The ‘gentle parenting’ backlash: Am I raising my kids to be helpless?

One friend happily lets her 14-year-old kid bus home from dinner with friends in Sydney’s central business district to their suburban home at 8pm. But she struggled when teenage friends of her 18-year-old, with little driving experience, offered to drive him on back country roads during a weekend away.

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“There are so many stupid scenarios these stupid parents [of other kids] put you into,” she says.

Another friend with two primary-school-aged children wonders about the negative impact of not making her kids do household chores, and letting her kids stay home from school when they feel even the slightest bit unwell.

“I’m super soft,” she says. “But that’s not making them tough and letting them get through. That’s not going to [raise them to] be the kid who grows up and gets back and does stuff again [after a challenge]. That is completely my anxiety.”

So, how can we know if we’ve actually damaged our kids by doing too much for them?

“Anxiety,” says Callegari, listing one of the warning signs. “Inability to make decisions. Procrastination, overly avoidant socially. School learning problems, like an inability to do work on their own. Excessive risk aversion.”

’We go, ‘Oh gosh, they need help’, and we step in and we help. And we thus prepare the road for them [the kids], and not them for the road.′

Clinical psychologist Judith Locke

Parents should also ask themselves just how often they’re doing things for their kids that they could do themselves. “If a client said to me, ‘On average, that’s how my mum and dad acted, they mostly did everything for me, or mostly made decisions for me’, well, then, that speaks to a pattern rather than an outlier,” says Callegari.

But even if that has been you, as a parent, it’s never too late to wind back the damage.

“There’s no such thing,” says Callegari, of a point of no return on this matter. “The brain’s plastic.”

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It’s simply about repairing the damage by “connecting with the [child’s] unmet need”. “Which is autonomy, competency, kids’ doing things for themselves, feeling like they can do things for themselves,” he says. “Praising them, telling them that you believe in them, ‘I think you’ve got this, I trust you, It’ll be OK if you fail. That’s how we learn.’”

Parents also need to take a hard look at their own parenting choices, which are likely an unconscious reaction to the way they were parented.

“Most parents overcompensate,” – do the opposite to how they were parented – “or surrender… and just repeat the sins of the father, so to speak,” says Callegari.

So, many parents in their 40s who were raised by baby boomers – raised themselves by stoic parents who came from a world of fuel shortages and unemployment and might have lacked empathy for their children – might boomerang away from their own upbringing and “smother them [their kids] with love” and make sure they’re safe, he says.

It’s not that paying attention to our children’s feelings is a bad thing, says Locke, author of The Bonsai Child, a book about how over-parenting can stunt a child’s development. The problems arise when we treat children who have a diagnosis of anxiety, or are otherwise anxious, as a fait accompli, as opposed to figuring out how to help them rise above their anxieties.

“We’ve kind of written a script for kids where everybody else is responsible for making you feel better, you know?” says Locke, who sees countless children suffering from anxiety as a result of having been over-parented. “I think it’s the current environment, [in which] we always emphasise care in these situations as opposed to slowly introducing demands or expectations and opportunities for them to overcome it.”

If this is you, though, she empathises.

“It’s what has been encouraged by society… that caring parenting is dropping off their [kid’s] assignment that they left at home, and caring parenting is allowing them to miss the sports carnival because it’s boring,” says Locke. “So you’re kind of pushed in a wrong direction.”

Parents are also tapping into their primal instincts.

“We [parents] go, ‘Oh gosh, they need help’, and we step in and we help,” says Locke. “And we thus prepare the road for them [the kids], and not them for the road.”

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The crucial question parents need to ask themselves if their child baulks at a challenge, or if they take on one for them, is: “If not now, when?”

“If they can’t go to camp now, when are they going to go?” says Locke. “If you don’t have a plan for [when that will happen], well, where will this go? That’s the thing you’ve always got to think of in this. They don’t accept the teacher’s authority, my authority [as a psychologist] because they’ve got a diagnosis of anxiety… If they can’t go to school [if they refuse], how are they going to go to uni? Who’s going to employ them?”

Parents need to also recognise that challenges are crucial for a child’s development, just as wind is essential for a tree to grow strong.

“Because trees actually need bits of wind as they’re growing, for the roots to grow deeper,” says Locke. “And the branches to grow stronger. If they don’t have that experience of wind, if they’re so protected, the moment the wind comes along, they’re going to blow over. They haven’t actually learned to cope with it.” It’s the same with children, she says. “People need to put windy experiences in their life, so to speak… or else the child is actually not ready for the world they’re going to grow up in.”

As a start, parents should make sure that their children are “doing something more [independently] this year than the last year”, from the age of two years onwards, says Locke. In this way, they will be on a steady path to building the essential skills of resilience, self-regulation, resourcefulness, respect and responsibility, she adds.

This can start with such simple tasks as requiring that your kids dress themselves, help set the table and make their own breakfast. “They should need you less every year,” says Locke. “Make sure that they’re on track to go to schoolies, when they’re 18.”

If a child has developed anxiety, parents should seek out a “solution-focused” therapist, says Locke.

”We emphasise responsiveness [to our children’s problems] and not demands,” she says. “So the solution is actually slowly allowing the child to get ways of facing the things they don’t want to face.”

And, says Callegari, don’t expect to transform your parenting overnight.

“Just remember, you don’t have to be perfect,” he says. “[Be] good enough.”

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