Category: Values
The anxious style of American parenting
A friend shared this article with me and I found it very thought-provoking. I was surprised that lower income parents find parenting fun and rewarding significantly more often than middle and upper income parents do. The author attributes this differences to the “concerted cultivation” that wealthier parents are engaging in, all in an effort to ensure that their kids maintain their economic and class-based privilege — maintain the status quo. The final paragraph is pretty impactful:
Just don’t mistake refining their human capital — molding them into ideal bourgeois citizens — for parenting. Because that work is not an expression of love, not really. That’s fear. And if your greatest fear is your child becoming poor, or losing the privilege and power you’ve accumulated, then you should pause, stop telling yourself that “you’re only doing what’s best for my family,” and think more about why and how you’ve come to accept that everyday reality for others.
After reading this article I started to wonder to what degree the “concerted cultivation” style of parenting the author describes in this article is present in Germany as well. I feel like in general there is much less “cultivation” here. There are few private schools, and even the ones that do exist are mainly attractive to parents who want less cultivation, rather than more (e.g., the waldorf school). There are no elite colleges: most kids just go to the university close to their hometown. There are few summer camps, and for little kids at least mostly they are things like forest camp or horseback riding camps, not programming or robotics camps meant to give your kid a leg up. The only common after school activities seem to be sports and music lessons, although I do know a few kids who take private language lessons.
Can we prevent our kids from developing an anxiety disorder?
I few years ago I read this extremely thought-provoking article in The Atlantic: What happened to American childhood (childhood in an anxious age). If you haven’t read it yet, it’s definitely worth a read.
I read the article several years ago, but there are still a few parts that stood out for me, and that I still remember very clearly.
“Fear of dogs at age 5 or 10 is important not because fear of dogs impairs the quality of your life,” he said. “Fear of dogs is important because it makes you four times more likely to end up a 25-year-old, depressed, high-school-dropout single mother who is drug-dependent.”
When I originally read this article, Chickpea was still pretty nervous around dogs. I don’t know if I would say she was actively “afraid” of dogs, but she certainly didn’t like them and tried to keep her distance. Was that a sign of some kind of problem, or just a normal childhood fear that she would grown out of? (This seems to be a pretty normal developmental fear, especially because for little kids the dogs are truly quite bit in proportion to their own body size. As kids get bigger, it seems that dogs will naturally seem less scary!)
After I read this quote I started paying more attention to how I (and other parents) handled their kids fear of dogs. With Chickpea when we would pass a dog outside for a long time she would often make a wide berth around the dog. Or she would pause in a driveway and let the dog pass by before proceeding down the sidewalk. Fine. I’m not going to force her to get close to the dog. And she’s managing her own fear. But I have seen other parents preemptively pick their kid up so that they are away from the dog, yell at the dog owner to keep their dog away from the kid, or grab the kid’s hand and move their kid to the other side of their body to “protect” their kid. All of these convey to me “my kid can’t handle the fear, I have to protect them.”
“There is no greater risk factor for anxiety disorders than being born female,” Andrea Petersen writes in On Edge, her exploration of anxiety. “Women are about twice as likely as men to develop one, and women’s illnesses generally last longer, have more severe symptoms, and are more disabling.”
The article suggests that this discrepancy is because parents usually protect girls more than they do boys. A friend pointed out that boys may have lower rates of anxiety (because they are pushed more to “face their fears” and not be a scaredy-cat), but that this type of parenting will create other negative repercussions down the road, related to not recognizing or accepting their feelings. How can we not over-protect our kids while still allowing them to feel their feelings and face their fears in their own time?
I also remember that the author of the article implied that by not giving our kids chores we are coddling/overprotecting them:
When Braun Research surveyed more than 1,000 American adults, 82 percent said that as children they’d had regular chores—but only 28 percent said their own children did.
This quote isn’t directly related to anxiety, but given the context it’s in in the article, I would argue that it’s part of a message that parents are coddling their kids. Is that true? Is not giving our kid’s chores coddling them? I definitely feel like kid’s should be expected to help out around the house, but is it necessary that this help come in the form of specific chores? Maybe there’s something about being given sole responsibility for some task that’s protective, versus just helping out when requested?
