The US Surgeon General warns that parents today are feeling increasingly stressed and burnt out. Obviously, this is unhealthy for us and for our children. Several societal factors are thought to contribute to this issue. The good news is that one of them is in our power to control: Intensive Parenting. Sociologists describe intensive parenting (in a recent “New York Times” article) as “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities.” They note that parents are feeling more obligated to provide extracurricular activities for their kids than they did a decade ago and spend more time stimulating and actively playing with them. The jury’s out as to whether these kids are benefiting from their parents’ efforts, but they are undoubtedly feeling their parents’ stress. Janet’s view is that intensive parenting teaches kids they need intensive help. She believes that the key to being involved in the most positive manner in kids’ lives is to better understand our role—where they need us to be leaders and when they need us to let go and trust them.
Transcript of “Kids Don’t Need Intensive Parenting (and Neither Do We!)”
Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.
Today I have a big topic to talk about, a topic I’m passionate about. It is the stress that we may be experiencing as parents. What can we do about it? We’ve all heard by now about the surgeon general’s warning about parenting, that it’s become too stressful, that parents are getting stressed beyond what’s healthy. And just the mere fact that this issue has risen to the level of warranting a surgeon general’s warning is kind of alarming, right? And I certainly don’t want to alarm you more or stress you out more. Quite the opposite. What I hope to do today is help you, if you are experiencing this kind of stress, to take a step back and see the whole picture: where you may be exerting concern and energy and a sense of control in areas that really don’t belong to us as parents, that work better when children can own these and we can let go of them.
First, let’s talk about this issue a little bit. There was the surgeon general’s warning, and then at the same time there’s been a slew of articles lately about what they’re now calling intensive parenting. I think the first term I remember hearing about this was hovering, the hovering parents, helicopter parents, snowplow parents, overparenting. Now they’re using this term “intensive.” And if we just think about what that word means and what it entails. Well, I’ll tell you what they’re saying it entails. In this New York Times piece that came out recently, they note that expectations on parents are way higher today, for parents to educate and enrich their children to ensure that they’ll be able to achieve a middle-class life. They quote sociologists who describe intensive parenting as “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities.” And the article indicates that parents feel obligated to provide more extracurricular activities than they did a decade ago, spend more time stimulating and actively engaging with their child, playing with them on the floor, and that this is at least partially fear-driven.
But doing all of this gives us a false sense of control, because it’s not in our power to make a child into someone that they’re not. So a lot of this is really understanding what we control and what we don’t control. And as parents, when we take on responsibilities that don’t belong to us but actually belong to our child, we will not be helpful. We could in fact make their lives—and certainly ours, as the surgeon general’s warning shows—harder. We’re hindering rather than helping by trying to control areas that we don’t control, that we can’t control. Another reason that is given in the New York Times article is that parents are trying to make up for what their children lost during the pandemic.
I’m going to talk a little about all of those details, but first I want to talk about the antidote to overly stressful intensive parenting: trust. And that is something you hear me talk about here, so this is nothing new to you. Trust in our children as uniquely capable, whole people. To see them that way, to trust them—ideally from the time they’re born—trust them to be able to face developmentally appropriate situations, with us as their secure base.
This is also something that’s been talked about in terms of intensive parenting, that it’s child-centered. The difference in the respectful approach that I’m sharing is that it is relationship-centered. And of course we can only talk about a relationship with our child when we perceive them as an actual person. So if we can begin to do that with our newborn, then we can start our relationship there.
And I think a lot of the time—because I know I used to feel this way—people believe that children are not quite people yet until they’re a bit older. I’m not sure what age, I never really thought about this consciously. But that there’s sort of something we’re supposed to mold or make into or add all these ingredients to, to try to make them into a person, and then we’ll have the relationship. Well, the problem is that by then we start to get into dynamics with our children through stimulating, through activities, through the way we play with our child—which I talk a lot about here. The way that I recommend playing with a child is much more passive on our part. It’s actually very enjoyable, the opposite of stressful. It can be the fun in our day, actually. But when we start on this path of taking on these things, cultivating their talents and their academics and their futures through everyday interactions and activities—it’s not up to us to cultivate what’s going on inside them and what they do. The only part that we cultivate is a relationship where we trust them and an environment that’s just reasonably stimulating. Just a typical environment, it doesn’t have to be fancy in any way, it doesn’t have to have sensory this or that. Life naturally has that. So we can take our focus back to a relationship of trust.
