"Wow, she's really getting the hang of that spoon," I commented with a smile.
"Yes," her mother replied, "I've been working really hard with her on it all week. It's kept me pretty busy."
Working really hard on teaching her to use a spoon? All week? Kept her pretty busy?
I shouldn't have been surprised. Hearing this intelligent, accomplished woman with a master's degree in biology tell me how consuming she's found teaching her toddler to use a spoon is just one more example of our current culture of hysterical parenting. I mean, really, when did parenting become this difficult? When did the admirable quality of involved parenting become this?
While it's one thing to be pleased — even proud — over baby's ability to connect spoon with mouth, it's quite another for her mother to become that invested in it, logistically or emotionally.
Wait, wait, you may be asking. Aren't you that same Katie Allison Granju who wrote a parenting book telling people to give their children more attention? Well, yes, and no. I did write the book Attachment Parenting (for which Dr. William Sears wrote the introduction), and I do believe strongly that infants and very young children thrive best with a high-touch, responsive style of parenting, but I'm also that mom who encouraged her two-year-old to play in the mud — some of which he certainly ate — and her five-year-old to climb trees. Yes, my kids slept with me as infants — because I found we all got the most sleep that way — but the kids were enjoying sleepovers with family and friends by kindergarten.
These days, I let my youngest kid enjoy his growing collection of pocket knives, and I expect my children toIn the past decade and a half, the parenting zeitgeist has shifted . . . into overdrive. ride their scooters out of my eyesight in our urban neighborhood. And I frequently tell my children that since I already completed elementary school, and have no intention of repeating the work, they will need to do their homework without me hovering nearby.
I have often described my parenting philosophy as "benign neglect." Responsive parenting means just that: we respond to children's needs. It's not the same as over-parenting, in which we anticipate, preempt, or take control of our children's needs and developmental tasks.
Of course, like all parents, I have my worries. In my case, I fret that they are watching too much TV and not developing a strong enough work ethic. I worry that the fact that their parents are divorced will leave them irrevocably damaged. And like everyone else I know, the primal fear of stranger abduction is always hovering at the edge of my motherbrain.
But I can say honestly that I don't obsess about the minutiae of my parenting, and as I get ready to give birth to child number four with husband number two, fifteen years after becoming a mother for the first time at age twenty-three, I am increasingly finding that this puts me in a distinct minority. In the past decade and a half, the parenting zeitgeist has shifted . . . into overdrive.
While there have always been obsessive, overbearing parents, they used to be the exception, rather than the norm. They were the kinds of hyper-involved parents no one wanted to become; because as they lived their lives solely through the prism of their parenting, it was believed they produced the archetypal "mama's boy," the child who was never allowed any activities outside his parents' watchful eye, and who was coddled and protected from all conceivable risk. This type of childhood, we have always believed, ultimately produced individuals who were stunted in their ability to make bold moves or take leadership roles — or even function independently.
Until recently, the essential tasks of parenting were seen as nurturing and socializing children. Today, however, this simple mandate seems criminally neglectful. Now, parenting requires constant vigilance, unflagging attention to every detail of our children's lives, and ever present monitoring of their every activity.