The child has been accepted into a major university and is weeks away from starting a difficult area of study, but it’s her parent who is doing all of the talking to get her problem corrected, while she says nothing and appears to be dragged along against her will.
You’re probably familiar with the term “Helicopter Parents,” where parents hover over their children and swoop in to rescue them at the first sign of trouble. At the college level, the physical presence required to hover may be limited, so we are now observing a different parenting style: “Lawnmower Parents.” These are the parents who rush ahead to intervene, saving the child from any potential inconvenience, problem or discomfort.
Other variations of this style of parenting include “Snowplow Parents,” “Bulldozer Parents,” and my personal favorite: “Curling Parents,” given the similarity to the Olympic athletes who scurry ahead of the gently thrown stone, frantically brushing a smooth path and guiding the stone towards an exact pre-determined location.
All humor aside, this kind of parental behavior can have long-lasting, detrimental effects on your child. Some of these include:
· She becomes poorly equipped to deal with routine growing and learning experiences. This includes everything from asking for directions and dealing with an annoying roommate to much broader skills like communicating with superiors, negotiating for something she wants and coping with disappointment.
· She doesn’t develop a sense of personal motivation or drive, since she only knows how to follow the path that the Lawnmower Parent has already prepared.
· She can’t make a decision, big or small, without the guidance of others.
· She constantly receives the message that she isn’t good enough to do this herself. In essence, the Lawnmower Parent is repeatedly demonstrating to the child that she cannot be trusted to accomplish things on her own.
Please consider these additional thoughts from a college faculty perspective:
· As a result of blatantly abusive behavior of some parents, many universities maintain a policy that all contact from a parent is referred to the administration office. A parent’s request to “just keep this conversation between us” or “don’t tell my daughter that I called you” isn’t likely to be honored, and may actually single your child out to administration for an unflattering reason.
· There is some information that we legally cannot reveal to you if your child is over 18 and hasn’t granted us permission. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), there are scenarios in which the university cannot release the student’s academic record to the parents, regardless of who is paying the tuition. And guess how I find out what I am permitted to reveal to a parent? I need to contact the school administration (see the previous bullet point).
· Faculty members are professionals, but if your behavior is threatening, outlandish, repetitive or otherwise inappropriate, there’s a good chance that we’re going to discuss it among ourselves. Your child may quickly gain a reputation within the faculty that is the exact opposite of how you are hoping that she will be received.
· Faculty are heavily involved in job searches, writing recommendations, making referrals, and so forth. If a parent has been contacting me to “help” her child through my class, how can I honestly rate that student highly on communication, motivation and maturity to a future employer when I haven’t ever seen the student demonstrate those skills?
How can you avoid becoming a Lawnmower Parent?
· School age kids: start practicing now! Let your kid do the talking as often as possible: ordering at restaurants, asking for directions, or calling a friend on the phone to ask for a playdate instead of arranging it yourself via text message.
· High school kids: while there is still room for parental involvement at this age, insist that your child attempt all communication on her own first. If she needs to miss a quiz and do a make-up, have her make the arrangements with the teacher, and only intervene AFTER she has made the first attempt on her own. If she has a conflict between track practice and music lessons, have her discuss the possibilities with the involved groups, then have her make the decision and deal with the potential consequences.
· Kids of all ages: TRUST your kid to do well, and tell her repeatedly that you believe that she can make good decisions on her own. Give her room to make mistakes, even major ones sometimes, and learn from them together.
As parents, we will inevitably watch our kids struggle, feel uncomfortable and even fail. As painful as that can be, you aren’t doing your child any favors by trying to shield her from this part of life or solve her problems for her. Instead, give her opportunities to learn strength and self-confidence, so she can handle future challenges with grace.
(1000 words)
Being an Elephant Mom in the Time of the Tiger Mother
By Priyanka Sharma-Sidhar
December 3, 2014/ The Atlantic
I still remember the first time someone spoke to me about grit. It wasn’t when I lost my dad and saw my mother fall apart.
It wasn’t when my mother died, and I felt like I was falling apart.
It wasn’t when people who I believed would invest in my business didn’t. It wasn’t when the great recession hit our advertisers and my business had to stop publishing a magazine.
It was when I was thinking of pulling my 3-year-old out of a preschool in which she clearly wasn’t thriving. She was anxious, frozen, a shadow of the child she used to be before she started there.
But it was a co-op preschool, meaning I couldn’t just turn around and leave. When you sign up to join a co-op, you also sign up to work various jobs around the school and to commit to being an active part of a larger community. In other words, I had to talk to the other parents at the co-op about my decision. One of them cautioned me: “What about grit?” she said. For a minute, I was taken aback. Was she talking about me or my 3-year-old?
She wasn’t talking about me.
It shouldn’t have shocked my system. I’ve often felt like a misfit around parents when they talk about how kids have it too easy these days or how important it is to inculcate a sense of independence in them as early as possible.
This is the story of my struggle to allow myself to be the kind of parent I want to be. I grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. in my 20s and became a mother here in my 30s. I had never felt like an outsider, ever—until I had a child.
I read a lot of books so that I would be the best mom I could be. And I suddenly found myself wondering, did the Indian parents I saw in my parents’ generation—and many in mine—get it wrong? My father was a big believer in the importance of a child’s first five years. I often heard him tell people how he couldn’t scold me until I was five. He reprimanded his younger brother for raising his voice at his kids before they turned five. Raised voices or not, we didn’t have any concept of time-outs anywhere around us. I can’t recall a time when I cried and a grown up didn’t come to console or hold me. They always did. I slept with my mother until I was five. My father would tease me and say I was my mother’s tail, but neither of them did anything to get me to sleep alone or in a different room with my siblings.
