Hara Estroff Marano: If you think of a hothouse, where plants are not exposed to the natural elements and they're protected from the rigors of nature, that's what's going on with kids. They're not really exposed to the normal vicissitudes of life. And the major effect of that is that they don't learn how to cope with the normal ups and downs of everyday life. When they do have to deal with these things, notably when they leave the protective cocoon of home to go off to college, they break down in record numbers. They're just totally overwhelmed.
C: Your book spans the whole cycle of childhood: you talk about kids who are very little and then move up through the teens years. You have all these great terms like "snowplow parenting" and "pasteurized" parenting that describe how right from the get-go children are brought into a space where safety and making childhood uncontaminated by anything unpleasant is sort of an epidemic, I guess, that you see around you. For my part, I wonder, is there a middle class mom alive in America who doesn't exhibit some of the tendencies you talk about?
HEM: It's very hard for them because the culture of parenting has changed. I talk to parents all the time and it's incredibly hard to resist this [overprotectiveness]. One example: kids going to the bus stop. So many people report the same phenomenon. There's a bus stop near their house and every morning 20 kids and 24 parents are out at the bus stop. Every parent feels somehow that only they are capable of watching their child. They don't even trust the next-door neighbor to supervise their child properly. So what you see here is this widespread element of distrust. And it's distrust of children and distrust of nature to prepare children for their eventual independence...and it's distrust of everybody else to keep a watchful eye on a child. And there are other elements too.
C: We have this perception that the world our children are in is much more dangerous than the world of the past. And you say a lot of this is built on myth. Like pedophiles—
HEM: There has been escalating hysteria over pedophiles over the last 15 years at the same time as the Department of Justice data shows that the danger is really minimal. And the fact is that kids are in greater danger in their own home from someone they know than they are from a stranger. I'm not inventing that. These are meticulous records. And the reason we know is that all kinds of crimes against children are decreasing and so are crimes against women and these are things that tend to travel together. What you do have is that when it happens you hear about it. I mean, how many years after the Jonbenet Ramsay case...? It's more than a decade and people are still talking about it! I just wish parents would apply their rational mind instead of their fearful mind. You have to stop and say, What is it that's driving all this parental anxiety? Where's it coming from? There's just this excess of parental anxiety focused on the kids. And I think the kids and the parents both would be better off without it.
C: So you're saying in a way that the parents are wimps. And then wimps beget wimps?
HEM: That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. Here's the funny thing: whenever I talk to parents, the thing that gets me is that they kind of know that what they're doing—they kind of suspect that what they're doing—isn't tremendously healthy for their kids. The reason they suspect it that they know they weren't raised that way and they seem to be doing just fine.
C: Can you give me a couple of examples of how this hyper-anxious parenting manifests? What are the most egregious or obvious things that come to mind when you look at moms today—moms of kids, teens, or college kids...
HEM: I happen to think that the cell phones with GPS on them are absolutely vile.
C: I'd never heard of them until I read your book. I guess there are moms out there who are tracking their children?
HEM: Oh, yeah. And their computers or cell phones beep when their children go outside some pre-specified zone. But when you think about it, you're outsourcing trust there. Trust is the bedrock of society. It's the glue of all relationships whether it's intimate relationships or larger social relationships, so I think the GPS cell phones are very pernicious...and you know, people think they're doing themselves a favor, and cell phone companies are marketing this. All you have to do is open your local paper and see the ads: "Equip your family with GPS monitoring! Have that peace of mind."
If you want to read on, please go here to read the rest of this interview on my personal blog. If all this talk of anxious parenting is making you want to drown yourself in a vat of Xanax, feel free to stop reading here. But before you go, tell me what you think. Do you feel you're an overly protective parent? Do you feel other parents around you are wimpy? How does it hang in your 'hood?
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