The disintegration of the parent-child bond

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/the-disintegration-of-the-parent-child-bond/article28191786/

by the-enemy • 11 years ago

42 52 11 years ago

elinchrome• 11 years ago

Funny how every new generation is so much worse than the one that came before.

azakai• 11 years ago

It's important to realize that things often seem that way, you are right. But at the same time, there can be real differences between generations, that an easy cynicism would ignore.

goddess_divine• 11 years ago

kids these days

hobs• 11 years ago

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” - Socrates

lifeisstillgood• 11 years ago

Thank you - perfect quote.

Each generation thinks they either invented sex or worry.

zeveb6• 11 years ago

Some people read that and think, 'Ha! Old fogeys always complain, but nothing changes.' Others read it and think, 'Huh, folks have gotten a lot worse over time.'

rusabd• 11 years ago

What happened to that Greece btw?

xupybd• 11 years ago

I have to wonder what impact having both parents in the workforce has? It would seem that working is no longer a choice but an economic necessity for both parents. And that's only the families where the parents remain together. I'd imagine single parents find it even harder to spend time with their kids.

Kluny• 11 years ago

Really? I thought the trouble with kids these days was that they are all mamas-boys and daddys-princesses who can't accomplish anything on their own and who's parents micromanage their whole day and won't leave em the hell alone?

teekert• 11 years ago

Compensation behavior for not being there all day? When you are there... Better be right on top of things...?

jonnathanson• 11 years ago

I don't necessarily see helicopter-parenting and absentee-parenting as mutually exclusive. The typical helicopter parent is always nagging, harassing, and invading the privacy of his/her children -- which is a sort of omnipresence, sure, but it's not a constructive emotional presence. You might as well not even be there in that moment; you'd accomplish the same thing sending a preprogrammed nag-bot into your kids' rooms to chide them and/or dote on them constantly. In fact, it's possible your kids are actually tuning your presence out when you're in their faces all the time.

The magic combination seems to be: 1) let your kids discover the world (and make mistakes) on their own, just enough to let them learn and grow up; 2) be there for them when they need you. At one point in our history, this combination seemed intuitive. These days, after several generations of successive, fear-based sales of self-help books, advice, and programming, our culture has short-circuited parental instincts.

scrupulusalbion• 11 years ago

I see helicopter-parenting and absentee-parenting as min-maxing; these are the munchkins of parenting.

Just as in role-playing, the parent gives little to no concern to other issues that are important for the child's development. The helicopter-parents focus on something to build into the child or to preserve the kid from; the absentee-parents merely minimize effort/time spent on the child.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

His main idea is that many of the problems we see with North American kids today – the defiance, the disrespect, the disconnection from the real world – can be traced to the lack of a strong attachment between parents and their kids.

We? Problems? Under what calculus are defiance, disrespect, and disconnection, "problems"? Maybe the current state of the world (or maybe just Canada) deserves defiance, disrespect, and disconnection?

The observation being made here is purely subjective; one side believes they deserve something (obedience, respect, attention) that they may, in fact, not.

More likely we are seeing a rejection of the state of the world and many of the people who caused the state to be the way it currently is.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

Much, much more likely is we are seeing yet another "back in my day" rant that has no real substance

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

I agree there is not much substance here. One reason that these rants may be reoccurring is that the world created by "older" people was created without much thought to what new people might think. The new people see this reality and begin to reject it.

zeveb6• 11 years ago

Under what calculus are defiance, disrespect, and disconnection, "problems"?

They are not the proper attitudes of those with lesser knowledge, skill and experience to those with greater such. That they are prevalent is indicative of, among other things, bad parenting.

Guess what? Your folks were your age once. They experienced the same emotion-addled thought processes. They believed ludicrous things to be true for the same reasons that you do (and I did, and sometimes still do). And they can look at your situation from a distance and say, 'you know what? relax!' and be right.

ThrustVectoring3• 11 years ago

Adults aren't wiser and more experienced children. They're children with the creative and vital burnt out of their souls and replaced with a respectable act that gets put on for other adults.

