{"id":7497,"date":"2011-07-19T22:27:30","date_gmt":"2011-07-20T02:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=7497"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:08:14","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:08:14","slug":"why-too-much-happiness-is-ruining-todays-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/07\/19\/why-too-much-happiness-is-ruining-todays-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Too Much ‘Happiness’ Is Ruining Today’s Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids\u2019 happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods<\/a><\/em> by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it\u2019s that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (\u201cThey fuck you up, your mum and dad, \/ They may not mean to, but they do.\u201d) At the time, I was a new mom with an infant son, and I\u2019d decided to go back to school for a degree in clinical psychology. With baby on the brain and term papers to write, I couldn\u2019t ignore the barrage of research showing how easy it is to screw up your kids. Of course, everyone knows that growing up with \u201cMommy Dearest\u201d produces a very different child from one raised by, say, a loving PTA president who has milk and homemade cookies waiting after school. But in that space between Joan Crawford and June Cleaver, where most of us fall, it seemed like a lot could go wrong in the kid-raising department.<\/p>\n

As a parent, I wanted to do things right. But what did \u201cright\u201d mean? One look in Barnes & Noble\u2019s parenting section and I was dizzy: child-centered, collaborative, or RIE? Brazelton, Spock, or Sears?<\/p>\n

The good news, at least according to Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, was that you didn\u2019t have to be a perfect mother to raise a well-adjusted kid. You just had to be, to use the term Winnicott coined, a \u201cgood-enough mother.\u201d I was also relieved to learn that we\u2019d moved beyond the concept of the \u201cschizophrenogenic mother,\u201d who\u2019s solely responsible for making her kid crazy. (The modern literature acknowledges that genetics\u2014not to mention fathers\u2014play a role in determining mental health.) Still, in everything we studied\u2014from John Bowlby\u2019s \u201cattachment theory\u201d to Harry Harlow\u2019s monkeys, who clung desperately to cloth dummies when separated from their mothers\u2014the research was clear: fail to \u201cmirror\u201d your children, or miss their \u201ccues,\u201d or lavish too little affection on them, and a few decades later, if they had the funds and a referral, they would likely end up in one of our psychotherapy offices, on the couch next to a box of tissues, recounting the time Mom did this and Dad didn\u2019t do that, for 50 minutes weekly, sometimes for years.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Our main job as psychotherapists, in fact, was to \u201cre-parent\u201d our patients, to provide a \u201ccorrective emotional experience\u201d in which they would unconsciously transfer their early feelings of injury onto us, so we could offer a different response, a more attuned and empathic one than they got in childhood.<\/p>\n

At least, that was the theory. Then I started seeing patients.<\/p>\n

My first several patients were what you might call textbook. As they shared their histories, I had no trouble making connections between their grievances and their upbringings. But soon I met a patient I\u2019ll call Lizzie. Imagine a bright, attractive 20-something woman with strong friendships, a close family, and a deep sense of emptiness. She had come in, she told me, because she was \u201cjust not happy.\u201d And what was so upsetting, she continued, was that she felt she had nothing to be unhappy about. She reported that she had \u201cawesome\u201d parents, two fabulous siblings, supportive friends, an excellent education, a cool job, good health, and a nice apartment. She had no family history of depression or anxiety. So why did she have trouble sleeping at night? Why was she so indecisive, afraid of making a mistake, unable to trust her instincts and stick to her choices? Why did she feel \u201cless amazing\u201d than her parents had always told her she was? Why did she feel \u201clike there\u2019s this hole inside\u201d her? Why did she describe herself as feeling \u201cadrift\u201d?<\/p>\n

I was stumped. Where was the distracted father? The critical mother? Where were the abandoning, devaluing, or chaotic caregivers in her life?<\/p>\n

As I tried to make sense of this, something surprising began happening: I started getting more patients like her. Sitting on my couch were other adults in their 20s or early 30s who reported that they, too, suffered from depression and anxiety, had difficulty choosing or committing to a satisfying career path, struggled with relationships, and just generally felt a sense of emptiness or lack of purpose\u2014yet they had little to quibble with about Mom or Dad.<\/p>\n

