Kids these days have plenty of things but no time to play. They are indulged and coddled but behave worse than ever. Where have modern mums and dads gone wrong?
DIANA Smart is a cautious woman. She tends to qualify things. She doesn’t get over-excited by results. But even she admits to being very surprised by what she found when she compared the behaviour of a group of children born in the early 1980s with another born around the year 2000.
While both groups of six to seven-year-olds were fairly well behaved, when the researchers investigated conduct problems – temper tantrums, disobedience, fighting with other children and lying – the difference between the two was significant.
According to their parents, the 1980s group were more troublesome. But according to the teachers, it was the latter group that had more behavioural issues. They were also more hyperactive, although, oddly, less anxious than the 1980s children.
It wasn’t the difference between the children that surprised the researchers – while statistically significant, behavioural problems were low across both groups, it was the difference between what parents and teachers reported that was unexpected. It is almost unheard of for teachers to report more behavioural issues, Smart explains. ”It was very unusual.”
Maybe parents in the noughties were ”less bothered by challenging child behaviour” or teachers more attuned to it, Smart and her colleagues from the Australian Institute of Family Studies thought. Perhaps this generation of children was mucking up more in school. After all, some experienced teachers were reporting anecdotally that today’s children were more badly behaved than their predecessors, the researchers said.
The most likely scenario is that it is parents themselves that have changed – from figures of authority, to figures of fun.
While the study’s findings may have thrown Smart and her colleagues, they came as no surprise to a growing number of teachers and child-care workers who say they are dealing with ever more behavioural issues. They complain that in an increasingly child-centric culture, they are being expected to pick up the pieces left by parents who withhold nothing from their children – except perhaps the word ”no”.
Just last month, Education Minister Julia Gillard told a conference of teachers that schools were having to ”bear a lot of weight because there are things that should be done in families, but aren’t”. And hers was just the latest voice in a chorus of complaint about over-indulgent parents and the offspring they’re producing.
In a 2008 essay, American writer Joseph Epstein called our child-first culture ”the kindergarchy”. ”No other generations of kids have been so curried and cultivated,” he wrote, ”so pampered and primed.” Social researcher Hugh Mackay concurs, arguing in his book Advance Australia Where? that child-centrism is producing a generation of youngsters with ”towering self-esteem and … unabashed assertiveness”.
More recently, Melbourne writer Christos Tsiolkas sparked furious debate by painting an all-too-realistic portrait of today’s overindulged toddler and then putting him on the receiving end of a hefty adult-inflicted whack in his novel The Slap. Meanwhile, comedian Chris Lilley won a huge fan club with his nauseatingly familiar creation Ja’mie King and her doormat of a mother inSummer Heights High.
Lower birthrates, greater affluence, and an increase in the number of working parents (all of which translates into more money and fewer children on which to spend it) are the main factors being blamed for today’s over-indulgent parents. Mackay says it’s a mix of factors not unlike the one that produced China’s notorious Little Emperors.
As well, there has been a proliferation in the amount of parenting advice available. But, according to Mackay, the only thing the what-your-child-should-be-doing-now books, parenting courses and Supernanny-style TV shows have succeeded in doing is making ”child care [an even] more complicated science. Parents are losing confidence in their ability to parent,” he says. ”(They) don’t want to get anything wrong.”
There has been a quantum shift in the way parents parent, Mackay says. ”And we’ve got this weird reversal where parents feel like they have to please their children (rather than the other way around).”
We are the ”the mean parents”, Liz, a high school teacher from Sydney, says of herself and husband Grant, who preferred not to identify themselves for this story. Their daughters – aged nine and six – both have a Nintendo DS ”but the deal is that they can only get an upgrade of a game or a new part on their birthday or if they save up through pocket money”. That deal means they are ”quite different to a lot of their friends … who have 10 or 20 more games than them”, she says.
Liz, in her early 40s, says kids now have computerised equipment from the moment ”they can move” and constantly get new gadgets. ”You may have the DS but then you’ve got to have the games that go with it,” she says, ”and after 12 months there will be a new version.”
