My Journey

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and proclaiming, "Wow, what a ride!!!"

Saturday, December 6, 2008

overparenting???

I was reading an article in The NEW YORKER – "about the rise of overparenting!"
After reading this article, of course, I was thinking to myself, am I one of them?? The “over-parenting” parent?? I must admit, I do have the tendency of over-parenting Darren and Kailey.

Overparenting means different things to different people, but the article’s author defines it through several elements:
-Spoiling kids with attention, stuff, and latitude through lax rules.
-Achievement pressure — i.e. I need to make sure my kids gets into Harvard so I am hiring him a tutor when he is 5.
-Anxiety about everything from sanitizing kids’ hands to worrying about how they are getting on with their classmates.
The article reviews several recent books that explore the subject of helicopter parenting in more detail than I’d seen before. To save you the suspense, the verdict is uniformly negative: Overparenting is bad for our kids.

Whether or not I overparent, I do think about these issues a lot. Just this week I enrolled Darren in Piano lessons, and I am looking for art lessons for him now. I do feel that it is impossible to balance between "exposing our kids to different activities" and "not overloading them" (and our families and wallets.)
I haven’t found a solution yet… All I can do is to try to find a balance and hoping that I made the right decisions.