The OverParenting Trap How to Avoid Checklisted Childhoods and Raise Adults
As the author of a new book on parenting it's heretical for me to disclose that I'm not particularly interested in the subject. But it's true. I'm not interested in parenting. I'm interested in human beings. I believe in humans. I believe that all of us should have the right and chance to make our way in the world. I believe this, not only for the sake of each individual but for the sake of a world that gains a little bit when any one of us figures out who we are, what we're good at, what we love, and what we value, and then works very hard to be the very best version of that self we can muster. From my work with countless young adults over a decade as Stanford's freshman dean I've learned that having the courage to be who we are regardless of what other people want us to beeven parentsis the path to a meaningful and rewarding life. I'm interested in that for all of us. So I'm also interested in what gets in the way of each of us being our best self. And in doing something about it. I used to think the obstacles stemmed chiefly from otherness, outsider-ness, from being on the margins because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, family background, hardship, trauma, or abuse. And yes, of course, those things are obstaclessometimes tremendous obstaclesto a person's chances for becoming their best self. When I was freshman dean, I presumed that it would be students from underprivileged, underserved backgrounds who would most need a caring, thoughtful dean to believe in them when their background and family narrative collided with all that Stanford would ask and expect of them. And some of my favorite moments as dean were indeed spent mentoring such students. So imagine how surprised I was to discover among my more affluent, well-connected students a growing number who seemed to be lacking the ability to make their way independently in the world, as, frankly, 18-22 year olds always had been able to do and just as crucially, used to desire to do. I'm deliberately being vague about what exactly was missing in so many students because frankly I couldn't quite tell at first. Something was just off. Odd. It took most of my ten years as dean before I figured out what exactly the problem was. For starters, each year my students were more and more and more and more accomplished. The grades, but not just the grades the scores. And not just the grades and the scores but the awards, and the accolades, and the activities, and community service, and leadership, and, and, and, and, and, every other prospect for perfection. Yet each year I noticed that more and more could tell you what they'd done but not so much why they'd done it. Could tell you what they'd achieved but not so much about what mattered to them. These students were far more interesting to look at on paper than to talk with in person. Was any of this stuff really their passion? Did they even know what that word meant or was it just something someone said they needed in order to get into the quote unquote right college? Did they have a budding sense of self, or were they really just content to let their parents plan life for them? As someone who believes in humans, this perplexed me. Meanwhile, each year I saw more and more parents come to campus with their freshman kid and then . . . stay, literally or virtually, to ask questions select courses, activities, majors, internships, and careers solve problems handle conflicts defend and advocate for their student register for classes fill out applications track deadlines and call to wake their kid up. And to top it all off, these students weren't mortified when their parents did all of thisas my generation and the ones before it would have beenthey were grateful! Grateful to be able to communicate with a parent multiple times a day, in the dorm, in the dining halls, in the student union, going to class, going to another class, going somewhere after class, in the lobby of the advising office. Even in my office. Or they tried to. "It's my mom," they'd say, sheepishly, with a small shrug. "Do you mind if I just get this? I'll just Mom?", I believe in humans so I thought to myself, Something's not right. Is this college, or is it middle school? Remember the Stepford Wivesthat 1975 feminist allegory of women who were not actually humans but instead were robots programmed by their husbands to be the paradigmatic perfect wife? The bots came to mind as I watched my students live their college lives still somehow looking over to the sidelines for mom or dad's direction, protection, or intervention, as if they were five years old playing soccer and needing mom or dad to point in which direction to kick the ball. I began to wonder whether lately we've been raising Stepford Children. Yes, of course, closeness, affection, love, frequent communication between parent and offspring, that's all good. Who among us wouldn't wish for a closer relationship with our own parents? I'm GenX. One of the "latchkey" kids. So this kind of constant communication between parent and child at first seemed so cute to me. But I believe in humans, and when the dynamic between parent and adult child is this constant chatterabout choices, possibilities, and outcomes, the should and shouldn'ts of life, the want to and ought nots, the how do I do this and the let me take care of that for youswhen it came to all manner of their academic, professional, emotional, and personal lives, this intertwinedness moved, in my view, from something cute to something rather bleak. My students were not only celebrating the joys of life with parents, they turned to them whenever something went even mildly wrong a flat tire, a tiff with a roommate, a less than great grade on an assignment, as if their first instinct was to call or text a parentan instinct as natural as taking a breath of airand as essential. They didn't seem to know how to contend with what life would throw their way. How to sit with discomfort or indecision or opportunity and emerge with their own sense of how to move forward. So intertwined with their parents they didn't seem to know how to be their own selves. As a believer in humans, that made me worry for the future lives of these students. And even for our future as a species, which I know sounds absolutely hysterical, but when you work with thousands of the so-called best and brightest, and you see this kind of existential impotence, and then you talk to colleagues at colleges around the country not just at the elite schools but at schools in every tier, and they see this, and you realize that this isn't just a Bay Area thing or a Stanford thing but a middle- and upper-middle-class American thing, and the rates of mental health problems in children, adolescents, and young adults are soaring, particularly in affluent communities, you get concerned. Really concerned. That concern for humans is what made me write my book. On, well, as it turns out, parenting. Our kids need us to back off but it's healthy for us parents, too, if we back off. Carl Jung says the greatest impediment to the development of a child is the unlived life of the parent. Many of us spend our lives scheduled to the hilt between work and home, homework and homeroom, practice tests and practice fields, trying to keep up with the judgmental Joneses. Ours is an endless shuffle to a rehearsal, a practice, a tutoring session, an expert of some kind designed to make our kid better at something. We are on auto-pilot in our minivans, going through the motions, making the snacks, being on the committees, arguing with teachers, principals, coaches, and referees, serving as our kids' concierge, personal assistant, and secretary, fearing our spouse's expectations, vaguely wondering when we'll get off the sidelines of soccer practice and start living our own vibrant life again. Our morning medication is caffeine. Our evening medication is wine. Long, long gone are the days of throwing open the back door and saying "get out there and play I'll call you for dinner." There are no wide-open afternoons. No wide-open doors. And no one is home to play. There is only the schedule and the dropoff and the pickup and some semblance of that family dinner we know we're supposed to have. And then the homework. Until some set of us plus them is exhausted. Sleep. Repeat. I believe in humans, in all of us, and I'm here to tell youwarn youthat this way of parenting is harmful to kids, to parents, to us all. You know it, I know it. We all know it. We see our children withering under the pressure of the checklisted childhood, feel ourselves struggling to keep up, and we imagine a different, saner way, exists elsewhere. Wyoming? Yet we look over our shoulder and see the galloping herd of other parents who are spending more money, hiring more help, taking more time off just to ensure their kid makes the grade, makes the cut, and gets admitted to that school over our kid, all the while bragging about their outcomes. We want to trust our instincts, wish we were brave enough to walk away, focus on family time not test prep, incite laughter, prompt joy, let our kids just be, but we fear the herd, and the short term win their kid will achieve with all that help. The overparenting herd has become a bully we feel the need to go along with. There's a lot that's wrong in society. A college admissions arms race and other large forces that both constrain and impel us as parents. But let's not forget we have tremendous control at what I call the local-local levelat our kitchen counter and dining table, where we've got children who need dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow morning. Join me in doing right by our children, by leaving the herd of hoverers, by fostering independence not dependence, and by supporting them in being who they are rather than telling them who and what to be. Together, we can push the parenting pendulum back in the other direction toward raising the healthy, independent, happy, successful, adults they deserve to be.