Is modern parenting damaging to kids?

[Rainbowsponge]

My friend’s husband is a professional in the area of child development and education. He’s taught at numerous schools, SEN schools and is now a researcher. He doesn’t have children, but I do, and yesterday we were talking about the seeming increase in children with anxiety, mental health issues and what he described as ‘delayed adulthood’.

He’s British but his extended family are from India, and he said visits to see them make a striking contrast between how our children are raised and how theirs are raised. He said children are sort of left to run around in packs and find their own amusement from quite a young age, and as a result they seem more mature and confident.

His theory is that we are interrupting normal development opportunities for kids brains, and therefore they’re not properly developing. He thinks we intervene too much in perfectly ordinary learning opportunities, like playground disagreements, and our quest to make sure our children never feel challenged or upset is actually making them more anxious.

He also thinks softer, more modern punishments are bewildering children and reinforcing bad behaviour, leaving them confused about right and wrong. Children read facial expressions, so seeing us look calm/unbothered rather than angry/disappointed when they’ve done something wrong is counterproductive and blocks them from naturally learning human behaviour and socialisation.

I’m not professing to be a perfect parent at all, but it was a really interesting chat and I want to discuss it further!

I think he is right. Children need boundaries, firm ones, to learn properly. Otherwise they get anxious because they are unsure if all is going well or not.
I do show mine when I am upset, angry, tired, happy, proud... name it.
I would not let them run wild in the forest for hours on their own, but this never been told off, always calm parenting style thing, I think it is counterproductive, to be honest. Something towards the middle and, yes, let them face and sort their issues. We are meant to intervene only if things get physical/ dangerous.

Sadly lack of supervision will contribute to higher incidence of accidental injury - the rates of which are much higher in low to middle income countries (clearly there are many causes but kids roaming around unsupervised is one of them). www.unicef.org/health

People have forgotten what a normal range of emotions is. Got a test and feel nervous - anxiety. Pet died and your naturally upset - depression. Now don’t get me wrong - mental health issues are real and some kids really are suffering massively, but too often we are too quick to jump in and label a situation when we are not qualified to do so. Kids need to learn resilience.

Oh give over will you. Of course I'm not saying that. You are saying that's what all kids used to have to go through. Total rubbish.

I'm a teacher and a parent and I think there is a fair amount of truth in what he says.

One of the reasons schools have introduced 'forest school' sessions is because it is recognised that children need to explore and learn for themselves. It builds their confidence in their abilities to assess risk and self esteem.

We actively teach things like resilience, risk taking and other skills that previously would have been developed naturally through experience.

I think the problem is that too many kids are overprotected from the trivial things while being overexposed to genuinely anxiety-inducing things.

I have a friend who is a primary teacher who says they show their kids newsround every day. Why? Why are 9 year olds learning about Ukraine, Gaza and climate change? And why are they being told to ponder their mental health? It's way too much.

The best way to foster resilience is to ensure kids are exposed to challenges of the right size for their age (e.g. losing a teddy bear, losing a gymnastics competition) in a safe and stable environment.

I agree with this too.

There is a child in my class whose mum has diagnosed her with 'severe OCD and 'anxiety'.

Completely normal emotions to normal life experiences (eg being worried before a spelling test because a child hasn't practised their spellings) are now being labelled as MH conditions.

The second someone's child isn't 'happy', parents are quick to label, blame and diagnose rather than teach their child how to deal with uncomfortable emotions in a positive way.

I believe it's screen use and social media. You can pin point the decline in mental health to smart phone use. The 'anxious generation' highlights it. Children are no longer having a 'biologically normal' childhood so that will have consequences. I think 'poor/gentle/permissive' parenting is to blame for many kids having absolutely no resilience. This is something I see IRL.

I think age inappropriate teaching about mental health can act as a social contagion. In my own adolescence it was self harm, it was all over magazines for teenagers, I even remember one with some extremely graphic pictures.

Yes self harm has always existed but no, I don't think most of us would have tried it and done it without being exposed like that.

I don't think the trend for ultra gentle parenting is doing children any favours. Giving children clear boundaries from infancy is actually kind not cruel, whether that's behaviour, food, sitting still, waiting their turn etc. and yes they need once able to, to be able to sort out minor disagreements learning to take turns etc. it's a gradual process and nobody expects 5 year olds to not need significant intervention but by the teen years they should be pretty independent yet I see parents still arranging things for their dc (no sn) and just yesterday packing for 18 year olds! Ok what does it matter mum packs for them you say, whereas I think it's symptomatic of the wider issue of not letting them make mistakes which are necessary to develop as an adult.

I'm not saying run around in packs btw just there's a line and we crossed it here a while ago

@GeneralMusings

School is no more structured than when I was a child and my mum thinks they are really soft on them now, far more structured back then.

Newshound is a fairly sanitised version of world events, tbh.

You think that our children should be protected from what some children are actually living?

Understanding climate change and our personal responsibility to towards it is on the curriculum.

Watching Newsround is a great way to educate children on national and international events. It encourages discussion and helps them to contextualise their own life experiences and develop empathy.

I have a genuine question -

I see thread after thread on here about how today's children aren't "resilient" enough and it's all because of modern parenting...

But it's not just children, is it?? Mental health as a whole is basically in the toilet.

