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Dear Parents, 

The below article was sent in by a parent in the school community who thought it might be an interesting read for other parents. Please see below: 

OPINION 

The ‘gentle parenting’ backlash: Am I raising my kids to be helpless? 

 Samantha Selinger-Morris  www.theage.com.au/  April 1, 2023 

Am I raising my children to be helpless? 

I’ve secretly harboured this fear for years. And, until the other day, I was able to routinely whack the thought away, like a farmer hunting gophers. 

Am I raising helpless children by doing everything for them? CREDIT: DIONNE GAIN 

I could do this because, A) my powers of denial are strong, and B) I had other parents to judge. Sure, I shadowed my kids at swimming parties well past when every other parent I know did, for fear they’d drown. I also drove my kids everywhere, well into their early teens, in case they get lost or walked into traffic. But I wasn’t one of those parents who did their kids’ homework, right? I didn’t ferry warm clothing to their school when days became rainy. (Character assassination of other parents is the last refuge of the insecure parent.) 

But then, the lot of us who have a habit of “helping” our kids perhaps a little too much were placed in the crosshairs last week. There was The New York Times story that implicated parents who monitor their child’s every move as being partly responsible for the growing numbers of depressed teens during the pandemic. And there was yet another critique of so-called “gentle parenting”, which requires that parents empathise with their kids and attend to their emotions, rather than make demands of them. (Rugby League coach Wayne Bennett added, in a new documentary, Dawn of The Dolphins, that young men aren’t as “resilient” as they used to be, saying: “We sook more than we ever sooked.“) 

“There’s an overemphasis on feelings, not, ‘What do I have to do?’ but ‘How do I feel about what I have to do?’” says Brisbane-based clinical psychologist Judith Locke of the current parenting climate. “What are my broad feelings? And those two things impact more on learned helplessness than anything else,” she says, referring to the tendency of many parents to tackle their children’s challenges for them. 

At its most extreme, over-parented kids can develop the core belief that they are incompetent, says Melbourne clinical psychologist Ben Callegari. 

“Then that impacts your capacity to make choices, which impacts your identity development because identity connects to exploring the world curiously and trying things and going ‘I like that’, or ‘That’s me’,” says Callegari. “If a parent does that all for you, either you become very enmeshed with my parent, ‘I am my parent essentially, I am whoever they want me to be, or what they tell me who I am’, rather than ‘I am my own individual person’.” 

But just how much helping is too much helping? Every parent I know hits periods – from toddlerhood on through to the teenage years – when it feels nearly impossible to gauge just how much independence to give their kids. 

One friend happily lets her 14-year-old bus home from dinner with friends in Sydney’s central business district to their suburban home at 8 pm. But she struggled when teenage friends of her 18-year-old, with little driving experience, offered to drive him on back country roads during a weekend away. 

“There are so many stupid scenarios these stupid parents [of other kids] put you into,” she says. 

Another friend with two primary-school-aged children wonders about the negative impact of not making her kids do household chores, and letting her kids stay home from school when they feel even the slightest bit unwell. 

“I’m super soft,” she says. “But that’s not making them tough and letting them get through. That’s not going to [raise them to] be the kid who grows up and gets back and does stuff again [after a challenge]. That is completely my anxiety.” 

So, how can we know if we’ve actually damaged our kids by doing too much for them? 

“Anxiety,” says Callegari, listing one of the warning signs. “Inability to make decisions. Procrastination, overly avoidant socially. School learning problems, like an inability to do work on their own. Excessive risk aversion.” 

’We go, ‘Oh gosh, they need help’, and we step in and we help. And we thus prepare the road for them [the kids], and not them for the road.′ 

Parents should also ask themselves just how often they’re doing things for their kids that they could do themselves. “If a client said to me, ‘On average, that’s how my mum and dad acted, they mostly did everything for me, or mostly made decisions for me’, well, then, that speaks to a pattern rather than an outlier,” says Callegari. 

But even if that has been you, as a parent, it’s never too late to wind back the damage. 

“There’s no such thing,” says Callegari, of a point of no return on this matter. “The brain’s plastic.” 

It’s simply about repairing the damage by “connecting with the [child’s] unmet need”. “Which is autonomy, competency, kids’ doing things for themselves, feeling like they can do things for themselves,” he says. “Praising them, telling them that you believe in them, ‘I think you’ve got this, I trust you, It’ll be OK if you fail. That’s how we learn.’” 

Parents also need to take a hard look at their own parenting choices, which are likely an unconscious reaction to the way they were parented. 