Defiance, disrespect, and disconnection are absolutely the correct way to interact with those who insist on destroying a fundamental part of who you are.

danharaj• 11 years ago

If I had lived in a household like this, I would have become estranged from my parents the moment I could. It's authoritarian drivel. This is fodder for narcissistic parents.

ThrustVectoring3• 11 years ago

Yuuuup. The reason I didn't have a good relationship with my parents isn't because of any of the bullshit reasons given in the article. It's simply because my parents aren't healthy people to be around.

Zikes• 11 years ago

The article uses very broad strokes, making points which could certainly lend themselves to narcissistic parenting. One stand-out line is "[b]ut your child’s first allegiance must be to you, not to her best friend". It stresses very hard that the responsibility is on the child to adhere to the relationship as defined by the parent, whom is painted as infallible in this regard. Parents certainly take on a lot of responsibility as caregivers, but they're never perfect, and aren't always deserving of allegiance.

Children are first and foremost people, and they deserve to be treated as such. They should be able to define their own relationships, even if that means forming close bonds of friendship at an early age. Maybe the friendships won't last, maybe they will, but that's not for anyone to decide but those involved. Taking that away from a kid, telling them their friendships are somehow superficial and don't matter because so much of it happens through "magic computer-boxen and apps" that seem to be the root of all of today's ills, well that sounds pretty domineering and narcissistic to me.

If a parent wants a strong bond with their child, they can take all the steps they want to encourage the growth of that bond, but trying to force it, as with any other relationship, will only lead to the opposite result.

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

Many teens would be the first to tell you that they love their parents. But they are not seriously concerned with what their parents think. Or more precisely, some are more concerned about what their peers think than what their parents think.

Hasn't this always been the case?

As one Scotsman told me, “We don’t even think much about ‘generations.’ We just all enjoy doing things together.”

Unless that Scotsman is 13, that's pointless. He may love doing things together; his children might be counting down the minutes 'til they can hop back online and talk to their friends.

If you have the opportunity to move closer to your child’s aunts, uncles and grandparents, do it. (We did.)

That's good, but I'm not sure what this has to do with the parent-child thesis.

ksenzee• 11 years ago

One cause of [children and teenagers'] fragility is a weak parent-child relationship.

I don't buy that the relationship between parents and children has changed all that much in the last 25 years. I certainly don't believe parents love their children less, as the author is implying ("they cannot get unconditional love and acceptance from their peers or from a report card"). Plenty of Gen-Xers were latchkey kids and we don't seem to have suffered for it.

The explanation I personally favor is that children and teenagers aren't allowed to do anything the slightest bit dangerous anymore -- even the playgrounds are padded -- so they can't calibrate their sense of what really is dangerous, and therefore everything feels dangerous.

the_mitsuhiko2• 11 years ago

I don't buy that the relationship between parents and children has changed all that much in the last 25 years.

Certainly social workers in some countries (including my own) think otherwise. When we got our child there were heaps of "how to bond with children" guides given to us.

The explanation I personally favor is that children and teenagers aren't allowed to do anything the slightest bit dangerous anymore -- even the playgrounds are padded -- so they can't calibrate their sense of what really is dangerous, and therefore everything feels dangerous.

Even if playgrounds are padded, children have plenty of opportunity to learn the cause of their actions with their parents in a safer environment. I don't see how children would develop any less just because they don't end up being disabled due to playing in dangerous environments.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

I don't see how children would develop any less just because they don't end up being disabled due to playing in dangerous environments.

Speaking from my own experience, I really wonder how I would have developed the way I did without being allowed to handle (very dangerous) tools from an early age, roamed all over Amsterdam from the ripe old age of 6, toyed with chemistry, explosives, electronics, household power and petrol engines all of which could have easily killed me.

I'm probably more careful rather than less careful because of this and none of my friends or me ended up disabled. Long before we got to the stage where we could have become disabled we learned how to respect the stuff we played with.

Trying to imagine the alternative universe where all my tools had been plastic, safe imitations, where I was only allowed to work with batteries, being limited to the local playground (supervised, of course) and chemistry would be limited to playing around with salt & vinegar.

