Play classical music to your newborn to increase intelligence. Start your children learning a second language before the age of four. Spend an hour a day reading with your toddler to boost test scores at age eight. Make sure your children like sprouts before they’ve tried strawberries, otherwise they’re destined for obesity. With all the advice out there – all the things you know you ‘should’ do – it’s hard not to feel like you’ve failed as a parent before your child has even started school.
Two generations ago, when our parents were being raised, there wasn’t this anxiety about bringing up children in the optimal conditions. People had children and they did their best. And that was enough. They had no qualms about sending their children out to entertain themselves in the garden for the best part of the day, serving the same five meals on rotation, or letting their older children raise the younger ones. It was normal. That’s not to say that we can’t all benefit from knowing some ‘best parenting practices’ and keeping abreast of the emotional, mental and physical health discoveries that are being made. But can you have too much of a good thing?
Jared Alden, counsellor at the German Neuroscience Centre in Dubai Healthcare City, believes that, yes, we can know too much – and not just about parenting, but about all areas of life, such as nutrition, health and relationships. He says, “We have a lot of information coming at us, but it’s not necessarily knowledge. It’s an endless barrage of factoids that we just don’t know what to do with. In a way, it is a form of peer pressure – the TV tells us that everyone lives a certain way and does a certain thing and it is hard not to be influenced by that. The word ‘should’ sells. I think advertisers, and others who sell information, create a sense of need in us in order to sell their product or service.”
Jared points out that it’s not all bad. That aspiring to be a better parent, or to live healthier, has its benefits. He says, “Feelings of guilt and want are natural, healthy parts of life. We are more aware of health concerns and basic safety. We
look for risk where we did not before, but boy does it make some of us paranoid. Parents get obsessed with giving their children the best of everything. Others get obsessed with being fit.
I get obsessed with recycling, and I get angry when I go for lunch and see bottled water from Norway. There is a fine line between ambition and anxiety.” In his book Future Shock, published in 1970, American futurist Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi (also a futurist), speculated that future generations would suffer from information overload – a condition which is now being called infobesity, inferring that gorging on information is as bad for your health as gorging on food. In an interview 30 years after his book was released, Alvin said, “Too much of anything is not good.
Too much ice cream will kill you. I don’t think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload... There are a huge number of people who feel that the future is arriving so fast that they’re hanging on by their fingernails. That the world has become so fast that there isn’t time to think through the complexities of the decisions they need to make.”
Essentially, Alvin’s theories state that we have so much choice, and so many options, that we are often stunned into stagnancy. In terms of parenting, this translates into children’s schedules being filled with extra-curricular activities and exciting outings – we want our children to be able to sing, paint, surf, dance, speak three languages, kick a football, send an email and talk about global warming. It’s not that we don’t know what we want, it’s that we want it all. But we don’t know how to get it.
Being the perfect mother
Earlier this year, a survey by British parenting website yano.co.uk found that six out of ten parents admit they feel down and depressed by the pressure to be the perfect parent. In fact, 10 per cent of parents said they felt this pressure every day. Dubai-based mother-of-two Laura Edwards*, from the UK, says that she was “blown away” by the deluge of parenting information she was faced with when she had her first child. “Someone gave me a Gina Ford book and I felt pressured to get my son into a routine on day three of his existence,” says Laura. “It didn’t work, so another friend gave me another book and gave me advice on how I should sleep with my baby in my bed, A good friend of mine had a baby slightly older than mine who was perfect.
I couldn’t help feeling judged by them all and it really affected my sanity and our friendships. You definitely feel pressure to do things a certain way... and it doesn’t just come from other mothers, it comes from doctors, too.” In her effort to do everything right, Laura stressed herself out so much that her body stopped producing milk. She says, “I was so cross with myself for listening to everyone... with my second child, I didn’t listen to anyone, or read any books. I just chilled out and I had a much better experience – and I think my child had a better experience as well.”
It’s common sense that if our parenting style is stressing us out, chances are it’s stressing our kids out, too. American journalist and author Pamela Druckerman has written a book called French Children Don’t Throw Food about the differences between French and American parenting styles, based on her own experiences of raising children in Paris. According to Druckerman, the French have a much more relaxed attitude to parenting and, as a result, have children who are better behaved.
She first noticed the success of French parenting in a restaurant one day when her toddler ate only bread and rice and caused havoc while French toddlers sat calmly in their highchairs eating fish and vegetables. She says, “The French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and pre-literacy training, French kids are – by design – toddling around by themselves.”
Finding time to chill
When children get older, this desire to be the perfect parent can make life hectic, not to mention expensive; the Yano survey found that 46 per cent of parents try to feel better about their parenting by buying their children nice clothes and toys, while 38 per cent pay for extracurricular activities. It’s easy to get sucked into this notion that every day must be filled with meaningful, edutainment – we go out of our way to give our children exposure to many different experiences and opportunities, mainly because they will enjoy it, but also in the hope that they will become passionate about one of them and excel at it.