Another part that I remember was a discussion of why some kids overcome behavioral inhibition, and others do not:
Another hint as to how parenting can affect childhood anxiety comes from the research on what’s known as behavioral inhibition—a shy, sensitive temperament that’s found in about 15 percent of 3-year-olds and that constitutes one of the strongest known risk factors for the development of anxiety disorders. Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland has spent the past few decades conducting longitudinal studies that explore how this temperament predicts experiences later in life. About 20 years ago, as Fox and his colleague Kenneth Rubin combed through the data from the first of these studies, trying to figure out what differentiated the kids who overcame their inhibition from the ones who didn’t, they came across an unexpected clue: Those who went to day care for their first two years were far more likely to be spared anxiety down the line than those who stayed home.
I tried to read the article above on the link between daycare and anxiety and what I found seems pretty weak. First of all, they are only looking at how daycare attendance correlates with behavior inhibition as the kids age. Although that temperament is highly correlated with anxiety in adulthood, it’s just just a predictor. Also, the kids weren’t randomly assigned to daycare, so it could just be that anxious parents keep their kids at home and it’s the parent’s anxiety levels that predicts the kid’s anxiety, not a specific effect of daycare per se. Maybe there are better studies out there but I couldn’t find them on a quick search.
Finally, I remember the anecdote about what happened after an earthquake in California.
[M]y mind keeps wandering to two children’s drawings reproduced in the pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce’s book The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive. Both depict California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed dozens of people—and also, as chance would have it, occurred midway through a study Boyce was conducting of whether stress increased local children’s susceptibility to illness. Naturally, he and his team expanded the study to incorporate their reactions to the disaster, and they asked each child to “draw the earthquake.” The kids’ responses varied dramatically. Some produced cheerful pictures—“homes with minor damage, happy families, and smiling yellow suns”—while others generated scenes of destruction and injury, fear and sadness. To Boyce’s fascination, children who drew darker scenes tended to stay healthy in the weeks that followed, while those who drew sunny pictures were more likely to come down with infections and illnesses.
Boyce now believes it was protective for children to create “honest, even brutal depictions of a no-doubt-about-it disaster.” We talk about things that scare us, he ventures, “because it makes them gradually less scary; about sadness, because it makes the sadness diminish a little each time we do.”
I guess the hypothesis was that the kids who drew the scary/dark pictures had worked through the bad feelings and let them out, whereas the kids who drew sunny pictures were still holding all those feelings inside. And that somehow the additional stress from the worry and fear leads to increase rates of illness? I wonder if that result has been replicated?
The article ends as follow:
I am drawn to this story in part …. because its moral is at odds with the way adults so often try to shield children from difficult topics. In fact, it sometimes seems that the more overwhelming the world gets, the more adults try to blindfold children.
In the end, one lesson we might derive from everything scientists and clinicians have learned about anxiety is this: If we want to prepare our kids for difficult times, we should let them fail at things now, and allow them to encounter obstacles and to talk candidly about worrisome topics. To be very clear, this is not a cure-all for mental illness. What we need to recognize, though, is that our current approach to childhood doesn’t reduce basic human vulnerabilities. It exacerbates them.
This article was the first time I had heard about the SPACE program, although it’s come up many times since then. I was intrigued by it, but after reading about it I also had a whole host of questions.
A highly promising new treatment out of Yale University’s Child Study Center called SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) takes a different approach. SPACE treats kids without directly treating kids, and by instead treating their parents. It is as effective as CBT, according to a widely noted study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry earlier this year, and reaches even those kids who refuse help.
I was at first surprised that it is so talked about given that it is “as effective as CBT.” That doesn’t sound that effective! But it seems like just getting an anxious kid to agree to go to therapy is often difficult, so a therapy that doesn’t require the kid to do anything is actually pretty useful. Here’s more about the SPACE program, which teachers parents how to change their behavior when responding to kids with anxiety.