Instead, these patients talked about how much they \u201cadored\u201d their parents. Many called their parents their \u201cbest friends in the whole world,\u201d and they\u2019d say things like \u201cMy parents are always there for me.\u201d Sometimes these same parents would even be funding their psychotherapy (not to mention their rent and car insurance), which left my patients feeling both guilty and utterly confused. After all, their biggest complaint was that they had nothing to complain about!<\/p>\n

At first, I\u2019ll admit, I was skeptical of their reports. Childhoods generally aren\u2019t perfect\u2014and if theirs had been, why would these people feel so lost and unsure of themselves? It went against everything I\u2019d learned in my training.<\/p>\n

But after working with these patients over time, I came to believe that no florid denial or distortion was going on. They truly did seem to have caring and loving parents, parents who gave them the freedom to \u201cfind themselves\u201d and the encouragement to do anything they wanted in life. Parents who had driven carpools, and helped with homework each night, and intervened when there was a bully at school or a birthday invitation not received, and had gotten them tutors when they struggled in math, and music lessons when they expressed an interest in guitar (but let them quit when they lost that interest), and talked through their feelings when they broke the rules, instead of punishing them (\u201clogical consequences\u201d always stood in for punishment). In short, these were parents who had always been \u201cattuned,\u201d as we therapists like to say, and had made sure to guide my patients through any and all trials and tribulations of childhood. As an overwhelmed parent myself, I\u2019d sit in session and secretly wonder how these fabulous parents had done it all.<\/p>\n

Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much?<\/p>\n

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn\u2019t end up on a therapist\u2019s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids\u2014yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?<\/p>\n

VIDEO: Lori Gottlieb speaks to parenting expert Wendy Mogel about the ways well-meaning parents can ruin their children.
\nCHILD-REARING HAS LONG been a touchy subject in America, perhaps because the stakes are so high and the theories so inconclusive. In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert recounts how there\u2019s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles\u2014the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered\u2014with the pendulum swinging back and forth between them over the decades. Yet the underlying goal of good parenting, even during the heyday of don\u2019t-hug-your-kid-too-much advice in the 1920s (\u201cWhen you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,\u201d the behavioral psychologist John Watson wrote in his famous guide to child-rearing), has long been the same: to raise children who will grow into productive, happy adults. My parents certainly wanted me to be happy, and my grandparents wanted my parents to be happy too. What seems to have changed in recent years, though, is the way we think about and define happiness, both for our children and for ourselves.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, it\u2019s not enough to be happy\u2014if you can be even happier. The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness have morphed from a quest for general contentment to the idea that you must be happy at all times and in every way. \u201cI am happy,\u201d writes Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project, a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list and that has spawned something of a national movement in happiness-seeking, \u201cbut I\u2019m not as happy as I should be.\u201d<\/p>\n

How happy should she be? Rubin isn\u2019t sure. She sounds exactly like some of my patients. She has two wonderful parents; a \u201ctall, dark, and handsome\u201d (and wealthy) husband she loves; two healthy, \u201cdelightful\u201d children; a strong network of friends; a beautiful neo-Georgian mansion on the Upper East Side; a law degree from Yale; and a successful career as a freelance writer. Still, Rubin writes, she feels \u201cdissatisfied, that something [is] missing.\u201d So to counteract her \u201cbouts of melancholy, insecurity, listlessness, and free-floating guilt,\u201d she goes on a \u201chappiness journey,\u201d making lists and action items, buying three new magazines every Monday for a month, and obsessively organizing her closets.<\/p>\n

At one point during her journey, Rubin admits that she still struggles, despite the charts and resolutions and yearlong effort put into being happy. \u201cIn some ways,\u201d she writes, \u201cI\u2019d made myself less happy.\u201d Then she adds, citing one of her so-called Secrets of Adulthood, \u201cHappiness doesn\u2019t always make you feel happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Modern social science backs her up on this. \u201cHappiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,\u201d Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. \u201cBut happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.\u201d It\u2019s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively\u2014only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we\u2019re depriving them of happiness as adults?<\/p>\n

Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment\u2014\u201canything less than pleasant,\u201d as he puts it\u2014with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.<\/p>\n

Consider a toddler who\u2019s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure\u2014not just on the playground, but in life. If you don\u2019t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I\u2019m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own\u2014but parents never learn this, because they\u2019re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn\u2019t need protection.<\/p>\n

