I used to think that only Americans and Brits did helicopter parenting. In fact, it’s now a global trend. Middle-class Brazilians, Chileans, Germans, Poles, Israelis, Russians and others have adopted versions of it too. The guilt-ridden, sacrificial mother — fretting that she’s overdoing it, or not doing enough — has become a global icon. In “Parenting With Style,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti say intensive parenting springs from rising inequality, because parents know there’s a bigger payoff for people with lots of education and skills. (France is a rare rich country where helicoptering isn’t the norm.)(Here's the discussion we had about French parenting last month.)
October 15, 2014
"'In Norway 'we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them....'"
"... explained the producer [of a documentary], a father of three. The French 'demand more of their kids, and this could be an inspiration to us.'"
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I thank God every day that my wife stays home with the kids. Enjoys her job of taking care of them and our home, and raises our children.
How is it surprising that having fewer children doesn't lead to "helicoptering" (intensive "nurturing") on one's children?
I mean, this really is a case of having all one's ova in one basket.
Also, it just isn't humanly possible to "helicopter" six to eight tykes. Matter of fact, moms & dads generally dragooned the older kids into service to help raise the younger ones.
Well there's a fairly large middle ground between helicoptering and dragooning.
In the future doting parents will just have a drone circling the chest freezer in the garage.
"France is a rare rich country where helicoptering isn’t the norm."
Sure isn't. I was, both, repulsed and sent into spasms of laughter over the tile flooring they almost universally choose, that tripped the toddlers and sent them sprawling head first - with a nice ripe "CRACK" - and, sometimes, leaving a golf ball-sized lump. Over and over I saw it, those tiny victims of rigid conformity, which translated even into floor design.
The playgrounds were nightmares, with little grass and no padding of any kind on anything - really dangerous shit with exposed edges over hard dirt - to such an extent I was always trying to direct the kids' attention away from them when I babysat. Fuck that. Let's go get some cotton candy and make faces. There's three of y'all and you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, do you? No. But you think I'm funny, don't you? Yes you do - alright: walk this way (Cue the Groucho Marx strut,...)
It just felt better,...
Don't worry. There are still plentiful strings of television/video game afternoon-evenings spent in guidance desert living rooms throughout the United States.
(Not that I'm in favor of overbearing parents, but I don't think they're the biggest problem going.)
Last week I introduced some elementary age students to Blake and Tennyson, and it was awesome.
Unrelated: I bet Crack is an awesome babysitter.
Norway also has Trolls.
Wisconsin has brats too! Mmmmm...
Sad but when Crack isn't on his race and white people schtick he is actually quite sensible. Anyway the French are jerks, nothing new there and what's wrong with parents who love and adore their children being protective even if too a fault? My wife was a helicopter mom to my youngest daughter (she now is a thousand miles away at college) and I'm glad for it. Heck my ex who is a nutter was pretty protective of my older daughter and for that alone as much as I bitch about the support I paid ( the excessive mom support) I can't complain about her being there for our daughter. Maybe it's me as a pappa but the sun rises and sets around my girls and I'm glad that I was and still am (inspite of this horrible economy) able to provide them with the best undergraduate and graduate education this great country of ours can provide. Maybe I'm old school in that I believe that if you try your best and give your kids the best opportunities in life you can even if your life has its set backs and downturns its worth it and no matter how well you do if you don't give your kids the best you can give them then your life isn't worth squat. That me, others may differ and I am grateful to their mothers beyond words especially to my current wife.
Loving this!
True, but it began before the extreme inequality. I'd say on a superficial level people have less children and were deliberate in their choice to have those children. Go a generation or two back from me and you still have plenty of nice, and a bit dweeby, catholic guys that got married at 21 because there was no other real way to have sex and then resented the heck out of their wife, kids, and the church (for essentially stealing their youths) as they got older because it was a bad match.
On a deeper level, I think the lack of traditional religion and the initiation of choice puts ALL the existential responsibility on parental shoulders. They are responsible for their child's life, but also essentially their death so they need to do what they can to make their one shot a good one.
Helicopter parents are at least trying.
They aren't the problem.
