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Parents Remain Prime Villains

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By KATHY SEAL and WENDY GROLNICK Special to the Tribune By WENDY GROLNICK And KATHY SEAL

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 21, 2008

Last week, after LeBron James' mother Gloria shouted at Celtic Paul Pierce for tangling with LeBron as he headed for a slam dunk, millions of Americans saw LeBron yell at his mom, "Sit your (butt) down!" Comments on the Internet denounced Gloria James as an overbearing mom who needed to leave her grown son alone. "Miss James stay home throw a shoe at the T.V," read one post on sports.yahoo.com. "She is obnoxious and crude," said another.

Only a few days before, "American Idol" producers banned David Archuleta's dad Jeff from rehearsals and headlines chastised him too.

The heated criticism of these celebrity parents is not surprising. Because there are few groups in America we criticize as easily as parents.

Mother blaming may have gone out with miniskirts, but it has given way to equal-opportunity parent bashing. Books and articles castigate parents for helicopter parenting, overscheduling, living through our kids and even using them as Prozac. We're too affluent and buy our kids too much! chants the chorus. We're raising a nation of wimps! Finding fault with parents is a national sport. Any other group criticized so regularly would have launched a civil rights movement.

But when we criticize rather than empathize, we miss an important opportunity to understand ourselves - because while parent bashing may make us feel one-up on other parents, at the same time we're riveted, because we see a bit of ourselves in the transgressors.

Take the slam on helicopter parents. Critics often give examples of high anxiety and control - the dad who won't let his child get a word in edgewise on a college tour or the mom who writes a child's homework essay.

A little empathy would go a long way here: what motivates such parents are their loving and protective feelings, heightened by anxiety about whether their children will "make it" in this uncertain and highly competitive world. These feelings have contributed to a very healthy modern trend: the ramping up of parental attention to their kids. Helicopter parenting may step over the line - it can be intrusive and infantilizing. But parents quite rightly bristle at the implication that there's something wrong with staying close to and supporting their kids as they grow older.

Critics need to understand that involvement with our kids - helping them learn, providing structure, and knowing what they like and dislike - is not only good parenting. It also has biological roots. Since parenting is key to survival and reproduction, evolution has shaped it.

Far from condemning intense parental involvement, psychological research has found that the more parents are involved with their children - be they toddlers or teens - the healthier and happier their kids, and the more they achieve in school. High parental involvement gives kids solid self-esteem and helps them feel secure and strongly connected to us.

Empathizing with helicopter parents would focus us on the solution to this dilemma, which lies in understanding psychological autonomy. Political autonomy means independence or self-government, but autonomy in people is simply the feeling of initiating an action. Children, in fact all human beings, need to feel that what they do is self-initiated. You can give children maximum care and structure and stay emotionally close without lessening their feelings of autonomy. If you read an essay and give praise and suggestions for improvement, that doesn't interfere with the child's autonomy. If you choose the essay topic and write an outline, that does. You can be highly supportive of your daughter while encouraging her autonomy. The distinction is not between "doing or not doing" for her - it's whether she feels autonomous.

Hovering parents act out of mainly positive desires that all parents recognize in themselves. Rather than ragging on parents, why not empathize with their feelings of caring deeply for their children? Why not applaud the millions of well-intentioned parents trying their best, praise them as examples to learn from, and help everyone resist the impulse to violate their kids' autonomy?

Kathy Seal and Wendy Grolnick are coauthors of "Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids: Dealing With Competition While Raising a Successful Child."

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