I'm treating my own children in much the same way, I trust them to use their heads when it matters and I show them the consequences of failing to do so in as controlled (but very real) a way as possible.

Of course other parents think I'm nuts but that doesn't overly bother me.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

Certainly social workers in some countries (including my own) think otherwise. When we got our child there were heaps of "how to bond with children" guides given to us.

Giving such things to everybody is an easy way to make sure that people who will benefit from them will get them.

webkike• 11 years ago

Teenagers go out of their way to do dangerous things. This is mostly anecdotal; I've been a teenager until pretty recently. But one thing I simply don't understand is the notion that safer playgrounds leads to a poorly calibrated sense of danger. What real life dangers truly appear in the playground? I haven't recently gotten a nosebleed from being hit on the nose with a rubber ball. What has mirrored the real world is all the diseases I've gotten.

setpatchaddress3• 11 years ago

But what explanation is required? I find the entire article disturbing, in the sense that they're describing the behavior of a subset of kids of every generation that ever lived. If anything, adults now have the tools to witness how their children behave -- they can now monitor the child's Gmail and Facebook accounts, and read chat logs in some cases. Other than improved monitoring, there's really nothing new being described here. Just pop psych parenting du jour.

FreedomToCreate• 11 years ago

This is an extremely complex issue that can't be broken down into a few bullet points and fixed. Beyond generalizing all parents, the author of this article overlooks many factors that form children relationships with them and others. For example, how is the parents relationship with there parents, economic class of the family, culture, etc..

haberman• 11 years ago

My impression of the general trend is the opposite. When I think of parenting 50 or 100 years ago, I think of it as more formal and detached. Children addressing their parents as "sir" and "ma'am". Fathers who were emotionally distant and leaving much of the parenting to their mothers. Discipline that involved respecting the authority of all adult figures.

When I think of parenting now I think of extensive concern with kids' emotional well-being, parents who take kids sides in quarrels with teachers, etc.

I don't know if these impressions are broadly true, but it's interesting that my impression is of an opposite trend.

I agree with the overall premise of the article, which is that kids are more fragile than they have been in the past. I'm just not sure that a decreased parent/child bond is the right explanation.

setpatchaddress3• 11 years ago

Don't know, but you can certainly find historical descriptions of warm and loving fathers (as we would recognize them today) from the 1900's. My grandmother described her relationship with her father (born during that era) that way. I wonder if it's possible, at this distance, to quantify the emotional quality of family relationships from the early 20th century. Probably requires scouring a lot of oral history.

zeveb6• 11 years ago

When I think of parenting 50 or 100 years ago, I think of it as more formal and detached. Children addressing their parents as "sir" and "ma'am".

I don't think that's detached, but precisely the opposite. Treating one's parents like anyone else says, 'you don't matter any more to me than anyone else does,' whereas treating one's parents as one's superiors says, 'you are my parents, older and wiser than I am, and I treat you unlike some random people on the street.'

cholantesh2• 11 years ago

Right, but the familial bond isn't expressed by formal, ritualistic practice. That only creates a relationship of command.

banku_brougham• 11 years ago

Lame and unconvincing.

sjclemmy• 11 years ago

30 years ago when I was 13, I experienced all the things described by the author. I over valued my peers' opinion, I disregarded my parents' words of advice.

Isn't it normal to feel these things? It's how an individual grows.

My secret to good parenting is compassion, consistency and honesty - the rest is just detail.

shanecleveland2• 11 years ago

Same experience here. I am thankful that I was able to make mistakes and learn from them. With support and the values instilled by my parents, I was able to minimize the negative impacts of my youthful mistakes.

Kapura• 11 years ago

I'd like to open with this tweet which I think captures some of the issues perfectly [1]:

---

my aunt: why u kids always on them phones cant u have a real conversation

me: puts down phone crosses legs why did u melt the ice caps

---

I'm a young adult, and I can say that anecdotally, if there's a strain in the relationship between my parents and myself it happens because I grew up in a world which is fundamentally different from the world they knew. This is partially due to technology, but it also comes from the fact that I (we) need to live in the world that "they" created.