Freeman, that is exactly my reaction. Last weekend I was talking with another parent at a 7th birthday party.
I started talking about books I have read with my daughter and this moms eyes just about popped out as the concept of reading a real book to her kid was foreign.
And that was when I mentioned reading Charlottes Web right before kindergarten. Her Tv afternoons kid cannot handle books longer than 15 minutes. Did not want to tell her how we binge-read Lion Witch and Warddrobe over two rainy days this summer ... It seemed like rubbing it in.
After that conversation, it struck me how different her daughters experience is from my kids. My kid is a great reader because the stories grew with her, the TV kid just cannot read or sit through books as she is stuck in remedial and short.
Critique as you want, I would give all that time to being parent all over again.
Right now there is a lot of pressure to helicopter parent such that it is difficult not to.
As for its origin, I'm inclined to think it is related to family size. My parents had 9 kids and we didn't get a lot of individual attention. I pour far more resources into my 1 child than my parents put into any 3 of theirs, and it's in large part because she's all I have.
My parents didn't need all of us (or even any of us, really) to be great successes for the family unit to be healthy. If one of us had gotten killed in the sort of childhood accident that used to be more common, they would have been devastated, sure, but with 8 left, the family dynamic wouldn't have changed much. If something happened to my 1 child, the ramifications would be far greater.
When I was a kid, we lived in Paris for a couple years and one of the most striking differences between France and the U.S. was how they treated their kids--frequently smacking them (not outright abuse so much as a quick smack when they misbehaved, which was often), and NEVER bringing them out to restaurants. Keep in mind, they often brought their dogs into restaurants--we joked that the dogs were probably better behaved than the kids. It just seemed that children were much more clearly second class citizens than they were treated back here.
Not that I think they were wrong about child-rearing (except maybe the constant hitting, which I think often causes kids to act up more, and French kids were hyper), as we in the U.S. tend to put kids on a pedestal that isn't good for them either. I figure French people seeing Americans let their kids act up in restaurants in America would be appalled.
@The Crack Emcee -- When a very gentle friend of mine moved to Paris for a year, she too was appalled at the playgrounds. It took her about one week before she told her equally gentle five-year-old son: Don't ever share your toys. If another kid tries to take your toys, yank them back. If someone hits you, knock them over.
Mark wrote: I started talking about books I have read with my daughter and this moms eyes just about popped out as the concept of reading a real book to her kid was foreign.
I just started over with reading books to my kids, I missed it so much. My youngest son hit age 7 and started telling me, sorry dad, I'm already reading something.
After a few months of this I finally insisted on reading one of Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales to him before bed. Just 15 minutes of mayhem a night. His 10-year-old sister listens in.
According to physicist Freeman Dyson, it all began with knitting….
‘Another technology with far-reaching effects on human society is knitting. Knitting emerged later than hay but just as anonymously. The historical importance of knitting is explained in an article by Lynn White in the American Historical Review of February 1974. The title of the article is “Technology Assessment from the Stance of a Medieval Historian.” The first unequivocal evidence of knitting technology is on an altarpiece painted in the last decade of the fourteenth century, now in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. It shows the Virgin Mary knitting a shirt on four needles for the Christ Child. White collects evidence indicating that the invention of knitting made it possible for the first time to keep small children tolerably warm through the Northern winter, that the result of keeping children warm was a substantial decrease in infant mortality, that the decrease in mortality allowed parents to become emotionally more involved with their children, and that the increasing attachment of parents to children led to the appearance of the modern child-centered family. The chain of evidence linking the knitting needle with the playroom and the child psychiatrist is circumstantial but plausible. As White says at the conclusion of his analysis: “Late medieval mothers and grandmothers with clacking needles undoubtedly assessed knitting correctly as regards infant comfort and health, but that in the long run a new notion of relationships within the family would thereby be encouraged could scarcely have been foreseen.” ’
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
Or perhaps I should say, according to historian Lynn White….
The Japanese beat us all in this category.
Yep, Henry, I am now starting to compete with her reading and am trying to keep something going there as it is so great sharing a great story with your kid. So much happens during that reading time.
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