One of the basic premises behind the SPACE program is that a parent should reduce accommodations:
“There really isn’t evidence to demonstrate that parents cause children’s anxiety disorders in the vast majority of cases,” Lebowitz said. But—and this is a big but—there is research establishing a correlation between children’s anxiety and parents’ behavior. SPACE, he continued, is predicated on the simple idea that you can combat a kid’s anxiety disorder by reducing parental accommodation—basically, those things a parent does to alleviate a child’s anxious feelings. If a child is afraid of dogs, an accommodation might be walking her across the street so as to avoid one. If a child is scared of the dark, it might be letting him sleep in your bed.
But for those of us trying to take a “respectful parenting” approach, how do you know whether an “accommodation” is just being respectful of your child’s preferences and wishes, or something that is enabling their avoidance of an anxiety trigger? I know tons of parents who sleep with their kids, or lay with them while they fall asleep. In many cultures, it is considered highly abnormal to sleep alone. (See the Anna Hibiscus excerpt at the bottom of this page, for example.) Maybe the difference has to be about whether you are trying to meet your child’s needs vs. afraid of your kid’s disappointment/fear/anxiety. In other words, if you are trying to actively avoid your own discomfort (i.e., negative feelings of your own when faced with your child’s fear), then it is perhaps an accommodation?
And maybe it also has to do with whether you can slowly remove the accommodation over time? Here, for example, is an article a friend sent me about how her parenting coach addressed anxiety that was affecting her daughter’s ability to sleep alone.
Say your kid doesn’t want to go to after-school care. If it’s just because they enjoy being home with you, and they don’t particularly get much from the after-school program, then you might say fine, stay home after school from now on. We’ll make it work. But if they actually do enjoy hanging out with their friends and doing things in the after-school program, and they are avoiding after-school care simply because they are anxious about something (maybe the older kids in the mix), then probably you should respond differently. Whether or not they have a diagnosis of anxiety, they are avoiding something that could be very positive because there’s a part of them that’s anxious.
And maybe a red flag to look for is when the accommodation seriously impacts your own life? In the article they gave examples where parents moved house or were late to work every single day. Those are clearly accommodations that are having negative consequences for the adults.
For co-sleeping, I feel like if your kid prefers it and it works for you, great. But if you choose to miss an important event because your kid is afraid to sleep without your presence–the that’s accommodating. It seems like if you are always going far out of your way to prevent your kid from being disappointed, afraid, upset…that’s a red flag.
But this still leaves the question, how do you respect your child and respond to their fears without just accommodating (i.e., the child “wins”) or by not being responsive (i.e., the parent “wins”). How do you find a middle ground? The SPACE program talks about being more “supportive.” I tried to find a definition of the support part (the s in SPACE) and so far found “a supportive manner that conveys acceptance of the child’s genuine distress along with confidence in the child’s ability to cope with anxiety.” So it seems to be about empathy with negative emotions—not ignoring or dismissing their feelings. And then after you empathize and don’t accommodate further you support by problem-solving ideas to help your kid manage the hard situations without simply avoiding them.
But still I feel a bit unsure. If my kid doesn’t want to try out a new gymnastics course, is that her avoiding a situation because she’s afraid, or just a normal kid preference that should be respected? In my case Chickpea isn’t a particularly anxious kids, so mostly I’m not worried about the consequences of any “accommodations.” But for kids who do tend to be anxious, how do you tell when something is just a normal preference that should be respected vs. avoidance due to anxiety? Or maybe it is avoidance, but the anxiety is due to a normal developmental fear that they will naturally grow out of? I guess you have to look for patterns of avoidance and what happens those times when you can’t accommodate? And then you can tell the difference between a request/preference/desire and avoidance of a situation that creates anxiety? Still, it seems very hard to know what a kid will “grow out of” naturally over time vs something that needs more professional support. I guess I generally feel like if the parent generally has a “I trust my child to handle hard things (with my support)” attitude, then they will stop accommodating when it’s clearly doing a disservice to their kid. Whereas if they generally have a “must protect my poor fragile child” attitude, then it doesn’t bode well.
Pretentious Mama 