However, it’s difficult to tell where an active and experiential childhood ends and over-stimulation begins. Jared says, “It’s a typical thing of our age that parents are never relaxed in any one moment, or activity, because they are too busy micromanaging the next event. I call it positive anxiety. A lot of children have never seen their parents rest... simply because their parents don’t know how to.”
How have we forgotten how to relax? Surely relaxing is something we all enjoy doing, so how can we forget to do it? According to Jared, keeping busy has become part of our coping mechanism – if we’re always moving, always busy, we must be doing alright, right? Wrong, says Jared. “I see so many clients who are keeping themselves busy so they don’t have to feel. Nothing ever upsets them – they’re never hot, they have a ten-minute commute, their house is never dirty, they never have an opportunity to feel bored, or lonely, because they go to the gym every day.
And then something happens – they wear their knees out and have to stop running, or their car breaks down, or their child hates them and they freak out.” Jared points out that we don’t normally get to see other people going through this, so when we become parents, we aren’t properly prepared for the hard times. When it happens to us, it takes us by surprise and we hide it behind happy Facebook updates and big sunglasses. Our honest-talking mother Laura agrees with this. She says, “When I had my first child, it was awful and tiring... and I didn’t feel I could say that to anyone. Years later, the friend of mine with the perfect baby admitted it had been hard. But at the time all she said was how wonderful and amazing it was.”
This ‘public face’ of parenthood – where people post on Facebook incessantly about how their child is chowing down on caviar and gravlax and about idyllic fairy picnics in the back garden, but nobody mentions the tantrums, the frustrations, the hard work that goes with it – is just another source of ‘perfect parent pressure’. Jared says, “It reminds me of that cartoon, The Jetsons, where the mum got a call on the computer but she hadn’t done her make-up yet so she held up a mask of her face in front of the screen... I think we do that with Facebook.”
Norma Cairns, counselling psychologist at LifeWorks Dubai, says, “Parenting shouldn’t be about being perfect, but about doing your best with the resources available to you. I don’t think we can ever know too much – it’s good to have information and to be informed – but clearly the source of information is important and all of it should be contributing to an end goal of having a heightened awareness of how we work physically, how we tick psychologically, what’s in a child’s best interests and what’s good for the environment. It’s not about being perfect – perfection is linked to anxiety. It’s about finding a level which is good for you and your family. The question is, how do you find that level?”
Taking the lid off
Removing yourself from the parenting rat race takes commitment and self-awareness. But it is possible, says Laura. “I don’t let it affect me anymore,” she says. “I bowed out of the competition. My three-year-old gets into our bed every night and I let him. When my first child did it, I put him back into his own bed every night for a month and one morning I found him asleep on the floor outside my bedroom door. I felt so guilty and stopped making a deal out of it. I do worry what people think sometimes, but I just try and do things our way... and that’s the best you can do, isn’t it?”
For parents who want to find their own way, Jared advises scheduling relaxed downtime in your weekly itinerary. He says, “When was the last time your kid saw you chilling with a cup of tea on the sofa, or your house in a mess. Set yourself little tasks, such as three or four hours on the weekend where you do nothing and see how everyone in the family handles it. When I say this to people, I see their shoulders tense.
They want to do it, but I don’t know if they actually manage it. When they do try to relax, it’s often an active process, like, ‘OK, we’re going to the beach to relax now.’ You don’t need to reinvent your life... just say to your eight-year-old, ‘You decide what we’ll do at home this afternoon.’ We don’t have to go back to an imagined idyllic time... we just have to try to incorporate unstructured time into our lives where we just sit together and hang out.”
This act of slowing down will give you the opportunity to find out what you and your family like and dislike, how much entertainment is good for your children, and how much free time they need. French-inspired Druckerman says, “A lot of parents have told me this sounds like the way they were raised, and I think that’s really interesting... We’ve developed this very intensive style of parenting where we do a lot of guilt, and a lot of worry, and a lot of intervention, and we’re not sure why we are doing it.
We weren’t raised that way but we are fed by all kinds of forces, from new research to economic uncertainty. But I think there is really a rethinking now of whether this current style of parenting is good for us and whether it’s good for our kids. Are our kids actually benefiting from this kind of intensive focus on them?” LifeWorks’ Norma says, “Go back to basics... we all know the fundamentals about life – everything is good in moderation, have five fruits and vegetables per day, sleep eight hours a night. I always say to clients that I have an invisible sign over my head saying ‘No shoulds, only coulds’.
Prioritise what’s important to you. And do children need to be engaging in ten different activities a week? I don’t think they do. With parenting, the best thing you can do is keep it simple.”
