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10/14/08
Living with Children
John Rosemond
Copyright 2008, John K. Rosemond
Q:
In a recent column, you had the audacity to say that parents should
not be involved with their children. As you are certainly aware, this
isn’t what we parents are being encouraged, from every direction, to
do. Can you elaborate and explain?
A: Like most post-1960s
parenting mantras, “get involved with your kids” is accepted not
because it makes good common sense or has proven to be advantageous
(because it hasn’t), but because it has a warm and fuzzy feel to it.
For example, schools keep pushing parental involvement in homework,
claiming it results in higher achievement, yet the rise in parent
participation in homework has coincided with declines in student
achievement. There’s a thin line between being involved and being
interested, supportive, and encouraging. I believe it is more
functional for all concerned that parents stay, for the most part, on
the “interested” side of the line.
Once upon a not-so-long-ago
time in America, responsible parents kept tabs on but were not involved
with their children. They knew the where, what, and with whom of their
children’s lives, but they maintained a respectful distance, letting
their kids learn their various lessons by trial-and-error,
traditionally known as the “hard way.”
In this context, the child’s
primary challenge was to keep his parents from getting involved. He
eventually figured out that the way to bring about minimal “government”
intrusion into his life was to act responsibly. When he failed to act
responsibly, his parents got involved, the consequence of which was
less freedom. It did not take many such episodes of parental
involvement for him to get it.
Parenting is a form of
leadership. In order for a leader, in any context, to be effective, he
or she must command (as opposed to demand) the respect of the people
being led. This requires a boundary between the leader and the led, the
permeability of which is controlled by the former. “Get involved with
your children” puts relationship before leadership, the cart before the
horse. It often results in the distinction between parents and children
being blurred, turning them into quasi-peers, thus making it difficult
for the children to accept the parents’ authority. Whining, petulance,
and problems with discipline are the likely outcome.
High
involvement transitions all-too easily into micromanagement, in which
case the child quickly learns that if he drops a proverbial “ball,” his
parents will not just pick it up, but probably also clean it up. They
may even begin carrying it for him. As he becomes more dependent on his
parents’ well-intentioned rescuing, he begins acting less and less
capable. In turn, his parents become ever-more convinced that he
requires their constant vigilance¬—their involvement—in order to
succeed. The parents end up working harder and harder to insure the
success of a child who is working hardly at all, which is why highly
involved parents are likely to be highly stressed parents as well.
In addition, parents who are highly involved in things like their
children’s homework begin to take their children’s successes and
failures personally. They end up preventing most of the error in the
trial-and-error process and cleaning up those errors that do slip by
them, the result being that the child fails to learn important life
lessons.
The trend toward increasing parent involvement has been
with us for more than a generation. Perhaps its most telling
consequence is the steady increase, since the early 1970s, of the mean
age of successful emancipation, helped along by large numbers of
previously rare “boomerang” children who seem unable to deal with the
most fundamental requirements of independent living.
Yes, you
read my audacity correctly: I am the contrarian of parent involvement.
I think it’s bad for parents, bad for children, bad for families
(obviously), and for all those reasons, bad for America.
Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents' questions on his website at www.rosemond.com.
 John's
popular syndicated parenting column appears weekly in approximately 250
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