{"id":9859,"date":"2011-06-15T12:39:13","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T16:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9859"},"modified":"2011-06-15T12:46:43","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T16:46:43","slug":"fight-that-natural-urge-to-over-protect-your-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/15\/fight-that-natural-urge-to-over-protect-your-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Fight that natural urge to (over-) protect your children"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting article by Lori Gottlieb<\/a> on the perils of over-protective parenting styles:<\/p>\n

\n

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our \u201cdiscomfort with discomfort\u201d in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age<\/em>. If kids can\u2019t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won\u2019t develop \u201cpsychological immunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like the way our body\u2019s immune system develops,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won\u2019t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn\u2019t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn\u2019t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they\u2019re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is \u2018I can fix this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee<\/em> a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they\u2019ve dubbed \u201cteacups\u201d because they\u2019re so fragile that they break down anytime things don\u2019t go their way. \u201cWell-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,\u201d Mogel said of these kids, \u201cso they don\u2019t know how to deal with it when they grow up.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh, and for those of you who regularly utter phrases like “Good job, buddy!” every time your kid manages to do something trivial, you can just knock that right off:<\/p>\n

\n

A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic<\/em> and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn\u2019t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim \u201cGreat job!\u201d not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for \u201cgood tries,\u201d he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as \u201cgood tries.\u201d) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself\u2014a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? \u201cNarcissists are happy when they\u2019re younger, because they\u2019re the center of the universe,\u201d Twenge explains. \u201cTheir parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting article by Lori Gottlieb on the perils of over-protective parenting styles: Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our \u201cdiscomfort with discomfort\u201d in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can\u2019t experience painful feelings, Kindlon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[374,262,375,139],"class_list":["post-9859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","tag-children","tag-culture","tag-parents","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2z1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9859"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9863,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9859\/revisions\/9863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}