According to a report this month by McCrindle Research, 96 per cent of Australian parents spend more than $100 a year on toys for their children, while 25 per cent spend more than $500. Most of the money goes towards ”toys that aren’t toys”, such as iPods, digital cameras and mobile phones.
”We were looking at toy spending for the under-16s,” says senior researcher Mark McCrindle. ”There were a lot of 14 and 15-year-olds [with consumer electronics], but what was surprising is that we [found] a lot of eight, nine and 10-year-olds with these things too. And there were cases of six-year-olds with digital cameras and IT devices.” The study, which drew on focus groups and qualitative research, left him with the impression that parenting these days ”is an accessory sport”.
”It’s not the go any more to have your aunt’s old pram … it’s about getting the Bugaboo pram, all the new gear and setting up the nursery,” he says. ”This is just mainstream today. It starts that way and it continues, so that parents – with the best intentions – want to do whatever possible to give their kids the best start in life … they don’t want them to miss out on technological skills so they get them a Nintendo or an Xbox.”
It’s not just toys. Melbourne kindergarten teacher Judy Shaw, who has been teaching preschoolers for more than 30 years, says children now have much fancier birthday parties than the backyard bashes of the past: ”cooking parties, woodwork parties, fairy parties.” They also have a lot more options when it comes to extracurricular activities. ”There’s so much out there that’s great,” says Shaw, though she does worry that some children are ”run ragged” with activities.
According to Kathy Walker, who runs the education and parenting consultancy Early Life Foundations: ”It doesn’t seem sophisticated enough to hang out at home or in the park any more. You have to say ‘my child is doing swimming, gym and ballet’. One parent told me she felt guilty for being at home.”
Mackay believes parents may be overcompensating for the time they’re away from their kids by filling their time together with organised activities and flashy toys. And Shaw says she understands why ”parents, who feel guilty for working and guilty for not working, give their child a toy to make up for being late from work”. But Walker believes fear plays a part too. Parents don’t have to worry about where their children are if they’re always in a class.
Fear – although this time about missed opportunities – may also contribute to a generation of parents who are heavily involved and competitive about their child’s schooling.
”This is the most overprotective, intrusive generation of parents teachers can recall having to deal with,” Mackay writes inAdvance Australia Where?, a sentiment backed by a 2008 survey of new teachers by the Australian Education Union. Of the teachers surveyed, 86.5 per cent said their training did not adequately prepare them for dealing with difficult parents or colleagues. A separate study, by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, found 95 per cent of parents spoke, wrote to or visited their child’s teacher or classroom, but only about 45 per cent volunteered to help out in class.
According to Walker, this amounts to so much pressure that ”prep grade now is more like year 1 in terms of what (kids are) expected to learn”, and Mackay says the number of children receiving academic coaching has skyrocketed. In his book he tells of one primary school that sent a note to parents asking them to reconsider their children’s need for coaching. ”The tipping point was the discovery that one boy, aged no more than 10, was being set homework by his coach, so his parents engaged a second coach to help him with the extra work being set by the first coach.”
There is another side to the overindulgence story. Mrs George is no regular mum. She is a cool mum. She wears a J-Lo style velour tracksuit. She serves her daughter’s friends mocktails after school – and offers to add alcohol. And when she sees her daughter getting hot and heavy with a boyfriend, she is unfazed. ”Do you guys need anything?” she halloos around the door. ”Some snacks? A condom?”
You might recognise Mrs George from the 2004 film Mean Girls, but it seems you’re increasingly likely to recognise her among your friends too. Well-known psychologist and parenting author Michael Carr-Gregg has lots of stories about parents incapable of saying no: the parents who wanted to take a holiday but told a clinician their children wouldn’t allow it unless they arranged a local restaurant to home-deliver meals while they were away; the teenager who went unpunished after pretending to go to university for an entire semester so her parents would keep financially supporting her; and the parents who served cordial ”shots” and lemonade ”chasers” at a birthday party for their eight-year-old.