But this isn’t only about trusting our children, because it’s more importantly about what gets in the way of us trusting our children. And what’s that? Trusting ourselves. Trusting that we are uniquely capable, but more importantly that we’re across-the-board good enough parents as we are, because we are. We’re all on a path. We’re all learning, just like in every other aspect of life. We’re always learning, we’re always growing. It’s not something that some people have and other people don’t have. We all have what we need for this journey.
And yes, some of us will have more challenges than others due to the ghosts of our past, our life situation, but children are quite ready to go through those with us. What they want most of all is for us to feel okay because that is the basis for them to feel okay as they are. And this is part of what’s come up in this research that’s been done and why the surgeon general made this statement. Children thrive in their parents’ sense of wellbeing. If we are stressed out—and I believe it’s because we’re taking on all these jobs that don’t belong to us—our child can’t get comfortable. They can’t feel a sense of security and ability to thrive and become gradually more autonomous and independent. All those things we want for them, our feelings can get in the way.
I mean, this isn’t to create more stress. This isn’t to put another thing on your to-do list. It’s to help you step back and let go of some things and trust that you’re okay and your child can do it. They can do their life, with your support. Not with your doing it with them and for them, but with your support for them to do it and go through all the ups and downs of doing it.
There’s this beautiful book that I’ve had for a long time actually, but I’ve been looking at it lately. It’s called Beginning Well, and it’s by Pia Dögl, Elke Maria Rischke, and Ute Strub, and they talk about the first weeks with our baby and how babies perceive our moods, even then. Maybe even more so then, because who matters in their life, what matters in their life? Us. In this book, they say: “The new baby takes everything in so deeply that we could say that her perceptions and actions are the same thing. Or, to put it another way, that perception itself is her main inner activity.” So that’s how perceptive our children are from the beginning to how we’re doing, and how we’re doing is their life. So we could say we owe it to ourselves to look at how we can reduce our job load that we’ve taken on and our expectations of ourselves and our expectations of our children. We can do that for our child just to have a parent they don’t have to worry about.
And I can already imagine people thinking, Oh gosh, I was depressed. And I went through my own with my first child and even with my third, I went through a lot of not-happy feelings. I wouldn’t say I necessarily had PPD, but I was down and exhausted and didn’t think I was going to make it sometimes. But instead of feeling guilty about that, by my third, I’d learned that it’s okay. What matters is today and then tomorrow, and just being aware of this and that it probably is affecting my child, and that’s okay. It’ll come out eventually, probably, through setting limits, through them having their own moods that I can trust and allow them to share with me. Maybe they’ll be more sensitive to certain things, but I don’t need to protect them from that. I just need to allow them to share the feelings.
This is never about that we’re perfect in any way, either perfectly doing all these things for our kids, which I don’t recommend, or perfectly unstressed and chill and relaxed. No. It’s just about being aware of how everything we do affects our children and that they will find a way to express the feelings and get them out of their body if there’s something uncomfortable going on. And we don’t have to worry about that either, it’s just this wonderful healing capacity that children have, that we all have, but especially when we’re children.
Other things that experts are imagining are contributing to parents feeling too stressed are things like the lack of support in our communities and the lack of government support for childcare and for working parents. And social media. This was geared to connect us, right? This is supposed to be bringing us together, but somehow it manages to make us feel lonelier and it makes it harder not to think of ourselves as in competition with other parents. And I would even say that the parenting advice—and I’m part of this, so I’m not criticizing anyone else, I’m putting myself in there as part of it—most of it, especially the really short, bite-sized advice that people give, it’s Do this, Do that, Do do this, Don’t do that. It’s all about doing. It’s not about stepping back, seeing, and letting go of jobs that don’t belong to us. It’s not about trusting, generally. It’s about the opposite, about Now you need to know what to do in this situation and in that situation and the next one. You can’t just trust yourself. That doesn’t help us, right?