Which made me think, of course, of my own sprints across the sand the second my toddler would fall. And of the time when he was 4 and a friend of mine died of cancer and I considered \u2026 not telling him! After all, he didn\u2019t even know she\u2019d been sick (once, commenting on her head scarves, he\u2019d asked me if she was an Orthodox Jew, and like a wuss, I said no, she just really likes scarves). I knew he might notice that we didn\u2019t see her anymore, but all of the parenting listservs I consulted said that hearing about a parent\u2019s death would be too scary for a child, and that, without lying (because God forbid that we enlightened, attuned parents ever lie to our children), I should sugarcoat it in all these ways that I knew would never withstand my preschooler\u2019s onslaught of cross-examining whys.<\/p>\n

In the end, I told my son the truth. He asked a lot of questions, but he did not faint from the shock. If anything, according to Bohn, my trusting him to handle the news probably made him more trusting of me, and ultimately more emotionally secure. By telling him, I was communicating that I believed he could tolerate sadness and anxiety, and that I was here to help him through it. Not telling him would have sent a very different message: that I didn\u2019t feel he could handle discomfort. And that\u2019s a message many of us send our kids in subtle ways every day.<\/p>\n

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our \u201cdiscomfort with discomfort\u201d in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can\u2019t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won\u2019t develop \u201cpsychological immunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like the way our body\u2019s immune system develops,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won\u2019t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn\u2019t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn\u2019t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they\u2019re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is \u2018I can fix this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they\u2019ve dubbed \u201cteacups\u201d because they\u2019re so fragile that they break down anytime things don\u2019t go their way. \u201cWell-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,\u201d Mogel said of these kids, \u201cso they don\u2019t know how to deal with it when they grow up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which might be how people like my patient Lizzie end up in therapy. \u201cYou can have the best parenting in the world and you\u2019ll still go through periods where you\u2019re not happy,\u201d Jeff Blume, a family psychologist with a busy practice in Los Angeles, told me when I spoke to him recently. \u201cA kid needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to grow up and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s a big if. Blume believes that many of us today don\u2019t really want our kids to leave, because we rely on them in various ways to fill the emotional holes in our own lives. Kindlon and Mogel both told me the same thing. Yes, we devote inordinate amounts of time, energy, and resources to our children, but for whose benefit?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re confusing our own needs with our kids\u2019 needs and calling it good parenting,\u201d Blume said, letting out a sigh. I asked him why he sighed. (This is what happens when two therapists have a conversation.) \u201cIt\u2019s sad to watch,\u201d he explained. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how often I have to say to parents that they\u2019re putting too much emphasis on their kids\u2019 feelings because of their own issues. If a therapist is telling you to pay less attention to your kid\u2019s feelings, you know something has gotten way of out of whack.\u201d<\/p>\n

LAST OCTOBER, IN an article for the New York Times Magazine, Ren\u00e9e Bacher, a mother in Louisiana, described the emptiness she felt as she sent her daughter off to college in the Northeast. Bacher tried getting support from other mother friends, who, it turned out, were too busy picking up a refrigerator for a child\u2019s college dorm room or rushing home to turn off a high-schooler\u2019s laptop. And while Bacher initially justified her mother-hen actions as being in her daughter\u2019s best interest\u2014coming up with excuses to vet her daughter\u2019s roommate or staying too long in her daughter\u2019s dorm room under the guise of helping her move in\u2014eventually she concluded: \u201cAs with all Helicopter Parenting, this was about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bacher isn\u2019t unusual. Wendy Mogel says that colleges have had so much trouble getting parents off campus after freshman orientation that school administrators have had to come up with strategies to boot them. At the University of Chicago, she said, they\u2019ve now added a second bagpipe processional at the end of opening ceremonies\u2014the first is to lead the students to another event, the second to usher the parents away from their kids. The University of Vermont has hired \u201cparent bouncers,\u201d whose job is to keep hovering parents at bay. She said that many schools are appointing an unofficial \u201cdean of parents\u201d just to wrangle the grown-ups. Despite the spate of articles in recent years exploring why so many people in their 20s seem reluctant to grow up, the problem may be less that kids are refusing to separate and individuate than that their parents are resisting doing so.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a difference between being loved and being constantly monitored,\u201d Dan Kindlon told me. And yet, he admitted, even he struggles. \u201cI\u2019m about to become an empty-nester,\u201d he said, \u201cand sometimes I feel like I\u2019d burn my kids\u2019 college applications just to have somebody to hang around with. We have less community nowadays\u2014we\u2019re more isolated as adults, more people are divorced\u2014and we genuinely like spending time with our kids. We hope they\u2019ll think of us as their best friends, which is different from parents who wanted their kids to appreciate them, but didn\u2019t need them to be their pals. But many of us text with our kids several times a day, and would miss it if it didn\u2019t happen. So instead of being peeved that they ask for help with the minutiae of their days, we encourage it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long work hours don\u2019t help. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got 20 minutes a day to spend with your kid,\u201d Kindlon asked, \u201cwould you rather make your kid mad at you by arguing over cleaning up his room, or play a game of Boggle together? We don\u2019t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it\u2019s better for them if sometimes they can\u2019t stand us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them\u2014more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them\u2014the banker who\u2019s happy, the surgeon who\u2019s happy,\u201d Barry Schwartz, the Swarthmore social scientist, told me, even though those professions \u201cmight not actually make them happy.\u201d At least for parents of a certain demographic (and if you\u2019re reading this article, you\u2019re likely among them), \u201cwe\u2019re not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day with a smile on their faces,\u201d Schwartz says. \u201cThey\u2019re happy, but we\u2019re not. Even though we say what we want most for our kids is their happiness, and we\u2019ll do everything we can to help them achieve that, it\u2019s unclear where parental happiness ends and our children\u2019s happiness begins.\u201d<\/p>\n