I know so many adults, ranging from late 20s to early 40s, who are on some kind of anti depressants, anxiety medication, going to therapy, needing breaks from work due to mental health. Things like exhaustion from working long hours whilst taking care of family, struggling to pay bills, caring for elderly relatives, seeing doom and gloom on the news 24/7 is obviously taking a toll and if modern life is affecting adults to this extent, I would think it's fairly obvious it will take a toll on children too?

I agree that it's important for children to learn that e.g. there are children out there who are living in poverty but that's different from watching footage of a genocide. I speak to young people and they all seem so incredibly despondent about the future. I don't think that's a good thing.

I hate the way kids are stopped in their tracks if there's a vague hint of a risk. 'Stop running, you might slip'. 'Don't touch that, it's dirty' 'Stop this, stop that'. How will they learn?

I genuinely believe that with Valium as a very large problem as far back as 1969, "mental health" or "suffering with nerves" is not a new medical condition.

The 1970s it was very common to find people were taking valium.

In 1900 there was an average of 1000 inmates in each mental asylum and there were around 120. The population was 41 million, but with a life expectancy much lower and only 1 in 5 children making 5 years old.

mental health isn't a new problem it's just that we don't have insanity wards or idiots wards.

The suicide rates were still high and many men just took themselves and walked into the local canal.

Todays generation have much more access to mental health literature, its talked about at school at home, on social media, to the point its hard to avoid if you wanted to .

I agree, we have a Facebook page for local mums and I would say 70% of posts are regarding a child with anxiety or a parent wanting information on how to circumvent the school to have their child assessed for something. Even though the school says they have no concerns. I would bet most of these children don’t have a proper anxiety diagnosis and instead the parent is using it to describe a nervous/shy personality type or normal level worrying. My friends husband said it used to be the case that parents would be in denial about their child having MH issues or SEN, now it’s the opposite and when in schools he spent a lot of time justifying to convinced parents that their child was perfectly typical.

I watch Newsround with my class every day.

They love it and Newsround never shows footage of genocide.

I will admit to being like this with DD for a long time, probably until she was about 3. I’ve really relaxed now as I had to face the fact it was hindering her development. I still have to hold myself back from saying ‘Careful!’, but I do.

Those saying it was just my parents that were shit.

It really wasn't. It was the prevailing attitude of the times. You were hit at home, you were hit at school. No one believed what you said if you told them someone had hurt you. You were told to get out of the house so that it didn't get messy. Out of house meant playing down the river, on the building estate and quite often doing things that were annoying and low level criminal to the neighbours. Parents often did not want the kids they had, they had fallen into parenting and worked hard physical jobs and no energy to parent.

It did teach me how to be very sneaky and not get caught though and to lie and continue lying to avoid the consequences - great life lessons. At least I'm still alive, A few children in my estate died in the river or from fooling around.

It was a working class community though so it is likely it had a different vibe to other's experiences.

In your opinion as a teacher, how do you think we expose children to the darker side of current events while ensuring they don't see the world as a horrible scary place? Perhaps it's just the young people I know but they have such a negative view of the world it borders on nihilism.

I really don't remember feeling like this as a young person growing up in the 90s. We knew there were horrible things happening e.g. famine in Ethiopia but ultimately we felt optimistic about the future and our ability fix the problems.

I think many children are left confused by their parents approaches. E.g. at a park with DD, a little lad came over to play on the equipment with DD and another girl. It was equipment that required turn taking. From my vantage point they were playing nicely together. No tears, no upset, just all getting along and mucking in together.

Lad's Mum was hovering and was very overly invested in them all having "a fair turn" (which translated into a really short turn each with much rotating between them); she kept jumping in and taking her boy off the equipment to let the other children have a turn. Therefore little boy understandably bursting into tears multiple times, changing the atomsphere of their game, and in the end mother then told him off and said "I'm taking you out of the park now as you can't behave" and he was absolutely beside himself.

They had been taking turns beforehand, perhaps not exactly the precise equal number of minutes each that his mother seemed to require, but they were all having fun watching each other on the equipment, even when they were waiting for their turn. I heard them say to each other things like "I'll have a go after you", "You come on now" etc and they had been working it out amongst themselves. I feel like the mother's interference added nothing to the situation and just made it all worse and left her son confused and upset, and the other children confused about what had happened. I don't think he'd done anything wrong and he wasn't allowed to learn anything for himself.

Yes, same here as a univ tutor. Student arguments in shared accommodation are ending up as formal complaints going through the university system. Still a minority, fortunately- but not a tiny minority. Dealing with adults behaving like 12 year olds is becoming part of the job.

A few days ago I saw a compilation of tiktoks on Youtube shorts. In the videos a parent was carrying a child in their arms and faked tripping near a wall. They would then put heir hand up to the child's head as if the childs head had hit the wall, the other parent then rushed and both parents made a big fuss as if the child had been hurt. After a momentary look of confusion the child would start crying. The children looked to be aged between 18 months and 3 years. I think there are two takeaway:

1. There are parents who are so messed up they will make their child cry for views.

1. Children react in response to the behaviour of the adults around them.

I think children take their cues from adults about what is worrying and what is normal so over analysing every negative emotion leads them to think their is something wrong with them rather than understanding that uncomfortable feelings are normal and can be overcome.

‘Children read facial expressions, so seeing us look calm/unbothered rather than angry/disappointed when they’ve done something wrong is counterproductive and blocks them from naturally learning human behaviour and socialisation.’

well mine are okay then because they KNOW when we are bothered, faces like thunder, scowls and yelling is the norm here. Hurrah!