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Guest post: "We're making our children unhappy"

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MumsnetGuestPosts · 10/03/2016 12:14

I'm hanging out on the sidelines at toddler playgroup, and in a moment of breathtaking cuteness, spy a two-year-old boy handing a little girl the toy fire engine he is playing with so that she can have a turn. All the parents gasp in unison, like a group of birdwatchers marveling at a glimpse of a rare new genus of eagle. Then out of nowhere, the boy's mum barrels in, grabs the fire engine off the little girl, and hands it back to her son. "He's happier when he doesn't have to share," she explains.

We live in California, perhaps the world headquarters of parental overthinking, and this isn't the first example I've seen here of an earnestly endorsed parenting philosophy that has lost all sense of human reason. But secretly, much as I hate to admit it, buried within this bizarre impending child rearing car crash, is the shameful kernel of a trait I recognise in myself. That is, a completely disproportionate focus on my own children's happiness that can sometimes border on the ridiculous.

In the two years I've spent researching and writing my book, [[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pursuit-Happiness-Why-Making-Anxious/dp/0091959152/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457206494&sr=1-1&keywords=ruth%20whippman&tag=mumsnet&ascsubtag=mnforum-21
The Pursuit of Happiness and Why It's Making Us Anxious]], I've come to the clear conclusion that the more avidly we value and pursue happiness as a singular goal in our lives, the more stressed and unhappy we become. But somehow I just can't seem to apply this logic to my kids. Although I can remain blissfully unmindful, disempowered, unactualised, and totally indifferent to my inner child, when it comes to my actual child, the facade starts to crumble.

At some deep level, I am terrified that if I fail to maximise every tiny happiness opportunity for my sons, they might grow up to be 'not happy'. That their future memoirs chronicling their mother's failure to give adequate praise to their cotton-wool Easter bunnies will turn up in the Painful Lives section of the bookshop, next to the Satanic abuse ones.

As a result, my approach to their happiness can sometimes feel less like a by-product of living and more like a forced march. I just can't relax and leave it to play out naturally. A feeling of urgency and perfectionism creeps in, and I feel compelled to pursue it frenetically on their behalf.

When my first son was born, I instantly contracted every malady in the diagnostic manual of middle-class parenting, exhausting myself trying to optimise his every moment. My voice took on a bizarrely over-enunciated, syrupy register I had never known myself capable of, somewhere between wartime BBC announcer and Julie Andrews, as I delivered a running commentary of the tedious minutiae of everything we did.

If I stuck him in his bouncer and took five minutes to check Facebook, I would then spend the next forty-five minutes compounding the problem by googling variations on: 'Romanian orphans, emotional effects of caregiver neglect' and scour his behaviour, hawk-like, for the signs. In short, I drove myself (and doubtless everyone around me) absolutely crazy.

I've backed off a bit with my second son, but still have my moments, and I'm certainly not alone. Fed by a multi-million pound parenting industry, the expectation of what parents should be doing in service of their children's happiness has been constantly inflating. Time use surveys show that a mother now spends an average of four extra hours with her children every week compared to her 1965 counterpart, while university-educated mothers put in an extra nine hours, despite being far more likely to work outside the home. Much of this time is spent in what sociologists call "concerted cultivation" (think scrambling over a jungle gym two inches behind a four-year-old while maintaining an unbroken educational commentary about the park's flora and fauna).

But it would seem that all this parental intensity might be backfiring. While parents of all backgrounds want the best for their children and do what they can to make that happen, this type of nervous hovering 'hyper-parenting' is overwhelmingly a middle class phenomenon. But detailed research by sociologists from the University of Pennsylvania, who studied the habits and lifestyles of both middle class and lower income families, shows that despite their many advantages, middle class children parented in this way tend to be less happy than their working class counterparts (lower income children are also more independent, whine less, and have closer relationships with family members.) So perhaps the same principle that applies to happiness in our own lives is equally applicable when chasing it on our children's behalf. Happiness should be the by-product, not the goal.

Author photo: Eliot Khuner

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tomatodizzy · 11/03/2016 07:57

I was at the fire engine story, until I got to the word California and then it all became crystal clear. That place is whack!