Parenting is tough. I have yet to find a foolproof parenting manual. Strong parenting requires precision: striking the right balance of love, attention, and discipline. Leaning too much in any one direction can cause negative repercussions.
When I was young, my parents disciplined with a heavy hand. Expectations were abundantly clear, and threats loomed regarding punishments that would be issued “when Dad gets home.” At the time, such authoritarian parenting was widely accepted as routine. My parents were older when they had me and subscribed to rigidity. “Children were to be seen but not heard.” My parents, no doubt, did the best that they could raising my older sisters and me, but we were three very different children, and each of us responded uniquely to their strict parenting style.
My friends’ parents, back in the day, mostly seemed either neglectful or permissive in comparison to my own. Some parents indulged their children with excessive purchases and enforced few, if any, expectations. Other parents travelled frequently, leaving their children to host high school parties in their absence.
While these three parenting styles – authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved parenting – persist today, we have become much more educated about parenting, in general, and understand that authoritative (not to be confused with authoritarian) parenting will likely yield the best results: Parenting with empathy but establishing consistent limits and expectations.
Despite our enlightened times, from my observations, parents struggle with the “empathy” piece, often overstepping the bounds of parenting and entering “the friend zone,” becoming their child’s confidant, champion, and benefactor. Friends, by nature, go to battle for other friends. They clear obstacles, matchmake, and occasionally obsess. Many parents and their children become codependent, with parents controlling their children’s lives or living vicariously through their children. Our primary goal, as parents, if feasible, should always be to produce healthy, independent, young men and women who will contribute to society.
To truly develop independence, though, our children must be allowed to fail, yet so many parents seem intent on protecting their children from failures. Over the past decade or so, I have witnessed parents of my students go to battle with teachers over grades, extra credit opportunities, deadlines, and school attendance policies. I have seen parents who fight school penalties for honor code violations. I have also seen parents who do their children’s homework and projects in high school and write their children’s essays. These parents often do not realize that, in doing so, they are harming their children and stripping their children of developing the skills they desperately need to find success. These overprotected children are much more susceptible to increased anxiety, decreased confidence, addiction, and promiscuity.
Because they act out of love, bulldozer or helicopter parents justify their actions, but in the process, they have created a world where grades are increasingly meaningless, participation trophies are touted on résumés, and college admissions can be bought or persuaded. Social media and the pandemic seem to have worsened parental overprotection. Today’s children have missed out on so much because of the pandemic that parents are quick to offer excuses for their children’s fatigue, inability to submit work on time, and poor behavior, and social media intensifies the pressure to seek perfection.
We need to return to a world that embraces each other in love but also holds each other accountable for actions. Our children need to know how to write their own essays and to accept punishment with humility, so they can grow. No parent is a perfect parent, but if we see ourselves in these examples of codependent, overprotective, bulldozing parenting, we must make amends, for our children’s sake. They are more capable than we know.