What kind of parent are you?
Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 10:53AM 
Wittgenstein once advised us not to look for the meaning of words, but instead take note of their use.
Words, he said, do not label the world around us, they shape it and create meaning out of it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the modern day parenting manual or glossy magazine, where being a mum or dad has been turned into an art form and designer children have become a must-have accessory.
The language of modern day parenting tells us a lot about how complicated it has all become. Floortime, car-schooling, hurried child syndrome, nanny-cams, strollerobics: there is a whole new world out there, and a great set of words to go with it. We even possess a word now for those who promote the benefits of breast milk over instant formula: lactivists.
We also have found ways to describe emerging phenomena in modern family life. I came across the following examples the other day and can’t wait to slip them proudly into a future conversation:
1. Parallel parenting: A form of parenting in which a divorced couple assume or are assigned specific parental duties while minimizing or eliminating contact with each other. In short, with the support of a contract to guide them, mum and dad can care for their children independently, without ever having to exchange a word.
2. Stealth parenting: Performing childcare duties while pretending to be at a business meeting or other work-related function. A phenomenon unique to men, for whereas companies are now fairly accommodating to women with childcare responsibilities, it still represents the ‘kiss of death’ for a man to say he needed flexibility for this reason.
3. Lifelong parenting: Taking care of one's adult children, especially those who show no desire to live on their own. A number of factors are apparently contributing to this flight back to the family nest by children in their 20s and 30s: soaring property prices, relationship breakdowns, and greater career instability. Added to this, it is no longer cool to regard Mum and Dad as a source of ridicule, so more than half of adult children living with their parents admit that they are perfectly happy to do so.
4. Askable parenting: A parent who is willing to answer their child's questions and who encourages their child to ask questions, particularly about sex. The message out there is simple: start talking to your children about sex, soon and often.
5. Helicopter parenting: A parent who hovers over his or her children. They say that this phenomenon began with the dreaded ‘Baby on Board’ sign in the early 1980s. Suddenly, child safety became everything. We buckled our children into car-safety seats, bought them bike helmets and car-pooled them around in Volvos every night of the week. Sometimes known as Generation Y, these children have grown up, confident in the knowledge that mum or dad is never far away, keeping tabs on their every move.
I have read books, flicked through endless magazines and product catalogues, even gone into cyberspace. I have returned with a whole new set of words and impressive terms. In the end, though, I am left with a strange feeling of dissatisfaction and mental bloatedness after spending an inordinate amount of time performing a task without tangible benefit. To the modern tongue, I am a person suffering an acute form of Dorito Syndrome.
So what kind of parent are you?
Reader Comments (4)
Dear David
Thank you for your article. Yes indeed, what kinds of parent are?
As a parent I am nearly an opposite of my own parents. When I was a kid in sixties I was 100% independent and autonomic. I walked or cycled every morning 3 km to school and back starting from the age of 7. In the afternoons I hanged around with my friends in forests, play-areas or sometimes even in town center - and that was absolutely normal practice those days. My parents did not ask any questions about the school – and I did not tell them anything, either. It was not needed. They had their life – and I had mine. We were all happy with that arrangement.
We (my wife & me) have two daughters aged 8 and 10. We think that we are good and caring parents. We do not let our daughters to go anywhere without supervision. We follow closely their life in school, their tests and exams and other school matters. We have an interactive correspondence with all their teachers. We support them in their hobbies by buying all the necessary equipments.
When we were young it was awful to have second hand bad quality equipments - so we are happy that we have a possibility to buy good-quality materials for them.
We encourage them to have a vivid social life. Our daughters have in total over 50 school friends, who have at least 2 birthday parties every semester. We transport them with our hyper-safe family Volvo all the week-ends from house to house.
As a father, I try to be with them as much as I can and I have a bad conscience nearly all the time because there are too much work and never enough time to be at home with the family in order to have quality time together.
And yet, we do not want to spoil our daughters. They do not always get what they want and we have often educative discussions with them about actual matters.
Are we over-protecting, over-caring, over-everything parents? Maybe yes, but do we have any intellectual alternatives to raise our children in any other way? We are much more aware about the psychological development of the children than my parents 40 were years ago – and we want to give the best possible education for our dearest.
Finally I think that my parents managed to raise me to be rather decent grown-up man without reading any educative book about the subject. They gave me space to grow up myself. I learned very early to take care of my own business and I got plenty of self-confidence by being able to manage on my own. That has been very useful for me in my professional life.
What kind of skills we are transferring to our children now-a-days? The same question has also another angle: what kind of skills we do not transfer to our children by being present all the time in their growing and development process?
Kari
Thanks, Kari, for your comments and for sharing your own 'story'. i guess it makes me think about the difference between outcome and process. There are a hundred different ways of bringing up children - being a mum or dad - but, in the end, most of us would rest content if only we knew that they were going to be happy, successful and ethical people in the world.
I am also left pondering your remark about what we are left NOT giving to our kids these days... Perhaps others can give their perspective on this important question.
David
I really enjoyed reading your article and am trying to answer the question as to what kind of parent I am. Am I the happy, proud, loving parent? Or the impatient, overprotective, angry parent? I really do not know. I always thought parenting would become easier as the kids grew. Now I know it isn't. I believe each age has its own problems and challenges and I still wait for the day when we leave home in the morning without quarelling and spolilng each other's day.
I guess that's the point of what I am trying to saying in many of the stories I am telling on this blog. For me at least, those moments of joy, perfection, happiness, truth are always only fleeting 'fragment'. Speaking personally, I am only ever the 'happy, proud, loving' parents part of the time...The rest is, well, at best, mundane. But, in the end, I have come to understand that this is probably ok. That's just the way life is. It is, as they say, 'Good Enough'.