Parents behaving badly

A friend of mine tells the following story. A few years ago, her daughter was accepted into the OC (Opportunity or Selective Class) in her local public school. In the first week of first term, all the parents attended a parent-teacher night in their children’s new classroom.

As the evening wore on, parents asked lots of questions about how many hours homework their children would be getting and what sort of things the teacher would be doing to stimulate the children in class. My friend was sitting at the back of the room and, after some time spent on this line of questioning, grew impatient.

So she put her hand up and asked her question. She asked the teacher how she was going to handle the fact that all the 10-year-olds in her new class were used to coming in the top two or three of their class and, that as only two or three of them could do the same in this class, how did she intend to handle the inevitable blow to the children’s self esteem.

The teacher was very relieved by the question, or so she said, because it was the biggest issue she had to deal with at the start of every year. But it was the reaction of the parents that really interested my friend. Despite the fact the teacher was in mid sentence, they turned and looked at her in astonishment. So caught up were they in the reflected glory of the “specialness” of their children, such a thought had never crossed their minds.

I believe my generation of Australian parents is possibly the most ordinary we’ve ever had. The rightly criticised “helicopter parenting” (so called because the parents hover protectively over children to an obsessive extent, I presume) is a direct result of our new and - if I may use a term I normally hate - un-Australian attitude to parenting.

As another friend of mine (in her 60s) said recently, if a teacher had told her mother she showed signs of having an imagination, her mother would have expected the school to knock it out of her. While I am not necessarily recommending a return to those extremes, these days, the opposite is true.

Now every parent seems to feel his or her child is “special” in some way. They are either “gifted and talented” (pass me the bucket, please) or are only not little “Einsteins” because they have learning difficulties which mask their as yet undiscovered, but no doubt, extraordinary abilities.

Public schools and their teachers have been the losers as a result of this projected egotism by parents. Ordinary schools are no longer good enough for our children, it seems. The last thing we want is our child to sit in the middle of a scruffy classroom with a bunch of ordinary kids from the neighbourhood.

We want the rest of the world to feel about our children the way we do: that they are the most remarkable creatures in the universe.

The purpose of childhood is to grow up and the purpose of parenting, from the moment of birth, is to slowly, gradually, but inexorably, let go of our children. Tying our children too closely to us, drowning them in our often self-indulgent love, prevents them from getting on with their job because we are refusing to get on with ours.

As the poet Kahil Gibran said “Our children are not our children, they are expressions of life’s longing for itself.” This generation of parents seem to have forgotten that.

But why have we forgotten? What are the forces around us that are destroying our sense of proportion? Our common sense, if you like? First of all we are having far fewer children and we have much more money to spend on them: possibly the two most important ingredients for bringing up a spoilt (read emotionally crippled) brat.

Second, guilt. We are not only indulging our children to the hilt, we are indulging ourselves and we know it. Perhaps we try to make up for our emotional neglect and cowardice by throwing money at our children and fussing about stuff that doesn’t matter. Parents - particularly middle class ones - have never spent more time and energy fussing over their children's diets and our children have never been fatter.

Third, we are terrified. We worry about the world we have created for our children and as we no longer have confidence in our own ability to navigate it, understandably we have correspondingly little confidence in our children’s ability to find their way. Our own anxiety about the world causes us to see our children as fragile and vulnerable, when, in fact, it is ourselves who are feeling out of control.

If, as M. Scott Peck says, love is not a feeling but an action, maybe the best thing we could do for our children is stop indulging our overwhelming feelings of love and start acting in ways that are more likely to help them in the long run.

If we could just stop using our children to manage our own anxiety about the world, and start doing our job by judiciously and slowly allowing them to experience reality - to take risks and survive them - then, perhaps, they would have some chance of successfully completing their own job, and really grow up.

At the moment, the world is full of fully grown children who have never been allowed to be ordinary, who have been protected from failure, hurt and danger to an obsessive extent. We keep them indoors because of a fantasy danger - the abductor, the pedophile, the nasty stranger - and therefore make them much more susceptible in the long run to such real dangers as obesity, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Doctors already speculate that our children may be the first generation in history to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.

One of the reasons fairy tales are grim (in name and nature) is because they prepare children for the inevitable dangers they will one day face. It is safe danger, if you like, play danger, but children both need it and are strong enough to cope with it.

When we decide to protect our children from other children, when we decide to expose them only to people of the same class, religious and ethnic background, when we teach them, by our actions and our free floating anxiety that the world is dangerous and to be feared, with the very noblest of intentions, we do a terrible thing.