Status Anxiety

4 July 2009

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter parenting’ — an American term for supervising your children’s lives too closely — and recommended a book on the subject by Carl Honoré, a Canadian intellectual.

I was a bit suspicious because Honoré is one of the leading advocates of the Slow Movement, but Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is quite convincing. According to Honoré, we have entered the age of the ‘managed child’ in which middle-class parents spend too much time meddling in their children’s lives. ‘The average distance from home British kids are permitted to wander by themselves has fallen nearly 90 per cent since the 1970s,’ he points out. He believes children would be much better off if left to their own devices.

One passage in particular jumps out. Honoré is suspicious of the view that parents should try and build up their kids’ ‘self-esteem’. The practice of heaping praise on children for accomplishing something a chimpanzee could manage is completely wrong-headed. ‘Every doodle ends up on the fridge door,’ he writes.

Too right, I thought. Scarcely a day passes in our household without a child returning from school with a satchel full of drawings and Caroline is constantly scolding me for not taking enough interest in them. Indeed, the entire ground floor of our house has been converted into an exhibition space, with various daubs and scribbles being given pride of place as if they were the work of major artists. We’re currently ‘showing’ the work of Ludo, our four-year-old, who is at the height of his ‘robot period’.

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Emma

July 3rd, 2009 8:01pm Report this comment

I have always let my kids do their own thing but the problem is the five year old did not realize for a whole year at school that she was meant to try to learn to read she just said 'no thanks' when they asked her if she wanted to. So it backfired a bit.