Elisabeth Guthrie - No More Push Parenting: How to Find Success and Balance in a Hypercompetitive World

Josh and Max are eleven-year-old twins. Twice a week they are awakened at four-thirty in the morning, dressed in the dark, and driven to hockey practice. They eat Pop Tarts en route. Their father is very enthusiastic about the boys hockeyhe calls them his double threatand he's gotten them expensive gear bags and new sticks for their birthday. The boys mother is ambivalent. Josh and Max both have fallen asleep at their desks at school in the past weeks. But, shrugging, she claims, They just love it. And their dad is so proud of them.

Ginny is a sophomore at a prestigious private school in New York. Her older brother attends an Ivy League college, their father's alma mater. Ginny is getting C's and B's in school, and her highly successful parents call me, worried. Even though they're had no other physician referral and no teacher complaints or concerns, they wonder if it's possible that Ginny has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Perhaps, her mother suggests, she should be on medication.

Maya, a shy and anxious fourteen-year-old, sits in my office and talks about how annoyed her mother must be with her. Last week, on the way to the hospital, Maya cried and begged her mother to cancel the nose job that they had scheduled for her as a birthday present. Maya had originally agreed to the surgery, knowing it would please her mother, but she had never really wanted it. Mother, who was driving, and Grandma, who was along for moral support, finally gave in and brought her home.

I t used to be that there were three kinds of children: average, above average, and below average. And while all but the most popular kids were sometimes teased for being chosen last for the team, or for being short (or tall), or thin (or fat), or for being dumb (or smart), most of us managed to survive. We got B's, some C's, and occasionally A's. We had a few close friends and a bunch of hallway pals. We had a few interests, maybe played a sport. We hung out a lot. And while our parents complained about the usual, like our messy rooms, they pretty much left us alone.

Of course, there was always one kid in the class who seemed to be born with an oboe in his mouth, and who knew from the age of five that he always wanted to attend Harvard and become a neurologist. Indeed, while we were average or above average, healthy and welladjusted, that kid was just plain weird. Today, it seems many parents yearn to have the kind of perfect child we would have once considered weirdoverly ambitious, hypercompetitive, serious to a faultand are doing everything within their power to craft one. We meet kids like Josh, Max, Ginny and Maya every single day. Good, hard-working, above-average kids whose parents are constantly encouraging them to take violin lessons (with the best teacher in the state) and to prepare for the SATs (with a tutor) as early as the ninth grade. These are the parents who are pushing their animal-loving daughter to consider a premed major just because you're guaranteed six figures as a doctor.

To these parents, B's aren's good enough, nor is simply getting into a good college. It's got to be Ivy League, or it may as well be nothing. Playing a single sport isn's good enough. It's got to be soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, track in the spring (and it's important to be a captain of at least one of these teams). To these parentsa great many of the parents in our society todaywhat was once considered above average has become average. And what was once considered so significant to a child's developmentthe freedom to identify and pursue one's own individual talents and interestshas been replaced by that which will appear most impressive to the outside world. The elusive goal for these children is perfection.

We have become so accustomed to hearing about these kinds of excesses in parentingabout overscheduled toddlers, pressured children, and superachieving teensthat we have really, to some degree, lost our sense of perspective. We shrug, and think of the neighbor or PTA acquaintance who's done the same or worse, and move on. But the fact is, we don's really move on. More and more we're affected, as parents, with tremendous anxiety and a constant low drumbeat of pressure from the questions we ask ourselves again and again: Are we doing enough for our kids? Should we be doing more? Will our kids measure up?

Certainly the parents of the children described in the above scenarios are basically reasonable and sensible. Probably people like you and me. I know from many conversations with such parents that most of them, like Josh and Max's mom, wonder if all the pressure they are putting on their children is ultimately bad. After all, their own parents paid little attention to the details of their upbringing, and they're doing fine today.

Most parents smile with recognition or nod knowingly when I mention the term push parenting. They see it all around them. It's evident in behaviors like:

• Orchestrating virtually every moment of a child's life with lessons, play dates, and enriching activities;

• Demanding high achievement in school and at sports at almost any cost (emotional, psychological, physiological, financial);

• Pressuring a child to choose courses, activities, or interests more to build a rsum than to discover or explore natural curiosities or personal interests;