My parents weren’t the only ones with this kind of approach. The phrase I would hear in almost every home we visited during my childhood was some version of ‘Let the kids enjoy themselves.’ They have the rest of their lives to be grown up. And the social fabric of our world supported them. We would go to the fanciest of restaurants with our parents and run around and play tag. No one would stop us—not the managers, not the other diners. It was normal. Soon enough, the servers would join in. It was lovely.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that my parents and their friends necessarily had it right. Some of them produced kids who were happy, some of them didn’t; some of them raised CEOs, some of them raised stay-at-home moms. I’m just saying that it’s okay to be an elephant mom, an elephant dad—an elephant parent.
If you’re wondering what ‘elephant parent’ means, it’s the kind of parent who does the exact opposite of what the
tiger mom
, the ultra-strict disciplinarian, does. Here’s a
short video clip
that shows how real elephants parent. And that’s what I’m writing about here—parents who believe that they need to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re still impressionable and very, very young.
My elephant mom was a doctor with infinite patience. I failed a Hindi test when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I remember going to her, teary-eyed, with my results—and hearing her tell me that it didn’t matter. There were many more tests ahead. As I sobbed in her lap, she stroked my hair, hugged me, and told me there would be another test, and I could pass that one. (I did get the annual proficiency prize for Hindi a year later at the same school.)
My grandparents were doting parents, too. On both sides, the families lost everything in the partition of India. They had to flee to India from what is now Pakistan. My naana (mother’s father), originally a doctor from a wealthy family, began saving every rupee to educate his girls. He stopped going to the movies, his favorite past time. Both he and his wife stopped buying new clothes and began stitching them at home instead.
My father knew grit. He came to Punjab in India on a train with bullets flying around him—and people dying in front of his eyes. (Riots accompanied the 1947 partition that divided India and Pakistan.)
After his father died suddenly, he looked after his mother and brought up his four siblings in India. He and my mother paid for them to study in school and college and funded their weddings. Yet, my father never talked to me about grit. If anything, my parents protected me from pain; perhaps they knew that life would eventually have some pain in store for me, sooner or later. They learned how to raise their kids from their parents. And I learned how to raise my kid from them.
But my husband, who is also Indian, and I are raising our daughter thousands of miles away from where we were grew up. There aren’t any families of Indian origin at my daughter’s preschool or even in our immediate neighborhood. “Our way” isn’t a way that everyone around us understands. When she was a baby, we wouldn’t let her cry herself to sleep. It wasn’t a judgment on those who followed the sleep expert
Marc Weissbluth
’s advice. It was and is a cultural belief. Even now, our four-year-old will often ask us to put her shoes on, and feed her, much to the consternation of many fellow parents. But we do it because it connects us to our uncles and aunts who would have said she has the rest of her life to do it herself.
To make sense of the world where I was raising my child, I went to meet Angela Jernigan, who runs
Parent Connect East Bay
in Berkeley. She helps people find and build a support structure in their parenting journey. “We don’t have the village anymore,” she said. “It’s very hard for parents to be connected (to their kids), to give their kids the experience of being felt and heard.” For that to happen, parents need to feel connected and supported themselves, which in our fragmented world can be hard to do, she explained.
Jernigan has heard words like grit and resilience thrown around in her own child’s elementary school. “I explain that us having adult-like standards for children is the wrong way to build resilience. Parents have to be nurturing to build a core of strength with children,” she said.
Nurturing. Vulnerable. Empathetic. That’s how parents need to be, she suggests, when kids are having a “big feeling” (in other words, a meltdown).
I heard something similar
in a TED talk
by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, who studies the human connection. “You can’t selectively numb those hard feelings,” Brown said. She was referring to emotions like guilt, vulnerability, and shame—emotions kids and adults feel. In an uncertain world, Brown said, we like to make things certain. “We perfect, most dangerously, our children.”
And why we do that probably warrants an entirely different discussion about our cultural fears and insecurities. Have we failed as parents if our kids aren’t the most well-behaved, toughest, and smartest kids in the neighborhood? Jernigan’s clients are more often than not people who are trying to be the perfect parents, raising perfect kids.
Literature, discussions and forums about parenting abound. As we look for the best ways to raise our kids, we gravitate toward what makes sense to us. After meeting Jernigan, I couldn’t help but think that if there were so many parents flocking to her group to learn how to better connect with their kids, maybe many of the differences I’d noticed weren’t as fundamental and deep-rooted as I’d believed. Perhaps parents, regardless of where they’re from, have more in common than not. The mom who spoke to me about grit also, on a separate occasion, spoke to me about wanting a slow separation from her child.
Studies and facts indicate that, regardless of what parents might say about being tough with their kids, they are spending more time and money on them than previous generations have done. A 2012 study by sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg that was published in Demography found that parents
spent more on their children’s education and care
than on consumer goods from 1972 to 2007. Studies out of the University of California at San Diego show that college-educated parents in the U.S. have dramatically
increased the time they spend with their kids
over the past twenty years.
So what does any of this mean? I suspect that, even though it’s the tiger mom who makes the bestseller list, and everyone’s petrified of looking too soft, maybe everyone around me is a little softer than they think they need to be. I’ve realized that the best parent you can be is the one that you want to be; and there is no perfect parent, just as there is no perfect kid.
The journey that started at my child’s first preschool ended well. I knew I had found the right preschool when a matter-of-fact educator named Janet Bronson, who helps run a small preschool in Berkeley, said to me during a school tour: “What I want to do is make sure that a kid feels emotionally safe here, not just physically safe.” And then a teacher named Nyisha Galvez said, “Teach me some words in Hindi so that I can make her feel comfortable and at-home.”
My daughter had found her habitat. And perhaps I had, too.
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