[AmityD]

Like most five year olds my son hates to lose. Whether it be a board game or a sporting contest, if he’s not winning he’s not happy. For this reason, and I’m guessing like most parents, most of the time we let him win so the experience stays enjoyable for everyone. After all, if you can’t be the king of your domain at five when can you be?

However, as he’s getting older I have started to change my philosophy slightly and every once in a while won’t skew the results in his favour. This always leads to the predictable dramatics, but I felt it was important he started to learn the grand old chestnut ‘Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.’ And now, after reading a fascinating article the other day, I am even more determined to let him lose occasionally, as it seems winning can do more harm than I ever expected.

In The Atlantic article Psychologist Lori Gottlieb was perplexed when she found a number of her patients were experiencing feelings of unexplained sadness, despite having wonderful childhoods, loving engaged parents and essentially ‘nothing to be unhappy about.’ As Ms Gottlieb explained,

“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’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious.”

So she began to look into why this was occurring and was surprised by her findings. She came to realise that these parents were possibly ‘too attuned’ with their kids. That their constant efforts in shielding their children from harm and unhappiness had actually prevented them from developing the coping mechanism to deal with the slightest thing going wrong. As fellow psychologist Paul Bohn goes on to explain,

“Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t 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’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it.”

As Oprah would say, what an ‘Ah ha’ moment! Really it seems pretty obvious when you think about it, but when your instinct as a parent is to always prevent them from harm, both physical and emotional, it does require a shift in thinking. However, reading on, the case for doing so becomes ever clearer. Dan Kindlon, another child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, explains why it’s so important that children develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t 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’t 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’t 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’re 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 ‘I can fix this.’”

I’m sure reading that makes all of us parents think of a moment where we have given in to our child’s request simply to stop their whining, to make them happy, or to make our own lives easier. But in doing so it seems we could be creating a generation of adults who never hear ‘no’ and thus fall to pieces the first time something doesn’t go their way.

The article also states that our current focus on ‘praise based’ parenting is causing major problems and contributing to the increase in narcissistic adults. Parents today, myself included, are often focused on building their children’s self esteem by telling them how special and talented they are. But rather than making them feel good about themselves, this could contribute to them thinking they are better than everybody else. It also has the effect of diluting the impact when they actually do achieve something significant.

These days it seems everyone gets a prize for trying. Parents are asking teachers not to mark in red pen because it damages their child’s confidence, kids in sporting teams all get a trophy because singling out the ‘best and fairest’ makes the others feel less worthy. Some schools in the US are even banning keeping score all together, not wanting to focus on who won and who lost. And we parents are so quick to fight our children’s battles, we can’t even let our toddlers squabble over a toy without stepping in to sort it out.

But you know what, in life there are winners and losers. Sometimes you succeed at things and sometimes you fail. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don’t. Some days you’re happy and some days you feel like crap. And none of it kills us. Yet by letting our children think otherwise we are actually setting them up for the exact unhappiness we are trying to prevent.

For me, this is fascinating stuff and will definitely effect how I parent from now on. I will still tell my children they are wonderful, but I will temper it with a few more ‘no’s’ and a few less wins. And I will hope that it prevents them from one day ending up on the therapist’s couch, talking about me!

You can find the whole article here.

What do you think of this parenting advice? Do you use praise to parent your children and do you find it works? Are you guilty of not saying no enough? Do you find the way you parent is very different than how you were raised? I'd love to hear your thoughts....

[libbylu]

I found this article very interesting. I have a sensitive, intelligent, demanding and somewhat highly strung 4 year old (nearly 5). I have responded to his temperament by trying to give him all the nurturing, security and closeness he demanded (as current parenting methods would suggest), meeting his many needs swiftly and earnestly, even though I found it quite smothering at times. I do find I encourage him a huge amount and now it seems he is somewhat more dependent on this encouragement than I would like. I find he is quite dependent on me for emotional regulation too. He shares with me every little thing that upsets or displeases him and expects I will and should do something about it, unlike his friends, who at 5 years old will mostly just get on with it.
Unlike you, Amity, I have never been one to let him win undeservedly, unless it is not a fair contest. I will more often than not let him win a running race, because I know he knows that I am faster. With snakes and ladders though, a game of chance, whoever wins, wins.
I think this article has given me the impetus to encourage him to be more independent and to be a little less eager to jump to his assistance. I think this pattern of behavior started because he was such a fussy child and I just wanted to do whatever I had to, to stop the fuss - I am not a natural hovering parent!

