Apodaca: The myriad methods of parenting
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary specifies 1958 as the date of the first known use of the word “parenting,” defined as “the process of taking care of children until they are old enough to take care of themselves: the things that parents do to raise a child.”
Eight years later, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind published the first of her groundbreaking articles on parenting and child development, in which she introduced the idea that there are distinct parenting styles.
She identified three basic types: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative.
Authoritative represents a balance of the first two and what she considered the ideal form of parenting. Later, other researchers added a fourth category: uninvolved.
Ever since, others have taken the notion that there are differing parenting styles and have run with it. Theory upon theory, book after book, and experts galore have presented us with arguments for and against various modes of raising children. We’ve all heard of the Tiger Mom and Attachment Parenting, but there are literally thousands of others.
Rather than just descriptions of generalized sets of traits, “parenting styles” in more recent times morphed into specific philosophies and methods that parents could deliberately co-opt to try to give their children the best odds of success and happiness.
Today, this “parenting” culture continues to thrive. I did a search for the word on the Amazon website and came up with an astonishing 178,882 results. And that was just in the books section, where many of the titles were some variation of “how to.”
There’s clearly still a voracious appetite for advice on how to parent well and an entire industry built around the idea that parenting involves skills that can be learned and strategies that should be employed to achieve optimum results. Try as we might to restrain ourselves, we parents appear all too eager to succumb to our desires to breed our kids into superstars.
The New York Times even recently reported on a growing inclination by companies to offer parenting “coaching” sessions to their employees. The benefit is presented as a means to help harried parents better balance their work and family demands, although it can also be considered yet another demonstration of our inclination to see parenting as a skills-based job. If only we could learn how to do it “right,” then our kids will turn out fine and our lives will be manageable.
It’s understandable, then, that a pushback has emerged to this over-the-top parenting business. We might call it the “anti-parenting” movement.
Many child development experts are calling for a return to more normalized expectations about our perceived abilities to chisel our children to perfection. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, for instance, UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik observed that our ideas about parenting have evolved into not just what parents do, but what they “should” do.
“To parent,” she says, is used as a “goal-directed verb,” with the end result of a parent’s actions expected to be a good kid and later on a successful adult.
This is akin to viewing parenting as the construction of a product, rather than the care and nourishing of a distinct individual, she writes in her new book, “The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.”
Gopnik’s attempt to redirect what she sees as a misguided picture of what parenting is all about certainly strikes a chord. And there are many other examples of a recent backlash against the frenzied quest to become ideal parents who produce model children, as well as an increasing propensity to portray middle-class parents as micromanaging freaks.
In the past few weeks alone, I’ve read a magazine column discussing “good-enough” parenting. I also stumbled upon another term I’d never heard before, “over-parenting lite,” which describes a balance between being an involved parent and one that also gives her children ample room to breathe.
Witness also the release of the new movie, “Bad Moms,” which may or may not be funny (I haven’t seen it) but which attempts to mine humor from a storyline about a cadre of mothers rebelling against the competitive pressure to be perfect parents.
And that Amazon search? A good number of book titles I perused were deliberately mocking. “Calm the [Expletive] Down: The Only Parenting Technique You’ll Ever Need,” “The [Expletive] No One Tells You: A Guide to Surviving Your Baby’s First Year” and “[Expletive] Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us” were but a few of the profanity-laced attempts to poke some fun at the earnest parenting how-to business.
One of my favorites was “How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill.”
Whether the push to remove some of the anxiety from parenting takes hold remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t bet against it. In a previous column, I wrote that the millennials are having kids now, and that generation’s approach to parenting is generally more relaxed and less strategic than their Generation X and Baby Boomer parents. They might turn out to be the anti-parenting movement’s leaders.
If that means a few less “how-to” books get sold, so be it. I think their kids will survive.
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PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.
