Overparenting

This week’s article summary is How Schools Are Handling The 'Overparenting’ Crisis

The article interviews writers of two new books: Jessica Lahey, the author of The Gift of Failure, is a teacher and Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of How to Raise an Adult, worked at Stanford.

Whether it’s middle school (Lahey’s focus) or college (Lythcott-Haims’ focus), many kids today are given less and less opportunity from their overly-protective parents to make—and learn from—mistakes. 

A few years ago, child psychologist and independent school consultant, Robert Evans, wrote that it used to be that parents expected schools to prepare their children for life’s bumpy road, while now most parents expect the school to clear all the bumpy patches of life’s rough road to ensure children have a smooth, steady, unending line of continuous successes.

Particularly in light of Carol Dweck’s work, it’s clear to most of us that a growth mindset emanates  from learning how to deal with and bounce back from failure/disappointment—in other words, to become ‘resilient’ and ‘persistent’, one needs challenges, frustrations, failures, etc. 

One of my toughest experiences as a parent was watching one of my kids pitch in a high school baseball game. In Little League and Middle School, he had been a solid pitcher because he could consistently throw strikes, and most of the batters he faced really couldn’t hit very well. By high school, pitchers can’t just throw strikes but need to learn to add movement, change of velocity, etc. to be effective. Anyway, he was pitching to a very good hitting team, and while he threw strikes, he gave up hit after hit after hit without getting a anyone out.  

My wife and I sat in the stands—embarrassed for him but also, to be honest, embarrassed for ourselves.  As we saw his lower lip quiver—the first sign of tears—we looked around for someone to blame—mostly the coach for keeping him in the game and humiliating him. 

Finally, the coach took him out of the game—and my son sat down forlornly on the far end of the bench. As a teacher and coach myself, I barely resisted confronting the coach about how he had destroyed my son’s confidence in his abilities and ruined baseball—his favorite sport—forever. 

After the game, as we drove home (my wife and I not knowing how to talk to him about the game and his epic fall from grace), he began talking to us: 

“Man, I got rocked today. I did what I always do but that didn’t work. I’ve tried to throw the ball harder but I just can’t. Plus, I have no movement on my pitches. I almost lost it on the mound but coach finally took me out. He thanked me for trying my best and for continuing to pitch even though I was getting hit hard—a lot of our better pitchers have pitched a lot innings this week and coach said I helped the team even though I got hit so hard. I guess I’ll keep trying to pitch, but I’m really not sure I will be able to at this level. I’ve played second base and I like that position too.”

My wife (also a teacher) and I looked at each other, proud of our son, but also glad we had kept silent and let him figure out what to do. 

That growth mindset attitude might not have resulted if he hadn’t “gotten rocked” in that game and problem-solved on his own—with my wife and me, due to our initial nervousness of how that experience had warped him for life, being quiet sounding boards for him. 

(FYI, my son did ‘retire’ from pitching in a mutual decision between the coach and him—which from an objective standpoint was patently obvious. He ultimately became a solid—though by no means great—high school second baseman.)

Joe

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Have you ever done your children's homework for them? Have you driven to school to drop off an assignment that they forgot? Have you done a college student's laundry? What about coming along to your child’s first job interview?

These examples are drawn from two new books — How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims and The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey.

Parents are "too worried about their children's future achievements to allow them to work through the obstacles in their path" (Lahey) and "students who seemed increasingly reliant on their parents in ways that felt, simply, off" (Lythcott-Haims).

Below is a conversation with the authors:

What is the core of what's happening with kids and parents today?

Lahey: Kids are anxious, afraid and risk-averse because parents are more focused on keeping their children safe, content and happy in the moment than on parenting for competence. Furthermore, we as a society so obsessed with learning as a product — grades, scores and other evidence of academic and athletic success — that we have sacrificed learning in favor of these false idols.

Lythcott-Haims: We parents are overprotecting, overdirecting and doing a lot of hand-holding, ostensibly in furtherance of kids' safety — physical, emotional — and security — emotional, academic, reputational, professional, financial. Our kids becomes chronologically adult but still expect us to tell them what to do and how to do it, and are bewildered by the prospect of having to fend for themselves as an actual independent human.

Lahey: We really need to stop looking to our kids for validation. They are not extensions of us, nor indicators of our performance, and it's unfair to saddle them with that responsibility.

How are schools playing into this dynamic?

Lahey: Teachers complain about parents, but we helped create this frenzy.

One mother told me she was willing to step back, but felt like she could not because the standards have moved for what constitutes an A on a science project. Teachers have come to accept that parents interfere and co-opt school projects, and have begun to take that for granted when grading.

Lythcott-Haims: The other way in which high schools in particular play into the dynamic is during the college admission process, where they feel judged based on the brand names of the colleges their seniors get into, and their incentive is to brag about that.

Can parents help reverse the tide when it comes to their kids' experience in school?

Lahey: Watch what happens when you go to a teacher and say, "I'd like to give my child some increased autonomy this year, so I won't be meddling in his homework and I'd like for you to hold him accountable for the consequences of his mistakes." You will have an admirer for life.

And what can schools do differently to promote a culture of independence and achievement?

Lahey: Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to show children that we value learning. We can talk about the importance of education all we want, but our kids are too smart to fall for that hypocrisy. As long as we continue to worship grades over learning, scores over intellectual bravery and testable facts over the application of knowledge, kids will never believe us when we tell them that learning is valuable in and of itself.

Lythcott-Haims: Some schools are taking a proactive approach to this problem by trying to normalize struggle, such as the "Resilience Project" at Stanford that shows videos of professors, students and alumni talking about their own failures.

What are the worst-case scenarios here? What's so bad about a little coddling before our kids hit the cold, cruel world?

Lythcott-Haims: I'm all for love between parent and child from now until forever. What I'm concerned about is when coddling means a kid doesn't acquire the skills they're going to need out in the real world.

Lahey: Just last week, I was sitting in a Department of Motor Vehicles a mother fill out her 17-year-old daughter's application for her, asking for vital information such as height and weight, while her daughter texted on her phone.

I get the sense from reading the reactions to your books that parents want to find a way out of this but they don't always know how — and you both have shared that you feel that you yourselves have been implicated in this kind of "overparenting" at times. What do you tell other parents?

Lythcott-Haims: Three things parents can do right away:1. Stop saying "we" when you mean your kid. "We" aren't on the travel soccer team, "we" aren't doing the science project and "we" aren't applying to college. These are their efforts and achievements. We need to go get our own hobbies to brag about. 2. Stop arguing with all of the adults in our kids' lives. If there's an issue that needs to be raised with these folks, we do best for our kids in the long run if we've taught them how to raise concerns on their own. 3. Stop doing their homework. Teachers end up not knowing what their students actually know, it's highly unethical, and worst of all it teaches kids, "Hey kid, you're not actually capable of doing any of this on your own."