This past Monday, I enjoyed watching our middle school students arrive for their conferences and share with their advisors and parents what has gone well for them so far this year and where they would like to improve. In the days beforehand, it was a pleasure to hear them preparing for the conferences, and some students came to my office—where their art hangs on the wall—and took down the pictures, so they could show them to their parents. For years, I have felt it was wrong to repeatedly exhort students to “own” their education but then to have meetings where they weren’t even included. I do understand that there are times that parents and teachers may need to discuss something without a child present; but when we’re talking about a child’s academic career, we should include them at the table, so they can be invested in their learning and intellectual development.
As parents, one of our goals is to eventually make ourselves superfluous, so our children will survive and flourish without us at their sides. There are few things more painful than standing by and watching our children struggle and sometimes fail; however, if we are always there to bail them out, they will never develop the resilience and the skill set to bounce back from temporary setbacks. Every defeat will loom large for them, and they will lack a sense of perspective.
Although educators and psychologists have been discussing this concept for years, we can always benefit from a reminder of the importance of allowing our children to develop their independence. A Chicago Tribune column published this past October, “Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation of children,” discussed a new book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, by former Stanford Dean Julie Lythcott-Haims. In this book, Lythcott-Haims borrows from her experience working with freshmen at Stanford to explain how “overparenting” is actually damaging children and possibly setting them up for failure down the road. All too often, when we as parents take on our children’s work as our own, we allow them to opt out of it emotionally and/or not feel responsible for the ultimate outcome. “We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But overhelping causes harm,” she [Lythcott-Haims] writes. “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.”
Lythcott-Haims even gives us this list of pointers to bear in mind when we may be headed toward “overparenting”:
- “Check your language.” When parents use the pronoun “we” when referring to our children’s activities, they may be veering toward being over-involved.
- “Examine your interactions with the adults in your child’s life.” Encourage our children to take the lead in talking with their teachers and coaches on their own behalf.
- “Stop doing their homework.” The temptation to help our children out can be overwhelming. However, when we go too far, we disserve them by not only preventing them from learning what they need to know but also hurting their own sense of self and agency.
As with so many other aspects of parenting, this may not be easy and it is definitely not fun. However, as we know intuitively, we need to “play the long game” in parenting and realize that what may be difficult right now will ultimately serve them best down the road. So, when our children call and say that they left their homework at home, we need to take a deep breath, remain calm, tell them that we hope they won’t do that again, hang up the phone, go back to whatever it is we were doing—reassured that our children will have learned a painful but important lesson on their way toward becoming confident and self-sufficient young women and men.
