The mother of all jobs just got harder

Fantastic article in today's SMH about the unnecessary criticism parents today receive for either being too complacent or helicopter parenting their kids.

We can too often feel sad as parents that we're not replicating the freedoms, Sunday roasts and cupcakes of our childhood, as though those days were carefree and high on happiness for kids and parents alike.

I call it 'the cupcake myth'. Why else would the baking business be experiencing such a boom - there's a new cupcake store on every cool street corner as Gen X parents try to recreate a happier time for themselves and their children.

But all may not be as it seems. Maybe something got muddled with the memories. Read on...

Who'd be a parent, eh? There are no perfect ones. In fact, they come in two mirror-image types. One lot loll around with a heroin needle in their arm while their kids run amok, while the other half overparent, robbing their kids of their selfhood.

The current attack on modern parents is one of the oddest things I've seen. For once, a generation has taken parenting seriously. In the Australian mainstream, both men and women throw themselves into it. Most spend large amounts of time with their children. They love and cherish them. They try really hard to do a good job.

And everyone older than 50 wants to tell them how they are doing it wrong. No, not just wrong. Ludicrously wrong. In fact “damaging their children” wrong.

Spending time with your children is suddenly defined as “helicopter parenting”, hovering so as to crush their spirit. Being cautious about risk is defined as “robbing them of their freedom”. And giving them love and support is “a damaging culture of unearned praise”.

There's a smugness about the attacks as if to say: “Don't they realise how easy parenting is? In my day ... ”

Pandering to this view, the publishing world is now full of rosy portraits of growing up in the 1950s or '60s where kids had their freedom, taking pot-shots with air rifles, whooshing down creeks on home-made rafts — the product of wise parents who understood risk and knew how to give kids the freedom to explore.

I'm sure that childhood existed for many but it's not my memory. I had the air rifle, that's true, and at age eight or nine I would cycle to a creek where some kids constructed a raft from old oil drums and tried to make it float. But I also remember the separateness of a '60s childhood. A lot of parents — not all — were quite disengaged. They didn't “give kids their freedom”; they just weren't that interested in their roles as parents.

Most, for example, would never turn up to watch the school football match; mine certainly didn't. You'd cycle there, play the game and cycle home. Music practice would happen once a week and would involve cycling to some strange house smelling of cabbage where one would be simultaneously felt up and taught Chopin.

The feeling up is an important part of the story, for as much as modern parents are mocked for their sense of caution, the truth is that things did go wrong for the children of the disengaged parents of the '50s and '60s.

There were paedophiles in the bushes and out-of-control priests in the churches and gangs in the schoolyard. And when things did go wrong, there was no culture of intimacy and trust between parent and child that allowed the child to tell and the parent to believe.

Of course, it's hard to get the right balance. Among today's parents, there are some who overdo the praise, greeting each art-class scrawl as the work of van Gogh. And there are misguided parents who always take their child's side, arguing the toss with school or police, even when the child is in the wrong.

What I don't understand is the delight people take in attacking young parents; and the overly rosy way they remember the parenting of the past — as if today is all bad and yesterday was all good. Sometimes there is so much passion in the attacks, I wonder if people are simply envious. Do they watch these modern children getting love and attention and wonder why they didn't deserve the same? Do they hear the unearned praise and remember the knee-jerk reaction to any child's achievement in the 1960s: “That's all very well but don't get too big for your boots.”

OK, maybe the psychological theory is a stretch. It's probably simpler: each generation believes its way is the only way.

If so, can I suggest a truce? If modern parents are to be routinely attacked for their failures, can we have some admissions on the other side? First up, many parents in the past took unacceptable risks with their children. In doing so, they weren't consciously “giving them their freedom”; they were just otherwise engaged.

Second, while the world of 2010 is not as dangerous as modern parents believe, the world of the '60s was not as benign as was supposed at the time. Things did go wrong and the price for a freewheeling childhood was paid unequally. If you had the freedom and never came unstuck — were never abused, never badly injured — thank your lucky stars but don't act as if the price was not paid by others who were not so charmed.

And, finally, let's admit that this generation of parents is attacked whatever it does.

Today's parents are either controlling their kids too much or controlling them not enough — the crowd of denouncers hardly drawing breath between their two modes of attack.

It's a strange world where you have to defend passionate, engaged motherhood and fatherhood.

richard@richardglover.com.au

Media Source: Richard Glover, Sydney Morning Herald 17 April 2010