The children of tomorrow

robert whelan, 9 October 2006

The Future Foundation, a think tank amongst other things, brought out a report last week telling us that today’s parenting is – contrary to popular belief – better than ever. According to their report, The Changing Face of Parenting, recent concerns about dangerously pressurised childhoods seem to have been misguided. However, a closer examination of the findings suggests that perhaps they don’t present such a break with recent concerns about overly pressuirsed children.

According to the Future Foundation’s report parents now spend an average of 99 minutes a day with their children – that’s four times the time parents spent with children in 1975. The authors of the report regard this increase as flying in the face of recent panics about the strains we put on our children. The report praises what the authors refer to as an ‘increasingly professionalised’ approach which parents now take to bringing up their children. But how healthy is this approach to parenting? It could well be argued that this sort of intensity in parenting is contributing to the hijacking of childhood.
In part due to an increase in working mothers (and an accompanying guilt), in part because we’re having fewer children, parents are under a lot of pressure to parent a textbook ‘well.’ The problem is that this pressure on parents turns into pressure on children. Just as the state-as-parent in education’s desperation to prove that children are having their best-ever learning experience has led to over-testing at home, proof of good parenting increasingly means Grade 8 violin, tri-lingualism and taste-buds trained to reject non-organic. Parenting and childhood are becoming less and less responsiveness and instead more dictated and choreographed. The irony is that the greater parental ‘prioritisation’ the Future Foundation talks about, risks being more about adult than child fulfilment.
In The Changing Face of Parenting the Future Foundation argues that the depleted freedoms children have today are made up for by an increased amount of ‘quality time’ spent with parents. And arguably it’s precisely in this ‘quality time’ that the stress-inducing manual-toting parenting occurs. Quality time (as opposed to quantity time) is all about scheduled activities and purposeful parenting; all too often a form of that regimentation which is the new childhood Grinch. Most children probably don’t benefit much from having their parents breathing down their necks for 99 minutes a day, channelling Lego building sessions into the foundations for a future career in architecture. They want to be able to look up from their storybook and ask Mum what a word means or to make Dad laugh with a joke they heard at school. They want their parents to be around and available when they want them, not pencilled in for formalised doses of parent-child time.
Yesterday’s Daily Mail turned up two other discussions on contemporary parenting styles. The first was from a large study carried out by Yale University. According to this research, pushy or ‘helicopter’ parents as they are referred to, make for healthier and better-developed children. The lead researcher, Joseph Mahoney, argues that ‘our findings contradict and challenge the concern and popular belief about ‘over-scheduling’. The Mail’s second source however, took the opposite view. A new BBC series tied to the book, The Madness of Modern Families: The Race to Compete with Other Bl**dy Parents worries that children have become a ‘project’ to too many middle-class parents.
Perhaps the point is that increasingly our understanding of children’s needs is merging with projections of our grown-up worlds of hyper-organisation, commercialisation and desperation to succeed. No doubt our understanding in these discussions is also clouded by adult over-analysis.
Anastasia de Waal