Slow Parenting
Monday, June 1, 2009
"Let the Kid Be." That was the headline topping Lisa Belkin's essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps, the piece suggested, we've at last moved beyond "Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting," perhaps beyond, even, the bad mother confessionals that Ayelet Waldman and a host of bloggers have lately been promoting. Indeed, writes Belkin, a "second wave has taken hold—writers are moving past merely venting and trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement" that some call "slow parenting" and some "free-range parenting" and, if one were to bottom line it, might be defined simply as giving children room to be themselves, as opposed to the resume-building, fear-rattled citizens of a dog-eat-dog world.
Just five years ago, when I published Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, there was, I will be frank, little public interest in the argument that I made within those pages—that it was time to let our children be, that it was our job as parents to open doors, not prescribe pathways, that stories and storytelling were the gifts that we parents must pass on. "I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning," I wrote. "I want him to channel his passions and talents and personal politics into rivers of his choosing. I’d like to take the chance that I feel it is my right to take on contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one. I’d like to live in a world where that’s okay."
Perhaps we've entered that era now. Perhaps, with new books such as The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (Tom Hodgkinson) leading the charge, certain freedoms will be granted—less Suzuki, for example, more afternoons spent wandering along the banks of the mud-rimmed creek. At least until, as Belkin points out, the next parenting movement edges onto the horizon.
17 comments:
I sincerely hope there is a change coming in the way parents think on this topic. We now have a generation of overstressed, over burdened children and that isn't healthy for them or for the society they will inherit.
While I would love to see parents letting "children be children", I don't see it at present. Or maybe because I'm a Teen/Adult librarian, not a children's librarian, I haven't yet seen those little ones being free to pursue the small things in life. However, the teens are stressed, stressed, stressed beyond belief. If there isn't a major overhaul in the way colleges accept students, I fear that whatever childhoodness (is that a word?) that kids experience, will quickly go down the drain as they enter middle and high school. Sigh!!!! I had a relaxed childhood and I'd like to be a child again, in my world, not this one.
There is so much I agree with here. What are we doing to our children when we push them and push them appear feel successful so we can feel really GOOD...My older children are bent to be academic. They just are. I have one who is not, but he has so many fabulous qualities as a human being. He is insightful, gracious, thoughtful, and sees what other people miss all the time. I feel so sad that he lives in a world that pushes people to be what they are not bent to be.
Sports in school is another area that has gone crazy. Just a thought.
Idle parenting--lovely. Less stress for parents, less for children, could help both just be together, too.
It would be nice if kids could go back to being kids, and not plugged in and over-medicated. The town I live in has something like a 50% drop out rate in schools. And it's scary how many are runaways on a regular basis.
The system doesn't work, and parents don't really want to be parents and it's a dangerous path we are going down. It would be nice if we were really able to relax a little, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Here's hoping, though!
I think that most of my own generation was raised with a "let the kid be" approach, but many of us have gone in the other direction with our own kids. And I marvel at how much supposedly "child-centered," high-pressure parenting turns out to be about the parents' own needs.
I sure hope this "slow parenting" thing catches on...although it may not be noticeable till this generation of children become parents themselves, and want to raise their own kids differently. We'll seen.
Ed makes a very good point in his comment, though - some of the pressure does come from the outside, like college admission policies, and those need re-thinking too.
I just finished reading Seeing Past Z and was struck by both the commitment and restraint in your parenting. I admired the opportunities you created for your son and his peers--they were unforgettable gifts. I also applauded the many times you sat back and let Jeremy find his own balance and direction without intervening. That has always been the hard part for me.
Right after I finished your book I read Fireflies in the Dark: The Story of Freidl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terezin by Susan Goldman Rubin. It tells the true story of an artist and teacher who brought art and understanding to children living in a German concentration camp. At one point Dicker-Brandeis mentioned that even in the 1940's concentration camp environment parents were too eager to turn their children into grownups. I was amazed at the similarity of the message. Slow Parenting may be a new trend, but its foundation comes from history.
It's so complicated. On the one hand, we have the "overstressed, over burdened" children as Becca says, and on the other, we have children who haven't had a proper start in life and are floundering. I would like for all children to have as much help as they need and be given the room and the time to learn what they need to learn without having to meet particular objectives at particular times. I think I would have done well in math, for example, had the curriculum allowed me 2-3 days per objective instead of 1-2 objectives per day. My high school alegebra teacher was a saint, for she would stay after school many days to help us.
