Over-parenting

I recently came across this article by Katie Allison Granju and not only enjoyed reading it but agree with it as well.

She quotes Jackie Kennedy as saying "If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much." I agree with that as well, but also know that overdoing and obsessing over every little detail of child rearing doesn't equate to good parenting. In this culture, that is overrun by parenting experts, of which Granju is one too, it is very easy to get overwrought by all the advice and worry about every little detail. Not to mention the competition with other parents, where we can feel good about our parenting, only when we get to put down somebody else's style. Yes, this competition has always been there, but now we have the muscle of the marketing and consumer industry behind it.

Granju wrote this article, partly to promote her book on the same topic, which brings me to my pet-peeve. Did you have to write a whole book about it? The article is enough. It is just like this other parenting book I am currently reading "Hold on to your kids" by Gordon Neufeld. The book has a good point, but all it needed was about 20 pages. I am through three quarters of the book, often skipping entire chapters at a time, and he is still defining the problem! Geeze. You had me at hello and are going to lose me soon if you don't come to the point already.

Dr. Neufeld's point is that the most important thing you need as a parent, the thing that gives you natural authority, makes the child want to be good for you, is the child's attachment to you. This attachment cannot be taken for granted, and must be nurtured and developed, esp in the modern society where everybody is so busy and we don't spend as much time with our children. As they grow, you have to make sure that your only interaction with your kids isn't you asking them to do or not do something. You have to take the time to enjoy being with them, just to hang out and show them how much they matter to you. When they are misbehaving, you shouldn't push them away, send them to time-out or try to teach them anything. Show them that you still love them and do what you need to get through the situation quickly. Work on a solution later, when everyone is calm. Some ideas are similar to what "Love and Logic" says - if you don't have the love, you can't enforce the logic. But of course, this man needs to sell his own formula so he denigrates all others and takes a few chapters doing it. Sigh.

His second point is that every child needs to orient themselves to somebody, like a compass needle. If the parent isn't available as the orientation point, then the kids orient themselves to their peers, which automatically results in turning away from the parents, leading to ill-behaved children who don't respect their parents and want to spend all their time with their friends. Since peers aren't mature or provide unconditional love, the children get bereft, do all kinds of wrong things to fit in and take rejection from the peer group very hard. The compass needle can only point in one direction at a time, so if you think your child is pushing you away and her friends matter more to her, you have to reorient the child's compass back towards yourself. He claims he has solutions for this and maybe I will reach that chapter one day.