While bucking up children has had a positive effect, such as recognizing them for their individual strengths, experts say it’s not praise, but responsibility and competence— having chores, being praised for something they try hard at—that really makes kids feel good about themselves. “You cannot give a kid self-esteem when all the praise is coming from you,” says Feldman, who teaches some PEP classes. “It needs to come from within. If a child is building with blocks and it falls over, maybe [he or she] will be sad. A parent who comes in and helps, rather than saying, ‘That’s too bad,’ is pushing and doesn’t make them feel more secure. We are just beginning to understand the distinction.”
“Mistakes are a part of learning,” Thompson says. “If a child says he or she is not good at math, or has a social problem, parents don’t want their children to struggle so they jump in and solve the problem. It’s well intentioned, but what we are really telling the child is that we don’t think they are up to it. In the long run, it’s undermining their development. We are hearing now about kids who are going to college so unprepared—not for the academics, but for organizing their own time, doing their laundry, because they had too much being done for them while they were growing up.”
“Chores,” Thompson adds, “are a wonderful way to help a child know that people count on them. But a lot of parents feel that it is not a nurturing thing to expect a child to help.” Those who do favor chores sometimes have a hard time fitting them in—thanks to long work hours for parents, and kids’ activities and homework. Creating a sense that chores are essential in an area where so many can afford the housekeeper, the yard service, the nanny to do our household jobs for us, is a challenge. “They don’t get the sense that something is required of them so life can continue, that sense of milking the cows,” says Mark Grannis, who grew up in Ohio and had to mow the lawn. “I have a hard time figuring out how to create that sense artificially.”
When it comes to material things, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses may be even harder to resist in an area where modest houses continually make way for McMansions, high school parking lots overflow with kids’ cars and exotic vacations are the norm.
“Around here, it’s common to make sure the kid gets the car when they turn 16, to get them iPods, to let them watch things more appropriate for high schoolers when they are 8 because others are doing it,” says PEP’s education coordinator Patti Cancellier. Sarah Grannis remembers talking to a Chevy Chase friend last summer who lamented he felt he had to buy his son a Gameboy. “He said if they didn’t have a Gameboy at their house, no one wanted to come and play there,” she says.“I think that’s kind of prevalent here: That sense of not wanting my kid to feel left out because I don’t have the right things to play with.” And it’s not just limited to toys, thanks to the proximity of such chi-chi stores as Saks, Louis Vitton and Jimmy Choo in Friendship Heights. “I’ve heard of girls wanting to shop at Tiffany’s,” says parent Jackman. “I have friends who are very frustrated with it. One moved to Frederick because she thought the affluence was getting out of hand.” Thompson says that the majority of families she works with have overwhelmed their kids with too much stuff.
“The kids have 65 percent too many toys,” she says. “In one family, the daughter was having all these power plays [with her parents] over what to wear. The problem was she had four layers of clothes on hangers and was overwhelmed with the choices. We put away all but six outfits and suddenly mornings were great in that family.”
The power of the media
The drive for material goods is fueled in part by advertising geared toward kids—“The message is, ‘This is something you want, go tell your parents,’” PEP’s Wicker says. But beyond advertising, the media also has helped create a new set of worries for today’s parents: Internet safety. We’ve all heard the social networking horror stories; the link between childhood obesity and too much screen time; exposure to adult concepts—from the endless cycle of horrific news stories to the Britney Spears culture trickling down to preschoolers, who come home singing “Oops, I did it again.” Media role models have taken a 180-degree turn from our childhood. “It used to be the message kids received from television shows was you behave or you suffer the consequences,” says PEP’s Cancellier. “Nowadays, the images kids see in the media are the exact opposite. It’s funny when kids talk back to parents. Commercials show kids hiding things from their parents, minimizing their e-mail screen. They see kids acting the opposite of obedient. One mom in one of my classes said her 7-year-old daughter dismisses her by saying, ‘Whatever.’ In my era, a child would have their mouth washed out with soap for saying that!”
For Helen, her fifth-grade son’s request for his own laptop has raised worries about both safety and having too much, too young. “The whole electronics thing, we’re on the cusp of that being the next big battle. He’s like, ‘Some of my friends have them.’ And it’s scary because the world can come into your house. The most I got as a child was, ‘You can’t watch Dark Shadows.’ It was a little scary because it was about a vampire. But compared to what’s on TV now, that was just bad acting. Now they get on their laptop, on YouTube, and the whole world is at their fingertips.”
Faced with so many challenges, parenting today can feel like a struggle to hold back the tide. But in their efforts to do so, many local parents are bolstering the values, and creating family memories, they treasure.
Williams and Todd save Friday nights for family movie night with 6-year-old Avery. Des Roches nixes television at home but provides lots of opportunities for her son to jump on the couch or wear costumes. Helen says no to her kids’ nickel- and-dime requests at the store, but gives them free rein on how they spend their allowances. “That makes them stop and think,” she says. Jackman gives her children choices, but within limits: “Yes, you can do a sport, but you can’t do three and you can’t do it every day.”
The Grannis family gets away every summer to their no-frills cabin in the Adirondacks, where there is no schedule. “I love that they are able to have that gift, these empty summers, sitting on a dock, reading a book, kayaking,” says Sarah Grannis. “It makes me feel like they are getting an old-fashioned childhood.”
“Kids remember the wonderful moments, like the trip to Disney, but they also remember things like every night, mom had dinner on the table for me,” Brown says. “Or cuddling on the couch. Those moments count.”
So are we better parents? And, if so, what does that mean for our own children? “I think our generation really wants to do it better than our parents,” says Beckert, “but sometimes I feel like we are fumbling through. I think our kids will do it even better.” Parenthood is decades away for Mark Grannis’s kids, but he already has advice for them: “If they asked me how they could do a better job parenting, I’d say you need to do better at simplifying.”
While my daughter gives me a thumb’s up for mothering, I already know a few things she’d try to do differently: Scrap the escalating “We’re going to be late!” nagging I do to get us out the door and create more unscheduled hang-out time at home. “We are not better or worse,” says family therapist Paul, whose own daughters are now grown. “We all try to do things differently than our parents. I know my daughters will. The best gift we can give them is resilience, teach them how to deal with life, how to make choices.”
Ultimately, I think I am a better parent than I might have been thanks to my mother, not in comparison to her. For all my angst over school lunches, she gave me great gifts that I am trying to pass along to my own daughter: A love of reading, independence, the simple joy of spending time together. One recent day, my daughter asked me to teach her how to make dinner. We boiled the water, added a drop of olive oil and then the pasta. She trimmed the green beans and I showed her how to steam them. Soon, I’ll teach her how to make her favorite meal: chicken. I can’t wait.
Writer Macon Morehouse, who lives in Bethesda with her 11-year-old daughter, has been published in People magazine, The Washington Post, USA Weekend and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
