For years, research on hyper-attentive parenting has focused on all the ways that it can hurt children.
Now, the U.S. government is reframing that conversation and asking if our new era of parenting is actually bad for the parents themselves.
Claire Cain Miller, who covers families and education for The New York Times, explains why raising children is a risk to your health.
Guest: Claire Cain Miller (https://www.nytimes.com/by/claire-cain-miller) , a reporter who writes for The Upshot at The New York Times.
Background reading:
• The surgeon general warned about parents’ stress (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/upshot/parents-stress-murthy-warning.html) , a sign that intensive parenting may have become too intense for parents.
• Read the surgeon general’s essay (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/surgeon-general-stress-parents.html) about parent stress.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily (http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-thedaily) . Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
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This topic makes me sick, and to quote a classic, “I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit.” Apocalypse anxiety, rat race, social media – the world is circling the drain.
I believe that the hidden force behind “intensive parenting” was always population control. Make parenting extremely difficult and expensive, push parents to have fewer kids and invest more in them. The government of South Korea was really blatant about this “quality over quantity” campaign; the US was a little more subtle.
Now that our overlords have started panicking about falling birth rates, they are trying to control the intensive parenting monster they created. I confess to finding this darkly amusing.
I’m a new mother of an 11 month old and I am their primary caregiver. I have been shocked and overwhelmed by all the guidelines to raising a child, both from the internet and their pediatrician. No screens allowed, read every day, get enough tummy time, no processed foods, breast is best, give them vitamin D and probiotics, buy the best Montessori toys, wear your carrier correctly or you will ruin their hips, do a bedtime routine every night, oh and don’t cosleep, you will kill your child! I don’t have enough time in the day to feed myself and shower, let alone follow all the “rules”
My parents certainly did not do this style of parenting. I was born in 1955. They modeled curiosity and creativity and intelligence through their normal lives. We were not held by the hand, driven to dozens of extracurricular activities or played with by our parent. We were left to learn about the world, about social dynamics and physical activity on our own and it happened perfectly well that way. I was a straight A student through college, athletic, and socially functional. I ran successful small businesses through my life and wound up financially comfortably. Kids learn about the world naturally on their own.
Oh god. Get ahold of yourselves. Stop helicopter parenting and stop calling everything a crisis.