“Most parents overcompensate,” – do the opposite to how they were parented – “or surrender… and just repeat the sins of the father, so to speak,” says Callegari. 

So, many parents in their 40s who were raised by baby boomers – raised themselves by stoic parents who came from a world of fuel shortages and unemployment and might have lacked empathy for their children – might boomerang away from their own upbringing and “smother them [their kids] with love” and make sure they’re safe, he says. 

It’s not that paying attention to our children’s feelings is a bad thing, says Locke, author of The Bonsai Child, a book about how over-parenting can stunt a child’s development. The problems arise when we treat children who have a diagnosis of anxiety, or are otherwise anxious, as a fait accompli, as opposed to figuring out how to help them rise above their anxieties. 

“We’ve kind of written a script for kids where everybody else is responsible for making you feel better, you know?” says Locke, who sees countless children suffering from anxiety as a result of having been over-parented. “I think it’s the current environment, in which we always emphasise care in these situations as opposed to slowly introducing demands or expectations and opportunities for them to overcome it.” 

If this is you, though, she empathises. 

“It’s what has been encouraged by society... that caring parenting is dropping off their [kid’s] assignment that they left at home, and caring parenting is allowing them to miss the sports carnival because it’s boring,” says Locke. “So you’re kind of pushed in a wrong direction.” 

Parents are also tapping into their primal instincts. 

“We parents go, ‘Oh gosh, they need help’, and we step in and we help,” says Locke. “And we thus prepare the road for them [the kids], and not them for the road.” 

The crucial question parents need to ask themselves if their child baulks at a challenge, or if they take on one for them, is: “If not now, when?” 

“If they can’t go to camp now, when are they going to go?” says Locke. “If you don’t have a plan for when that will happen, well, where will this go? That’s the thing you’ve always got to think of in this. They don’t accept the teacher’s authority, my authority as a psychologist because they’ve got a diagnosis of anxiety... If they can’t go to school, if they refuse, how are they going to go to uni? Who’s going to employ them?” 

Parents need to also recognise that challenges are crucial for a child’s development, just as wind is essential for a tree to grow strong. 

“Because trees actually need bits of wind as they’re growing, for the roots to grow deeper,” says Locke. “And the branches to grow stronger. If they don’t have that experience of wind, if they’re so protected, the moment the wind comes along, they’re going to blow over. They haven’t learned to cope with it.” It’s the same with children, she says. “People need to put windy experiences in their life, so to speak... or else the child is actually not ready for the world they’re going to grow up in.” 

As a start, parents should make sure that their children are “doing something more independently this year than the last year”, from the age of two years onwards, says Locke. In this way, they will be on a steady path to building the essential skills of resilience, self-regulation, resourcefulness, respect and responsibility, she adds. 

This can start with such simple tasks as requiring that your kids dress themselves, help set the table and make their own breakfast. “They should need you less every year,” says Locke. “Make sure that they’re on track to go to schoolies, when they’re 18.” 

If a child has developed anxiety, parents should seek out a “solution-focused” therapist, says Locke. 

”We emphasise responsiveness [to our children’s problems] and not demands,” she says. “So the solution is actually slowly allowing the child to get ways of facing the things they don’t want to face.” 

And, says Callegari, don’t expect to transform your parenting overnight. 

“Just remember, you don’t have to be perfect,” he says. “[Be] good enough.” 

Open Day

On Tuesday 28 March, the College held it's Open Day which attracted over 100 people to the event. The College hosted two sessions which consisted of a presentation by the Principal team and some of our students reps in the Bunjil Centre followed by a tour of the school. 

Thank you to David Gill and Georgina Walton for overseeing the event and also to the student leaders who supported the event via presentations to parents and accompanying the tours.

Library News! 

To celebrate World Poetry Day recently (21st March), we launched a “blackout poetry” competition. Both students and staff were invited to participate. Blackout poetry involves leaving some words on a given page and blacking out the rest, so what is left makes a poem, of sorts. Zahrah was judged to be the most creative student entry, and Mr. G the most creative staff entry. All participants received a small prize for their efforts. 

Check out the posters we made on display in the L-Block corridor – they may help you find your next book.  

Remember, though not all superheroes wear capes, they find time to read! 

SEE YOU IN THE LIBRARY! 

Library Fun! 

The Library had a fun competition. 

Guess how many Easter eggs are in the jar.  

The lucky student that guessed the correct amount was Benjamin Craig 10D. 

Congratulations Ben, you guessed the exact amount of 85.