His comment reminded me of a conversation I\u2019d just had with a camp director when I inquired about the program. She was going down the list of activities for my child\u2019s age group, and when she got to basketball, T-ball, and soccer, she quickly added, \u201cBut of course, it\u2019s all noncompetitive. We don\u2019t encourage competition.\u201d I had to laugh: all of these kids being shunted away from \u201ccompetition\u201d as if it were kryptonite. Not to get too shrink-y, but could this be a way for parents to work out their ambivalence about their own competitive natures?<\/p>\n

It may be this question\u2014and our unconscious struggle with it\u2014that accounts for the scathing reaction to Amy Chua\u2019s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, earlier this year. Chua\u2019s efforts \u201cnot to raise a soft, entitled child\u201d were widely attacked on blogs and mommy listservs as abusive, yet that didn\u2019t stop the book from spending several months on the New York Times best-seller list. Sure, some parents might have read it out of pure voyeurism, but more likely, Chua\u2019s book resonated so powerfully because she isn\u2019t so different from her critics. She may have been obsessed with her kids\u2019 success at the expense of their happiness\u2014but many of today\u2019s parents who are obsessed with their kids\u2019 happiness share Chua\u2019s drive, just wrapped in a prettier package. Ours is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach, a desire for high achievement without the sacrifice and struggle that this kind of achievement often requires. When the Tiger Mom looked unsparingly at her parental contradictions, perhaps she made the rest of us squirm because we were forced to examine our own.<\/p>\n

Chua, says Wendy Mogel, \u201cwas admitting in such a candid way what loads of people think but just don\u2019t own up to.\u201d In her practice, Mogel meets many parents who let kids off the hook for even basic, simple chores so they can spend more time on homework. Are these parents being too lenient (letting the chores slide), or too hard-core (teaching that good grades are more important than being a responsible family member)? Mogel and Dan Kindlon agree that whatever form it takes\u2014whether the fixation is happiness or success\u2014parental overinvestment is contributing to a burgeoning generational narcissism that\u2019s hurting our kids.<\/p>\n

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn\u2019t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim \u201cGreat job!\u201d not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for \u201cgood tries,\u201d he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as \u201cgood tries.\u201d) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself\u2014a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? \u201cNarcissists are happy when they\u2019re younger, because they\u2019re the center of the universe,\u201d Twenge explains. \u201cTheir parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. \u201cPeople who feel like they\u2019re unusually special end up alienating those around them,\u201d Twenge says. \u201cThey don\u2019t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because their worlds were so structured with activities. They don\u2019t like being told by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if they don\u2019t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance. Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don\u2019t know how to solve problems. And they\u2019re right\u2014they don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, I spoke to a youth soccer coach in Washington, D.C. A former competitive college athlete and now a successful financier, he told me that when he first learned of the youth league\u2019s rules\u2014including no score-keeping\u2014he found them \u201cridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