And I think that’s why a lot of people complain that I don’t give enough advice. Because I’m trying to help you to see with a sense of perspective on what’s going on. Because when we do that, that’s where we get clarity. It starts with observing our child, observing our baby, instead of immediately intervening in some way, doing something for them, stimulating them. Seeing what they’re doing first. When they’re crying, asking them, “I wonder what’s going on with you. Hmm, let me check your diaper. Maybe you’re hungry? I wonder if you have a gas bubble.” But not assuming that Now I need to run around the block with my child to get them to stop! Taking on responsibility for that, that we have to quell every emotion that children have. When we’re facing something so overwhelmingly challenging like parenting, and it’s new to all of us. And even when we have a second or third child, it’s like they bring on a whole new layer of us, right? Well, we did it that way with that one, but with this one, that doesn’t work. It’s got this overwhelming novelty to it each time, and it can feel like we can’t possibly do this. It’s hard to trust ourselves.
A lot of us have this tendency when we are facing something so overwhelming to try to simplify it, to try to kind of chart it. Okay, this fits over there and that fits over there. That helps us feel more of a sense of control. And then this tendency that we also have to not perceive babies and very young children as capable people. Yes, they’re very needy, dependent people, but they’re not totally helpless. They have things that they can do, that we want to try to open space to let them do. But both of those things together, this tendency to want to oversimplify and make everything basic and then also oversimplify our children as these more simplistic beings, that’s what can cause us to do too much and to feel like we’re making them into something, instead of seeing them.
Other studies have shown that children generally benefit from parents’ involvement. They report that they like when their parents are involved. Well, yes, but think about it. A child gets used to, if a parent is doing that intensive involvement of cultivating the talents and the academics and the creativity and all the interactions and the activities, that’s what children come to know as something they need. Without meaning to, we can make them feel lacking in their ability to explore their own talents, to discover their way of learning academics and their activities and their extracurriculars.
Let’s just take play, for example. Many, many of you write to me about this, that you’ve found yourself stuck playing with your child because maybe from the time they were a baby, that’s what play was. It was this thing where we stimulate. And that’s not to say we never do that, of course we’re going to play this little piggy and have all the wonderful times together. But they can also start to play on their own, even as babies, by us just noticing when they’re doing something on their own, where they don’t need us for those minutes, and then building on those by opening up space for them and allowing them to happen without interrupting them.
What can happen when we don’t do that is that we’re taking on this job of stimulating our child and then our child tells us that they need it. Many of you write to me that your child needs you to play with them. What do you do? What do you say? Or sometimes parents will just casually say it: Well, my child needs me to play or they won’t play. This is something that intensive parenting or our taking on all these responsibilities has created. And if we think about it, if we can get into trust and let go of the fear and the feeling of wanting to control it, taking a step back: Look at this, we’re using this word “need” and we’re perceiving a want as a need. And then this want begins to feel like a need to our child because we’ve responded as if it is. And then kids believe that this is the involvement that we have to offer.
But when children become accustomed to us just being there sometimes, watching them play or reading a book nearby, just enjoying the time together, letting them share their discoveries with us, then that becomes involvement to them, too. And that is not stressful for us. Plus, it actually nurtures in our child these really crucial life-giving things. It nurtures them being capable of creating their own activities, of learning pre-academic skills and then coming to us with, “What does this say?” or “What’s this number?” or “Look, I found two of these and now I give you one and I have one.” They will bring that to us, but it’s a supportive role, not an active leadership role there. Then they can follow their own interests. They can know that they’re interesting to us just as they are, without them needing to get us to join them in some kind of game. And that we don’t have agendas for them, that we trust them to know themselves better than anyone, including us.
So when people do a study and find out that kids like parents’ involvement, what does that mean? What does that mean to the child? What kind of involvement are they used to? Of course our kids want us there, but we can do the most minimal things to help them. And yes, I know some of you are probably thinking, well, my child needs more because they have this disability, or they have these learning differences. I’m not saying don’t ever intervene, don’t ever help. But because we tend to see things in these most simple terms, we can get the impression that helping them is going all the way to 10, instead of starting at 1, with just the emotional support. “What are you doing? What’s up? What can I help with?” Often that is enough. Then if a child has disabilities, doing the most minimal thing so that our child still has a chance to do what they can do, because we value the power of trust. Trusting them so they can build self-confidence, trusting themselves.