[twinboys]

I am too competitive to let my kids win in simple games ( I hate to lose) - I play to win and sometimes I win and other times the 2 boys have to deal with each other winning or one been better than the other.

I do let my kids deal with hurt and disapointment as much as I can without being mean about it.

If they hurt themselves I am there to soothe them....But they have to come to me to get the soothing. ( Of course if there is blood it is a different senario)
I let them try things and will let them hurt themselves if it is needed.
The last time was at a skate park - one boy demanded to go down a ramp way to steep for him. I helped him balance on his scooter and then when he was ready let him go. Yep he came a cropper and he did hurt himself. He was told it was too big for him....Maybe he has learnt to listen to me. I suppose I will find out when we go there next time

[redkris]

This article basically said everything I would like to about parenting. I deal with teenage employees at my job, and it is very obvious which ones have been "over-parented"...if anything doesn't go %100 their way (ie a shift they don't like, a task they don't perform properly and have to re-do), they will either get their parents to call up and abuse the manager, or they will cry to try and get their way. These are 18 and 19 year olds I am talking about! They have never been taught that sometimes things won't go the way they want them to, and they simply can't deal with it.

DS is too young for me to play board games, but when we do, he won't always win. Sometimes he wants a toy or piece of food that another child has, and cries because I won't let him take it...I'm teaching him to share. Sometimes he falls over, and I watch him. Most of the time he picks himself up and runs off, the rest of the time he either comes to me to "kiss it better" or I come and give him a cuddle if it's a particularly nasty fall. He has learned to assess and cope with things.

When I was a kid, I was pretty uncoordinated and very rarely won or even placed in anything athletic. That was ok, I learned that winning isn't everything. My brothers played me at computer games, sometimes I won, sometimes not. That was ok. When my parents played games with us they very rarely went easy on us. That was ok. I think it taught me to be a good sport and a gracious loser and winner. I hope I can do as good a job with DS.

[Wickedness]

I also wonder if this type of parenting ties in with the guilt ridden working parents of today too?? The overcompensation for not being there at other times?

Parenting is a minefield. your scorned if you do, your scorned if your dont. I can only speak for myself and I will go to my grave happy with the way my kids have turned out

[AmityD]

It actually mentions this in the full article, suggesting that when busy parents only have 30 minutes a day to spend with their kids they don't want to waste it arguing about them tidying their room, so they let things go. Also buying things to make up for the guilt of having no time...

I also wonder if this type of parenting ties in with the guilt ridden working parents of today too?? The overcompensation for not being there at other times?

Parenting is a minefield. your scorned if you do, your scorned if your dont. I can only speak for myself and I will go to my grave happy with the way my kids have turned out

[archy's mehi...]

Since Gottlieb is also the author of 'Marry Him, the Case For Settling For Mr Good-Enough', I find myself looking for specious reasoning in this piece, too. I can't take her seriously as an analyst of human behaviour after that drivel.

[alextheseal]

This article gave me pause for thought too. It's interesting because in the past 12 months I have written articles about the ill-effects of too much praise and also the benefits of not letting your child win all the time. My issue with the piece, however, is that the problems Gottlieb describes are not due to being 'too attuned' to our kids - they are due to being enmeshed. We cannot be 'too attuned'. If we were perfectly attuned we would know when we need to back off and let them figure things out for ourselves. It's a true that the desire to protect is powerful and natural, and wanting this does not make us bad parents setting our kids up for a fall, but if we were to really examine the reasons why we often let things slide or give out too much praise, I think most of us would find that it's got more to do with us wanting to avoid conflict or wanting to encourage a particular behaviour, rather than being 'too attuned' to what our child needs.

Dr Laura Markham wrote a very interesting (much shorter!) response to Gottlieb's article that you can read
here Laura Markham article

[MilkyWhite]

Ahhh alextheseal.
Great response link. That REALLY makes sense. It isn't not wanting our kids to be disappointed that is the problem, it is that WE don't like how it makes US feel when they are disappointed. It's not that we nurture them too much, it is that we can't cope with our own negative feelings.
You nailed it.

[funkymumkey56]

Great article!
I recently was told that overusing the phrase 'good girl/good boy' as praise can be damaging and not to do it. Since then I have caught myself doing it several times and realised I use the phrase often, or at least used to.
How ironic and terrifying that being too caring and generous with praise can actually be a negative thing. With depression dramatically on the increase among children it's certainly worth considering.