Carr-Gregg admits they’re extreme cases. Even so, he says, ”we’re seeing stuff now that used to be sight gags in movies. The instinct of how to parent seems to have been lost. There is no limit-setting, no moral language, no ‘you can’t do this because I said so‘.”
One physical education teacher at an all-girls high school in Sydney, who spoke anonymously for fear of repercussions, says many parents don’t seem to know how to discipline their children any more.
One mother repeatedly contacted the teacher’s school to ask for advice in controlling her daughter, a year 8 student. After one occasion when the girl and a classmate were caught wagging, the school gave the mother advice about how to discipline her child for the infraction. But when someone from school rang to find out how the disciplining had gone, she told them she had decided to take her daughter (and the fellow truant) out for a special dinner because, with everyone else ”being so hard on them”, what the girls really needed was a friend. Her daughter was later asked to leave the school.
It seems the experience is not a one-off – many teachers are dealing with children whose parents have failed to set limits. In a 2008 survey of new teachers by the Australian Education Union, 66.1 per cent of teachers nominated ”behaviour management” as one of their top concerns (it came second only to workload, which was nominated by 68.5 per cent).
Union president Angelo Gavrielatos believes we are seeing ”**an outsourcing of parenting**”. And it’s not just discipline. A teacher these days is expected to be ”a nurse, a counsellor, a traffic monitor … (and to) talk about good eating, water safety, road safety, dog awareness”, he says.
Kathy Walker, who is out three nights a week running classes for anxious parents, says parents ”don’t know if they’re allowed to set limits”. She believes it is the result of a shift towards parents wanting their kids to feel like equals. ”At one level, you can’t argue about the intention of that, but what happens is [they think] an open, honest relationship means [parents] have to be like one of them, to be their buddy,” she says. ”A large percentage of parents are viewing [their kids] not as children, but as mini-adults.”
Epstein, author of The Kindergarchy, blames the ”premium” placed on youthfulness for parents shying away from ”the old parental role of authority figure”. But Sue (not her real name), who has been a high-school counsellor for more than two decades, thinks there’s another reason. ”I think that parents are very scared,” she says. ”There has been increased publicity around young people and depression and anxiety and even suicide, so parents are very anxious not to put extra pressure on children.”
With young people particularly susceptible to peer pressure (and peer pressure now available 24/7, thanks to the internet and mobile phones) parents ”will do anything to help them fit in”.
Sue says students in years 8 and 9 are having parties and demanding their parents serve alcohol. ”(They) can’t buy it themselves and it’s fairly well accepted as being not helpful for them and yet there’s an inability for parents to put up boundaries and say, ‘No, you’re not allowed to have it’.”
For all their efforts, zealous parents may be doing their children more harm than good. A study released last month by UK think tank Demos found parents who showed their children ”tough love” (warm, but with rules) were likelier to raise children with good character and capabilities than parents who were laissez faire, authoritarian or disengaged. The findings would come as no surprise to Sue. ”Adolescents need boundaries,” she says. And as long as the boundaries are fair and appropriate to a child’s age, ”they’re OK with it”. If nothing else, ”there’s a safety in being able to use your parents as an excuse”.
It seems teenagers don’t just need boundaries; they want them. The proportion of 10- to 17-year-olds who wished they had more freedom from their parents dropped from 46 per cent in 1997 to 33 per cent in 2007, according to Quantum Market Research’s YouthSCAN. Thirty-seven per cent said they wished they could do more with their parents.
Others are warning there is something less measurable at risk in our youth-obsessed culture.
In an essay for The New York Review of Books this year, author Michael Chabon reminisced about his childhood spent exploring the woods and streets near his Maryland home. It was part of a long tradition of children spending great periods of time roaming ”entirely free of adult supervision”, he wrote.
But now, parents are so scared of something happening to their children that they ”schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another’s houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between… The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past,” he wrote. ”The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself … has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonised.”
Neta Kirby, who has been an early childhood teacher for 30 years, puts it more simply: ”I believe children just want to play,” she says. ”They just want to lie on the grass and look at the clouds or just enjoy running around without being told what to do and how to do it. They just want to be children.”
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Source: The Age – http://tinyurl.com/yggdthm