But the other thing about involvement is we get to be as involved as we want. What if involvement was a choice, beyond being there for their meals and giving them full attention for these caregiving times during the day. But the rest of the time, what if it was our choice as to how much we wanted to be with them while they’re playing or being there to support them, in this much less stressful, trusting manner? Where we’re allowing them to have the struggles, allowing them to problem solve, knowing that this is a wonderful gift we can give them. And ourselves, because we’re going to have a child who doesn’t need as much from us, or anyone, because they believe in themselves and they know themselves.
It always kind of irritates me a little bit when people give the impression that it’s all or nothing. Things like involvement, I mean any aspect of parenting, that you’re either ignoring your child or you’re playing make-believe with your child. No, there’s this really comfortable, fun place to be in between all that, where we can enjoy our child’s journey, but let them have the journey.
I really admire the work that Lenore Skenazy has done. She started Free-Range Parenting when she was once considered the worst mom in America because she let her nine-year-old son take the subway all by himself in New York. And she’s been a champion for allowing children to have some autonomy and some freedom to be able to spread their wings. So I love her message. She suggests things like a “leave kids in the park playdate,” where parents go away and leave children, I’m not even sure what age, but all by themselves. But the thing is, we don’t need to do that. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that, I would want to be there watching what the kids were doing together. Not because I needed to be, but because I was interested. And I mean, that’s me, I’m in this work, so obviously I’m very interested. But it’s a false dichotomy to say that we’re either not there or we’re too involved. We get to be involved. If we want to be involved, that’s a beautiful thing. But it’s the way that we’re involved that matters.
I’m writing a book right now that I’m really excited about. It’s about how to start enjoying this path, feeling a lot less stressed from the very beginning. It’s also about how to get on the path later, but mostly it’s about how this looks with a baby. I talk about our job description as parents. In the opening section of this book, I lay out some ideas using the “roots and wings” analogy. Where kids need us to lead, where they need us to help them feel rooted, and, on the other hand, where they need to be the ones to spread their wings. What areas of caring for children fall into either of these categories? And my suggestion is that all the ones about spreading their wings, that we give those to them, because that is what spreading their wings is. We let go of those, we trust our child with those.
“Lead” and “trust” are the two categories. And lead is basically our job description. And then if we want to consider trust a job, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a stressful job. It’s a letting go of stress, it’s a letting-go-of-fear job. So maybe it’s mentally challenging and emotionally challenging, but it ends up being so much easier and less stressful than getting involved in these things.
Some of the things under lead, these are our jobs: Attending to basic needs. Communicating and touching respectfully and responsibly. Engaging in attentive, connected caregiving. So when we are doing those intimate things with our child, that’s when I believe it’s our job to engage. And we earn so many points with our child doing that, in terms of their needs for connection. Basically we could take care of that right there, in terms of needs. Is that going to be their want? No. They’re going to want our attention all day long, especially if they’re a toddler or a three- or four- or five-year-old. They’re going to want it all day long maybe, but they’re not going to need it.
Seeing beyond the moment. Kids need us to be the ones to do that. They need us to be the ones to see, Hey, if I start doing these things for my child now, it might be harder for them to believe they can do these things. So that’s just one example of seeing beyond the moment. But our kids can’t be the ones to do that. Developing a consistent daily rhythm. So we develop that with our child. It’s not something where we say, “We’re doing the rhythm, and here it is.” It’s something that we do responsively, we help create this rhythm based on the rhythms that they’re showing us that help them as babies.
Defining discipline and implementing boundaries. Okay, welcome to my podcast, that’s what it’s mostly about, right? And my book No Bad Kids. Care for our own personal boundaries. Which is a part of the discipline and boundaries, because we’re in a relationship and this is about us, too. It’s not good for our child to not learn that other people have personal boundaries. Practicing sensitive observation, so we can see what our child’s abilities are and what their interests are. And then we don’t have to go now and go build on them and make extracurriculars for them. We just can trust more because we’re seeing, Oh, wow, they have this totally different interest than I thought they had. They know, they’ve got this. It actually confirms for us that we can trust our children, so it helps us to trust. Model the behavior and good character traits we hope to impart. Those are most of the things that I see as our job.