How are the kids going to learn? he thought. He valued his experience as an athlete, through which he had been forced to deal with defeat. \u201cI used to think, If we don\u2019t keep score, we\u2019re going to have a bunch of wusses out there. D.C. can be very PC, and I thought this was going too far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, he came around to the new system, because he realized that some kids would be \u201cdevastated\u201d if they got creamed by a large margin. \u201cWe don\u2019t want them to feel bad,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want kids to feel any pressure.\u201d (When I told Wendy Mogel about this, she literally screamed through the phone line, \u201cPlease let them be devastated at age 6 and not have their first devastation be in college! Please, please, please let them be devastated many times on the soccer field!\u201d) I told the coach this sounded goofy, given that these kids attend elite, competitive schools like Georgetown Day School or Sidwell Friends, where President Obama\u2019s daughters go. They\u2019re being raised by parents who are serious about getting their kids into Harvard and Yale. Aren\u2019t these kids exposed to a lot of pressure? And besides, how is not keeping score protecting anyone, since, as he conceded, the kids keep score on their own anyway? When the score is close, the coach explained, it\u2019s less of an issue. But blowouts are a problem.<\/p>\n

He told me about a game against a very talented team. \u201cWe lost 10\u20135, and the other team dominated it. Our kids were very upset. They said, \u2018We got killed!\u2019 and I said, \u2018What are you talking about? You guys beat the spread! The team we beat last week lost 14\u20131!\u2019 The kids thought about this for a second and then were like, \u2018You\u2019re right, we were great! We rule!\u2019 They felt so much better, because I turned it around for them into something positive. When you get killed and there\u2019s no positive spin, the kids think they\u2019re failures. It damages their self-esteem.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the season, the league finds a way to \u201chonor each child\u201d with a trophy. \u201cThey\u2019re kind of euphemistic,\u201d the coach said of the awards, \u201cbut they\u2019re effective.\u201d The Spirit Award went to \u201cthe troublemaker who always talks and doesn\u2019t pay attention, so we spun it into his being very \u2018spirited,\u2019\u201d he said. The Most Improved Player Award went to \u201cthe kid who has not an ounce of athleticism in his body, but he tries hard.\u201d The Coaches\u2019 Award went to \u201cthe kids who were picking daisies, and the only thing we could think to say about them is that they showed up on time. What would that be, the Most Prompt Award? That seemed lame. So we called it the Coaches\u2019 Award.\u201d There\u2019s also a Most Valuable Player Award, but the kid who deserved it three seasons in a row got it only after the first season, \u201cbecause we wanted other kids to have a chance to get it.\u201d The coach acknowledged that everyone knew who the real MVP was. But, he said, \u201cthis is a more collaborative approach versus the way I grew up as a competitive athlete, which was a selfish, Me Generation orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Wendy Mogel if this gentler approach really creates kids who are less self-involved, less \u201cMe Generation.\u201d No, she said. Just the opposite: parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment. \u201cA principal at an elementary school told me that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we\u2019re seeing, in the name of our children\u2019s self-esteem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt \u201cless amazing\u201d than her parents had always said she was. Given how \u201camazing\u201d her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that? Instead of acknowledging their daughter\u2019s flaws, her parents, hoping to make her feel secure, denied them. \u201cI\u2019m bad at math,\u201d Lizzie said she once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. \u201cYou\u2019re not bad at math,\u201d her parents responded. \u201cYou just have a different learning style. We\u2019ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you naturally understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn\u2019t. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a different learning style,\u201d she told me. \u201cI just suck at math! But in my family, you\u2019re never bad at anything. You\u2019re just better at some things than at others. If I ever say I\u2019m bad at something, my parents say, \u2018Oh, honey, no you\u2019re not!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Wendy Mogel says, \u201cevery child is either learning-disabled, gifted, or both\u2014there\u2019s no curve left, no average.\u201d When she first started doing psychological testing, in the 1980s, she would dread having to tell parents that their child had a learning disability. But now, she says, parents would prefer to believe that their child has a learning disability that explains any less-than-stellar performance, rather than have their child be perceived as simply average. \u201cThey believe that \u2018average\u2019 is bad for self-esteem.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE IRONY IS that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing\u2014qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I met with a preschool teacher who told me that in her observation, many kids aren\u2019t learning these skills anymore. She declined to be named, for fear of alienating parents who expect teachers to agree with their child-rearing philosophy, so I\u2019ll call her Jane.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say, Jane explained, that a mother is over by the sign-in sheet, and her son has raced off to play. Suddenly the mother sees her kid fighting over a toy with a classmate. Her child has the dump truck, and the other kid grabs it. Her child yells, \u201cNo! That\u2019s mine!\u201d The two argue while the other kid continues to play with the truck, until finally the other kid says, \u201cThis one is yours!\u201d and tosses her child a crappy one. Realizing the other kid won\u2019t budge, her child says, \u201cOkay,\u201d and plays with the crappy toy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer kid is fine,\u201d Jane said. \u201cBut the mother will come running over and say, \u2018But that\u2019s not fair! Little Johnnie had the big truck, and you can\u2019t just grab it away. It was his turn.\u2019 Well, the kids were fine with it. Little Johnnie was resilient! We do teach the kids not to grab, but it\u2019s going to happen sometimes, and kids need to learn how to work things out themselves. The kid can cope with adversity, but the parent is reeling, and I end up spending my time calming down the parent while her kid is off happily playing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jane told me that because parents are so sensitive to how every interaction is processed, sometimes she feels like she\u2019s walking on eggshells while trying to do her job. If, for instance, a couple of kids are doing something they\u2019re not supposed to\u2014name-calling, climbing on a table, throwing sand\u2014her instinct would be to say \u201cHey, knock it off, you two!\u201d But, she says, she\u2019d be fired for saying that, because you have to go talk with the kids, find out what they were feeling, explain what else they could do with that feeling other than call somebody a \u201cpoopy face\u201d or put sand in somebody\u2019s hair, and then help them mutually come up with a solution.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to be so correct in our language and our discipline that we forget the true message we\u2019re trying to send\u2014which is, don\u2019t name-call and don\u2019t throw the sand!\u201d she said. \u201cBut by the time we\u2019re done \u2018talking it through,\u2019 the kids don\u2019t want to play anymore, a rote apology is made, and they\u2019ll do it again five minutes later, because they kind of got a pass. \u2018Knock it off\u2019 works every time, because they already know why it\u2019s wrong, and the message is concise and clear. But to keep my job, I have to go and explore their feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another teacher I spoke with, a 58-year-old mother of grown children who has been teaching kindergarten for 17 years, told me she feels that parents are increasingly getting in the way of their children\u2019s development. \u201cI see the way their parents treat them,\u201d she said, \u201cand there\u2019s a big adjustment when they get into my class. It\u2019s good for them to realize that they aren\u2019t the center of the world, that sometimes other people\u2019s feelings matter more than theirs at a particular moment\u2014but it only helps if they\u2019re getting the same limit-setting at home. If not, they become impulsive, because they\u2019re not thinking about anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

