The 'Overparenting' Crisis In School And At Home

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NPR

Have you ever paid your kid for good grades? Have you driven to school to drop off a forgotten assignment? Have you done a college student's laundry? What about coming along to Junior's first job interview?

These examples are drawn from two bestselling books — How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims and The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey.

The books make strikingly similar claims about today's youth:

Kids are anxious, afraid and risk-averse because parents are more focused on keeping their children safe, content and happy in the moment than on parenting for competence. Furthermore, we as a society [are] so obsessed with learning as a product — grades, scores and other evidence of academic and athletic success — that we have sacrificed learning in favor of these false idols.

We parents are overprotecting, overdirecting and doing a lot of hand-holding, ostensibly in furtherance of kids' safety — physical, emotional — and security — emotional, academic, reputational, professional, financial. But also in furtherance of our own ego. Our kid becomes chronologically adult but still expects us to tell them what to do and how to do it

Teachers and administrators complain about parents, but we helped create this frenzy ... Teachers have come to accept that parents interfere and co-opt school projects and have begun to take that for granted when grading.

I'm all for love between parent and child from now until forever. What I'm concerned about is when coddling means a kid doesn't acquire the skills they're going to need out in the real world.

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