I've noticed that my 6 year old daughter needs some structure and rhythm to her day, but within that structure, freedom to explore.
Oh, I want to read your book. :)
There are so many kids that we can't even see outside of school unless we're signed up for the same activity as them (which we usually aren't).
I decided this past school year, that instead of overscheduling, we were just going to chill and hang out together. Thursday is our only day with an after school schedule and it's been really lovely.
I am so deeply moved by the comments here—the thoughtfulness of this blogging community, the time you each took to say something, to be honest.
I learn from you all, every day.
Beth: Seeing Past Z was one of those monumental books in my life, as I so saw my son in those snatches of your own, and felt finally validated (maybe supported) at how I was not teaching him "skills" each day but finding his own way.
I have three other children, however, and I often wondered if you might not have felt additional pressure, a different kind of pressure, had you had more children. Watching atypical development alongside of very typical development can sometimes make parents feel pressure to do more, be more, learn more, give more.
I worry that the "slow parenting" movement will produce parents who want to "appear" that they are indeed slow parenters rather than actually so. If that is the case, we are really getting nowhere.
I hope people pick up The Parents We Mean To Be by Richard Weissbourd. Such a great read about a complex topic.
OGrady (if I may) — what a lovely, thoughtful comment. Thank you for somehow finding your way here. Your point is well taken, but to answer your question, I think I probably would have raised however many children I might have been graced with with a fierce desire to let them be themselves, find their own passions, and not be carved out and crafted according to a resume's purpose.
I taught young writers for many years, as you know (the story of Z, really), and I continue to mentor and teach writers today. Those who have something to say and who say it well have been given or have found the time to imagine and dream. It is their thoughtfulness that I lean toward, their ability to live outside the rush of resume building. This is not to suggest that these young people do not go on and do great things. They do. They go to wonderful schools. They excel. They contribute. But they go on in life knowing that they have carved out their own paths. I happen to have worked with writers, and to have raised one. But that's just a small subset of the many passions open to children who are not preceded by a parent's expectations and ambitions.
None of this is easy; I don't suggest that it is. My plea, in Z, was simply to give children the time to discover, dream, and choose—and then to support them on the paths that they chose.
Perhaps with a stall in the economy and people finally recognizing that acquiring isn't all it's cracked up to be, just maybe we'll begin to start (or restart) recongizing life for what it is, an opportunity to learn and enjoy, instead of a way to get ahead.
My kids are encouraged to be - that's it - to be. The rest will either follow, or not. Hopefully there's some happiness in there.
Hello Beth. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I was thinking again of "slow parenting" this morning on the way to work and worrying about people vacillating between the extremes: thinking that it is a either this or that way to parent.
I worry also about what "letting a child be" can look like. I wonder if I had not strongly encouraged by son to take the risk and be a member on the baseball team (despite his pleas sometimes that he wouldn't do it, or despite watching him out there in the field gazing at the stars), I worry that he would not have taken the same risks and grown the way he has today as he stands on that pitcher's mound, no longer the kid with Asperger's, but the kid pitching some serious heat.
I worry because had I not proded, cajoled, really encouraged that in the name of "letting him be to follow his dreams" that his dreams might have led him to a more isolated and "safe" place for him.
My only point is that it is so complicated and not so either/or.
I wish "slow parenting" referred to the problem I see each day: parents and kids so tuned into cells, computers, blackberries, etc. that they rarely have time for real connection. I do a self-test each night: I sit and think about each of my children and when we looked into one another's eyes that day. Usually, that answer is a good indication of how my day went.
Really, Seeing Past Z was and still is a gift for me as an educator and a parent. It makes me worry and wonder about all of this.
OGrady —
All thoughtful, wonderful points again, and I hope that I have not conveyed a black and whiteness to this. Of course we need to suggest, prod, open doors. But I have never felt comfortable dictating. My primary concern, in writing Z, was to suggest that children should not be adapted to a parent's idea of a suitable resume. I wasn't and do not advocate just letting a child be—as you know from reading Z. I was suggesting that we come to our children with no boxed-in preconceptions. That we spend time with them, listen to them, watch them, and discover what it is that will help them grow into the person they were meant to be (and not the person we might have idealized/imagined). And that we help them get there.
All of that takes more time, I might wager, than simply enrolling children in the targeted lesson sequences. All of that is precisely about what you say: connecting.
I could go on for paragraphs (if not pages) about this. Instead, I will simply say:
AMEN!
...A.
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