This same teacher\u2014who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job\u2014says she sees many parents who think they\u2019re setting limits, when actually, they\u2019re just being wishy-washy. \u201cA kid will say, \u2018Can we get ice cream on the way home?\u2019 And the parent will say, \u2018No, it\u2019s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.\u2019 Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is \u2018honoring her child\u2019s opinion,\u2019 will say, \u2018Fine, we\u2019ll get ice cream today, but don\u2019t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!\u2019\u201d The teacher laughed. \u201cEvery year, parents come to me and say, \u2018Why won\u2019t my child listen to me? Why won\u2019t she take no for an answer?\u2019 And I say, \u2018Your child won\u2019t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry Schwartz, at Swarthmore, believes that well-meaning parents give their kids so much choice on a daily basis that the children become not just entitled, but paralyzed. \u201cThe ideology of our time is that choice is good and more choice is better,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we\u2019ve found that\u2019s not true.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one study Schwartz and his team conducted, kids were randomly divided into two groups and then asked to draw a picture. Kids in one group were asked to choose a marker to use from among three; kids in the other group were asked to choose from among 24 markers. Afterward, when the pictures were evaluated by an elementary-school art teacher who did not know which group had produced which pictures, the drawings rated the \u201cworst\u201d were by and large created by kids in the 24-marker group. Then, in a second part of the experiment, the researchers had the kids pick one marker from their set to keep as a gift. Once the kids had chosen, the researchers tried to persuade them to give back their marker in exchange for other gifts. The kids who had chosen from 24 markers did this far more easily than those who had chosen from only three markers. According to Schwartz, this suggests that the kids who had fewer markers to select from not only focused better on their drawings, but also committed more strongly to their original gift choice.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with parenting? Kids feel safer and less anxious with fewer choices, Schwartz says; fewer options help them to commit to some things and let go of others, a skill they\u2019ll need later in life.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearch shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options open get left behind,\u201d Schwartz told me. \u201cI\u2019m not saying don\u2019t let your kid try out various interests or activities. I\u2019m saying give them choices, but within reason. Most parents tell kids, \u2018You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you\u2019re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.\u2019 It\u2019s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.\u201d He sees this in students who graduate from Swarthmore. \u201cThey can\u2019t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don\u2019t understand is that they\u2019re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for the good-enough answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are entitled to a perfect life\u2014that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from Harvard, puts it, \u201cif they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should be another option.\u201d Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she describes as \u201chandicapped royalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a parent, I\u2019m all too familiar with this. I never said to my son, \u201cHere\u2019s your grilled-cheese sandwich.\u201d I\u2019d say, \u201cDo you want the grilled cheese or the fish sticks?\u201d On a Saturday, I\u2019d say, \u201cDo you want to go to the park or the beach?\u201d Sometimes, if my preschooler was having a meltdown over the fact that we had to go to the grocery store, instead of swooping him up and wrestling him into the car, I\u2019d give him a choice: \u201cDo you want to go to Trader Joe\u2019s or Ralphs?\u201d (Once we got to the market, it was \u201cDo you want the vanilla yogurt or the peach?\u201d) But after I\u2019d set up this paradigm, we couldn\u2019t do anything unless he had a choice. One day when I said to him, \u201cPlease put your shoes on, we\u2019re going to Trader Joe\u2019s,\u201d he replied matter-of-factly: \u201cWhat are my other choices?\u201d I told him there were no other choices\u2014we needed something from Trader Joe\u2019s. \u201cBut it\u2019s not fair if I don\u2019t get to decide too!\u201d he pleaded ingenuously. He\u2019d come to expect unlimited choice.<\/p>\n