My mother didn't understand why I wanted to sell the stock in Exxon Mobil that I was given by my grandmother. But I am the one who will have to come of age in a world of rising sea levels and global temperatures, at least partially created by that firm's wilful deception[2]. I avoid animal products in meals for the same reason. But in trying to tell my parents this, they seem to believe I am disingenuous, or they don't take the issues as seriously as I do.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into these issues. Perhaps that this is just the most recent iteration of the generational conflicts that have occurred throughout time. But it feels like the world I will inhabit is radically different from my parents', and I just don't know if there will ever be a good way to bridge that gap.

[1] https://twitter.com/what_eve_r/status/681246826746523649

[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-c...

setpatchaddress3• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_gap

eternalban• 11 years ago

a world which is fundamentally different from the world they knew

Hyperbole. Let's hear about these [fundamental] changes. Life is 'a bit' unforgiving and discounting experience of survivors of this natural regime [is non-optimal].

.. why did u melt the ice caps

So you could waste your life obsessively staring into a 3x4 glowing surface.

[edits]

zeveb6• 11 years ago

> me: puts down phone crosses legs why did u melt the ice caps
I'm a young adult

You're certainly young, but are you an adult? Adults treat one another respectfully and kindly, not vituperatively.

But I am the one who will have to come of age in a world of rising sea levels and global temperatures, at least partially created by that firm's wilful deception[2]. I avoid animal products in meals for the same reason. But in trying to tell my parents this, they seem to believe I am disingenuous, or they don't take the issues as seriously as I do.

No, they don't take those issues seriously, because they are wiser than you and know that you are making mountains out of molehills. Twenty years from now the sea will be just fine, life on Earth will be just fine, and you'll be saying to your folks, 'gosh, I'm sorry I was such a boor.'

Don't worry — most of us go through the same thing. Lord knows that I did too.

vilhelm_s• 11 years ago

"some [teenagers] are more concerned about what their peers think than what their parents think. Others are more concerned about their inflated self-concept than about what their parents think. Kids need to value their parents’ opinion as their first scale of value, at least throughout childhood and adolescence."

It turns out that this article is written by a parent, rather than by a teenager.

brightball• 11 years ago

Honestly, I think a serious contributor here is the number of families with two full time working parents more than anything else. My wife and I were actually talking about this last night.

We both work til about 5:30 or 6 every week day. Our kids go to after school programs where they play with friends, do homework, etc before we pick them up. We get home around 6 and they need to get to bed by 8. That gives us 2 hours every weeknight to make/pickup dinner, do something together as a family, talk about our day, and get ready for bed.

If either of us got off at around 3 every day both of the kids could come home. We could go to the store together and get things to make for dinner together. I could start cooking and they could help or do homework and then when my wife got home dinner would be ready for us to sit down and have a family meal. We'd end up eating healthier and being less rushed. On a lot of days the kids could have their friends come over for a couple of hours until dinner time and potentially that child's parent(s) could come over to visit while the kids played.

Instead, we're left with this weekly rush. I honestly don't have much of an idea who the parents of my kids friends are at school...because I don't ever see them. I barely see my kids friends. This is before we factor in things like soccer practice.

On weekends, over 2 days we try to balance house chores with family time with going to the store to get everything we'll need for meals for the week before anything else that might come up.

I cannot imagine that we're the only family with 2 working parents that experiences this. The seeming solution to the problem is for one of us to scale back, but that means figuring out something at work that will allow us to do that and ensuring that we're able to adjust costs to take a hit somewhere (assuming that asking to scale back doesn't put the entire job in jeopardy). The other solution is to try to invest what's left of that spare time into creating a side income so you can afford to scale back...which just feeds the problem.

As I've gotten older I've started to place a significantly larger amount of respect on stay at home dads or moms, because the longer we've been pushing this dual career thing the more I realize what we're giving up. It seems like so much chatter, movie references, TV references, etc over the last 2-4 decades has mocked stay at home parents as either being unimportant, uneducated, people who sit around watching TV and what not that as a society we've pressured an entire generation into feeling like raising a family instead of having a job makes you somehow less.