And then here are things that belong to our children. If we’re doing intensive parenting, if we’re stressed, we’ve probably taken some of these on. Learning, such as the development of language, motor, and cognitive skills, and creativity. Of course, we’ll intervene for children who have a specific need for those things, but we’re still intervening from a place of trust. Play choices and inner-direction. Our child gets that, we have basically no idea how that should go. Expressing feelings and emotions. We talk about that a lot on this podcast.
Development of manners and social skills. So this is one that we both have a hand in, right? We’re in charge of modeling and we’re also in charge of the boundaries around their social behaviors. And they’re in charge of the development of manners and social skills, because we can’t control that. And when we do try to control with our impatience and our judgements, we can tend to make it harder for children to be their best selves with manners.
Another one: eating. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about our role in mealtimes. We set it up and then we allow them to eat. And toilet learning. I put that under letting a child lead that; other people have another opinion. I’ve seen it work best this way, and I’ve seen lots of problems created when we don’t trust children to do this. It gets delayed, it gets harder and harder.
And I have podcasts on all of these things, I’m sure, if you want to hear more. But you’ll hear a lot more in my book. In the meantime, here are some other books that I recommend. If you have a baby, Magda Gerber’s books, for sure: Dear Parent: Caring for Infants with Respect and Your Self-Confident Baby. My books: No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting. Kim John Payne’s book Simplicity Parenting. He was recently on my podcast, listen to that one if you want to hear more about trust-based parenting. The Self-Driven Child has a lot in it, not so much about infants and toddlers, but trust-based parenting for grade-school children and beyond. Beautiful book by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson. And William Stixrud was on the podcast, and that’s been a very popular one. David Elkind, The Hurried Child. Get that one right now, please, if you have a young child. Everybody interested in child development used to read that book. And what people seem to be doing these days is the opposite of what he recommends. He makes a really strong case, a science-based case for his recommendations. I can’t recommend that highly enough.
I just wanted to touch on something also that was said in these articles about where parents are coming from, because I really feel for parents feeling like they have to do all these things. And I know that I once felt that way, and I feel so grateful that I learned a much less stressful role for myself that has made everything so much more fun, so much more interesting, so much easier, so much more intellectually stimulating. Being with my kids, watching their journeys. They all played their way. And yes, they went to school too, but they played their way and made choices about their path to success as adults. I don’t talk that much about my children, but I’m so proud of them. They’re all successful, they’re kind, they’re well-mannered, they’re compassionate people. They’re finding their way. They’re all college graduates now. And I didn’t do anything fancy.
One of the things that makes me saddest about that college admissions scandal was not just that it was terrible that the kids that could have gotten into those schools didn’t get in because these other kids, their parents fraudulently got their children into those schools. That is tragic. As tragic, if not more tragic to me, was those children that got into the schools, how they must have felt, what they must have sensed for years about their abilities. That they weren’t capable of doing these things that other children can do. And it wasn’t that those children lacked anything. It was that their parents got caught up in fear, believing that they needed to be that involved and make it work for their child. I mean, the message that that gives children is staggeringly sad.
This is a win-win, when we can stand back and get perspective on what our child’s real needs are and where our fears are getting in the way and making it harder for us to see clearly. We don’t deserve to be afraid and stressed. And this is one thing we can control: we can control letting go of control. That we can do.
And just a small thing, this idea from the New York Times article that parents feel we have to make up for what our children lost during the pandemic. I know other people might disagree, but I don’t believe that what happened during the pandemic was entirely a loss for children. And the losses that children did experience really cannot be made up for. So that shouldn’t be a burden that we place on ourselves. They learned different things, things that they never would’ve learned without the pandemic. Do I know exactly what all those things were for each child? No, but I do know that children are always learning, always, whether we want them to be or not. They’re learning about us. They’re learning about relationships. They’re learning about themselves in the world.
And my youngest, he’s 22 now, he went through the pandemic in his first year of college. There were a lot of negatives to that, but there were also positives for him, and he’s more resilient for it. And we also had a fire here where we lived, a terrible fire that ruined a lot of things for him in high school in his senior year. His sports, his teams, all of that stuff couldn’t happen. And I feel like he’s had these amazing experiences for a person his age that have given him more empathy, more strength, allowed him to problem solve in ways that he never would’ve. So we don’t have to make up for anything because making up for is assuming our child is lacking. And they’re not.
I really hope some of this helps. We can do this.