Confidence Key In Good Parenting

Some 30 years ago, a revolution only slightly less transforming than the Civil War took place in America. The end result of this upheaval - initiated by mental health professionals eager to prove themselves better at giving child-rearing advice than was Grandma - was that the emphasis in child rearing shifted 180 degrees, turning the American family upside down. In previous times, that emphasis had been on character development, as reflected by the child’s social behavior. At the urging of well-intentioned professionals, the issue of greatest import (supposedly) became children’s psychological development. With this shift, children’s feelings assumed paramount importance, and good parenting became defined not in terms of how well one disciplined, but how well one understood and communicated with one’s children.

When issues of character and social behavior were at the crux of child rearing, it was a fairly clear-cut proposition. Parents knew when things were going well and when they weren’t, when to discipline and when not to, when their discipline had worked and when it had not. The shift to issues of psychology and feelings, however, because it involved a shift from concerns and issues that were self-evident to ones that were beyond the grasp of the benighted, caused parents to lose confidence in themselves and their actions. Supposedly, the only people who knew for sure whether a given child was or was not OK, whether parents were or were not acting properly, were psychologists and other mental health professionals.

Because nothing in child rearing (now “parenting”) was any longer self-evident, parents became anxious and insecure concerning the consequences of their actions; therefore, they began to hesitate taking any action at all. Whereas parents of previous generations had not been easily intimidated by either their children’s behavior or demonstrations of affect, many modern parents are intimidated by both and generally scared to death that anything even slightly out of the ordinary not only means something, but means something bad.

Several months ago, a mother approached me after a speaking engagement in Florida. She was worried, she said, because her 11-year-old daughter was always happy. That’s what she said! Nothing seemed to bother this little girl. She was a happy-go-lucky kid who let troubles and discord roll right off her back. That just didn’t seem right to her mother. She was worried that her daughter might be “out of touch with her real feelings” and went on to express concern that her daughter:

(a) might have interpreted some unspecified something the parents had said or done to mean that negative feelings were a family taboo,

(b) felt responsible for the happiness of the entire family,

(c) was “in denial” about some thing or things that were truly bothering her,

(d) all of the above.

The reader may think this mother to be irrational or, at best, silly, but I don’t think so. I think she merely reflects what “expert advice” has done to the typical parent - those, at least, who care enough to consume it. Her anxiety asks how a parent can retain a rational perspective concerning his or her children while operating from within a body of absurd, anxiety-arousing understandings concerning children, childhood and child rearing that has babbled forth from the professional community over the last generation or so.

Parent-babble has obfuscated rather than clarified the process of child rearing; it has replaced the realities of child rearing with a rhetoric of “parenting,” and it has demonized the traditional family unit and traditional family values. But worst of all, it has effectively deprived many a child of parents who are able to see the forest for the trees and act with compelling confidence in themselves. That apparently matters little to an 11-year-old girl in Florida, but to the average child, it means everything.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond Charlotte Observer