19 hours Ago
I’ve been addressing the question of how parents can know when they’re overindulging their children. We’ve examined two specific types of overindulgence, as categorized by the late parent expert Jean Illsey Clarke and her team of researchers. The first was Too Much.
The second was Soft Structure. The last is called Overnurture. Overnurturing parents are overprotective and overinvolved.
They hover and micromanage. They’re often called helicopter parents. Nurture is essential to raising healthy, thriving children.
Overnurture, however, can spoil them, like overwatering or overfertilizing a plant. Do any of the following describe you? If so, you may be an Overnurturer: “Rescuing” your children whenever you see signs of frustration. Constantly checking into their grades.
Managing their friends and activities. Shielding them from failure. Doing things for them that they should do themselves.
Making them special food because they don’t like what everyone else is eating. Ensuring they’re always entertained. Teachers know what overnurtured children are like because the past decade has provided a veritable flood of them.
To put it bluntly, they can barely do anything for themselves. Younger children won’t even attempt to solve basic problems on their own, like opening their lunch, locating a lost item or putting on their coats. They break down in tears at the first hint of distress.
They don’t know how to play alone with toys or how to play with other children. Some even come to kindergarten without toilet training. Older overnurtured kids can’t follow basic instructions.
They immediately text their parents whenever they get in trouble or get a bad grade (in turn, their parents immediately email their teachers). Their homework is complete, but they don’t understand it because they didn’t do it themselves. They are afraid to talk to adults, resulting in a weird dynamic where teachers and parents communicate over the child’s head about things that directly involve the child (and involve the parent not at all).
To encourage parents to give their eighth-grade kids a modicum of responsibility, I used to say: “You know, they’ll be driving in a year.” I don’t say that anymore because, though they can drive at 15, many don’t do so for years. That’s a bad sign because it indicates children are being trained to shed responsibilities rather than accept them — even when it’s in their best interest.
Overnurturing creates significant problems for adult children. They’re vulnerable to anxiety due to feeling overwhelmed or unprepared for basic life responsibilities. They have poor interpersonal skills.
They can’t manage time. They exhibit poor decision-making. They’re mentally and emotionally brittle.
It can also stunt their cognitive growth, which is why teachers who’ve taught multiple generations often report delayed maturity. Thus many eighth-grade students I teach today behave more like sixth-grade students did 10 years ago. It’s why we now refer to college students as “kids” or “children” when, just a few decades earlier, we unflinchingly called them adults and treated them as such.
Fixing the problem is simply a matter of applying a reasonable degree of nurture, which may require parents to reframe their thinking. Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, observes that when a child is learning to walk, it’s the last time many parents are overjoyed to see their kids try and fail and try again: “It’s hard to see them fall, but somehow we know this is an essential task for them to practice, practice, practice, and ultimately perfect. Well, somehow, we’ve forgotten that every single other skill in life is acquired the same way.
” Remembering it is crucial to getting things on track. It’s also important to realize we’re not our children’s “advocates.” We’re their parents, a job that’s actually much more difficult and far more important with a longer-lasting goal.
“As paradoxical as it may sound, our job as parents is, like it or not, to put ourselves out of a job," Lythcott-Haims says. “The moment they learn to walk, they’re walking away from us.” Our job isn’t to chase after them or clear their path.
It’s to prepare them for the journey. Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.
com ..