When I was my son\u2019s age, I didn\u2019t routinely get to choose my menu, or where to go on weekends\u2014and the friends I asked say they didn\u2019t, either. There was some negotiation, but not a lot, and we were content with that. We didn\u2019t expect so much choice, so it didn\u2019t bother us not to have it until we were older, when we were ready to handle the responsibility it requires. But today, Twenge says, \u201cwe treat our kids like adults when they\u2019re children, and we infantilize them when they\u2019re 18 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most of my peers, I\u2019d always thought that providing choices to young children gave them a valuable sense of agency, and allowed them to feel more in control. But Barry Schwartz\u2019s research shows that too much choice makes people more likely to feel depressed and out of control.<\/p>\n

It makes sense. I remember how overwhelmed and anxious I felt that day I visited the parenting aisle at Barnes & Noble and was confronted by all those choices. How much easier things would be if there weren\u2019t hundreds of parenting books and listservs and experts that purport to have the answers, when the truth is, there is no single foolproof recipe for raising a child.<\/p>\n

And yet, underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn\u2019t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can\u2019t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we\u2019re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do\u2014and some letting go.<\/p>\n

As Wendy Mogel likes to say, \u201cOur children are not our masterpieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed. Recently, I noticed that one of my patients had, after a couple of sessions of therapy, started to seem uncomfortable. When I probed a bit, he admitted that he felt ambivalent about being in treatment. I asked why.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents would feel like failures if they knew I was here,\u201d he explained. \u201cAt the same time, maybe they\u2019d be glad I\u2019m here, because they just want me to be happy. So I\u2019m not sure if they\u2019d be relieved that I\u2019ve come here to be happier, or disappointed that I\u2019m not already happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paused and then asked, \u201cDo you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded like a therapist, and then I answered like a parent who can imagine her son grappling with that very same question one day. \u201cYes,\u201d I said to my patient. \u201cI know exactly what you mean.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids\u2019 happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic. The Text: If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it\u2019s that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (\u201cThey fuck you up, your mum and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Too Much 'Happiness' Is Ruining Today's Children - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Article: How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids\u2019 happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods by Lori Gottlieb in the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/07\/19\/why-too-much-happiness-is-ruining-todays-children\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Too Much 'Happiness' Is Ruining Today's Children - 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