What’s a parent to do? Trusting your parenting skills
In today’s culture focused “for the children,” parents are feeling the pressures to do everything “right” as much as kids. A mother speaks out on how to regain confidence in parenting for the sake of your sanity and your child’s wellbeing in this helpful article on “Intensive Parenting.”
...Most parents, myself included, have become accustomed to living with a subtle sense of unease. It’s there in the playground and at the schoolyard gate. It permeates the atmosphere of children’s parties and sporting events, the doctor’s office, the supermarket checkout. It is a sense of watching and being watched; most of all, it is a feeling of being judged that seeps into every area of our lives, undermining confidence and transforming parenthood from a straightforward part of life into an angst-ridden ordeal....
If parenting is a big issue in the US, it is possibly even more so in the United Kingdom where seemingly almost any aspect of parenting can be politicised and made the subject of public policy....The evidence is unequivocal: you aren’t just imagining it - being a parent today is different than in the past....
While the term, “intensive parenting,” is not common here, it is common. It’s when parents are led to believe that they need expert guidance, childhood is medicalized and everything must be managed, and parenting is shaped by a pervading sense that children must be protected from anything even potentially risky. And frightened into believing that danger lurks everywhere! According to sociologist Frank Furedi, it normalizes the belief that parents are incompetent and need help in everyday life, undermining their self-confidence, while exagerrating the importance of every little thing parents do. Parents are led to fear for their children and doubt their own parenting skills. It’s no wonder he says it leads to “paranoid parenting.”
Rebecca Kukla of the University of South Florida gave a critical appraisal of the notion that ‘you are now what your child eats’, to the extent that even a single hotdog-of-convenience apparently risks ruining a child’s palate and ultimately jeopardising their long-term health and mental wellbeing. Public policy initiatives aimed at ‘supporting’ parents almost never improve things and sometimes make them far worse by denigrating parents’ ability to rise to the occasion. ...
Canadian academic Stephanie Knaak explained that we don’t so much make decisions as choose within ever-narrowing parameters of what is acceptable. As an example, she pointed to the question of bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding in several editions of Dr Spock’s childcare manual. In early editions of Dr Spock, breastfeeding and formula feeding are both treated as acceptable alternatives that take the needs of the parents into account. In contrast, the most recent edition makes it clear that breastfeeding is the morally superior choice and the needs of mothers are no longer part of the equation. Sure, you can formula feed, but you’d better have a good excuse....
Author Nancy McDermott concludes by answering the question “What can we do?” and offering other parents some common sense advice. The full article is here.
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