And I think it's breaking more of society than we want to admit. This isn't a gender roles thing either. I don't think it matters WHICH parent spends more time at home as long as one of them does.

We fuel this issue by generally meeting our significant others in college...where we are both training to have full time careers and taking on student loans that we'll have to work to repay. All just seems to be a huge, interconnected mess of a pattern.

I'm not actually sure what you could do to fix it, aside from providing companies tax credits for allowing "parent friendly" jobs to incentive them to have positions where the day ends when kids get out of school.

dawnbreez• 11 years ago

TL;DR:

Do things with your kids. Connect to them. Love them, not "because", but unconditionally.

Everything I have read, and everything I have seen, suggests that parents have to actually parent their kids. This isn't to say they need to discipline, or treat; it is to say that they cannot be idle. It's too easy to sit your kid in front of the TV and let them be "themselves", and that doesn't do anything.

lazyant• 11 years ago

"some (teens) are more concerned about what their peers think than what their parents think." I thought peer influence being as powerful or more than parent influence in teenagers was already accepted, not something new.

shanecleveland2• 11 years ago

Exactly. If by "some" the author means "all," then I'd say the quote is spot on.

cholantesh2• 11 years ago

The first and most obvious evidence is the extraordinary rise in the proportion of young people diagnosed and treated today for anxiety and depression.

I'm not sure why the author hasn't considered the possibility that, just like in other areas of mental health, recognition that these issues exist and better means of diagnosing and treating them have come to light. It may well be the case that there were a great deal of anxious and depressed children around, but went undiagnosed and untreated for a long time.

lutusp• 11 years ago

A classic psychology tract, constructed on the default premise:

1. Here's how things are.

2. Here's how things should be, if only people would listen to psychologists.

In this way, psychology has occupied the vacuum created by the departure of religion, in the minds of people who believe life should have a particular outcome, and who think someone is (or should be) in charge.

Meanwhile, parents, children, indeed everyone, are doing their best to fulfill personally chosen goals. Those goals are freely selected by independent agents in a morally neutral universe ruled only by evolution. Some plans will succeed, some will fail, but consulting authority is always a mistake, because in evolution, there is no authority.

Psychology has a long history of condemning behaviors it thinks the public dislikes, then changing their tune when public tastes change. It was once a mental illness to run away from your master in the antebellum South (Drapetomania). It was once a mental illness to be a homosexual (not very long ago). More recently, it was a mental illness to be creative and intelligent (Asperger syndrome). All these and many other imaginary ailments have been abandoned as public tastes changed.

H. G. Wells said, "Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe." It was a positive step to abandon religion. It will be another positive step when we abandon psychology and begin to think for ourselves.

jaredcwhite• 11 years ago

I'm not sure there's a parent-child bond being disintegrated in modern American culture -- if anything, a lot of parents seem more intentionally involved in their kids lives than past generations. However, I do think we need to look at a slightly higher-level problem: an adults-children bond.

As a father of two small children, I have noticed (along with my wife) that a lot of people in various social settings seem rather uncomfortable having our kids around. It's almost like this unspoken question is hovering around us, like "why aren't they in preschool" or "why aren't they with a babysitter" or "why do you have to bring them in here? This store is for adults only!"

A lot of businesses don't have good facilities for taking care of kids (changing tables, etc.). Only recently have we seen local malls remodel and include private nursing areas, etc. So sure maybe there's some progress here, particularly as a result of greater awareness of the needs of breastfeeding mothers and so forth, but I think there's still plenty of prejudice against kids in certain sectors of society.

Somehow, and I could be mistaken, it seems to me that in past cultures (particularly in rural or tribal settings), it was a given that children were heavily involved in the "business" of home and community. Children would work the same farm as the parents, for example. Obviously a lot of that kind of family cohesion was lost during the Industrial Revolution, so maybe it could be argued that things were worse off in 1916 than 2016. I don't know. It just "feels" to me, subjectively, like children and teens need to feel more included in "adult" society, and adults need to be more actively interested in the world of children across the board.

The disintegration of the parent-child bond

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