Mags GarganInstead of wrapping children in cotton wool, a more relaxed attitude to raising children can lead to happier, healthier families, writes Stella O’Malley
It was in 2007, when I became pregnant with my first child, that I began to understand more profoundly the complex issues that face modern parents. After I had told everybody the good news, I quickly became unsettled by the overwhelming avalanche of well-meaning but frankly terrifying advice that came from every corner.
This was the year that the Madeleine McCann kidnapping tragedy happened and the world was increasingly perceived as a dangerous place, filled with crazed, homicidal axe murderers. I diligently attempted to read all the baby books, trying to crack the nut that is parenting, but became confused when I realised that they all contradicted each other. I was also left feeling slightly bewildered when I realised that many of the baby books could be renamed simply as their special version of ‘what you’re doing wrong’.
During my ante-natal classes I was advised not to take my own mother’s advice too seriously as childhood is very different now, and was also warned not to listen to my friends, as they would probably tell fibs in a fever of competitive parenting. In addition, parenting books were cautioned against as “each child is different and you can’t do parenting by the book”. I nervously turned to my husband and asked him, “So where the hell can we go for advice?”
I had my second baby in 2009 and the paranoia and warnings continued relentlessly. Lying in my hospital bed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether childhood really has become so dangerous, or is all this a bit excessive? Has society really deteriorated so much – or are we worrying ourselves needlessly?
A leaflet in the hospital advised me to “keep an eye on your baby at all times”. “At all times”, I wondered, feeling pretty fed up at this stage, “do they really mean ‘at all times’?” As I was puzzling over this leaflet my husband, Henry, had taken our two-day-old son for a wander down the corridor.
Henry was cuddling our little ’un in his arms and generally revelling in that oh-so-special tenderness that we have for our newborns when suddenly a siren started blaring loudly. I was in a public ward and all the mothers looked at each other in horror – wow, this really was a brave new world. Nurses and doctors flew to action stations to see who was trying to abduct a baby. Eventually, after a bit of a kerfuffe, it turned out that it was my husband who was the unknown male on the loose. Our son was tagged and Henry had walked too far along the corridor (not off the ward, not through any doors, merely further down the corridor), so the siren had gone off. When I (and everyone else in the ward) heard my husband’s stuttered explanation I thought, “Mother of Divine, they really do mean ‘at all times’.”
There and then I promised myself that when I emerged from the deep water of the early baby years I would one day do my own research and find out for myself whether parenting really needed to be so intensive, and if childhood really had changed so much since I was a child in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Sometime later, while writing a thesis on parenting in the 21st Century, I was startled to discover that, despite the sensationalist stories in the media and hysterical tales of child abduction, the rates of child abduction and child murder by strangers are tiny and not increasing, and the rates of infant mortality in general have plummeted. In addition, the statistical rates of child sexual abuse in the developed world have declined an extraordinary 62% since the early 1990s (even though children today are much more likely to report abuse). The rates for children becoming seriously ill have also tumbled – far fewer children die from accidental death and significantly fewer children experience trauma – so if we look at the actual evidence, it turns out that if it really is a sick world we live in today, it was a great deal sicker when today’s parents were children.
These could be the glory days of the parent-child relationship, and parents today have the opportunity to enjoy parenting in a way that our own parents and grandparents could never have dreamed of. But this isn’t what’s happening – instead parents seem to have missed the party. Psychologists are concerned about research showing that parents today don’t enjoy rearing their children as much as former generations did. Robin Simon, a professor of sociology and author of The Joys of Parenthood, Reconsidered surveyed over 11,000 parents and reported that “Parents of young children report far more depression, emotional distress, and other negative emotions than non-parents”. Clearly something is rotten in the state of parenting.
But it doesn’t have to be like this – we parents could learn how to handle our hysterical and consumerist culture and simply enjoy raising our children. Hurrying to get to the latest supervised play arrangement could be swapped for children spending lazy days outside, unsupervised, playing with friends, exploring, building dens and riding their bikes. I can hear the shouts of dismay and derision already: “No, we just can’t do that! Life has changed! Children simply have to be raised in captivity; we have no other option! You are being naïve, life has moved on!” Yet after reading this book you will realise that life has indeed moved on: with levels of obesity, emotional problems, cyber-bullying, screen addiction, teen suicide, learning and behavioural diffculties increasing at a startling rate, the computer in your living room is much more likely to be a danger to your children than the tree in your local park.
Our perceptions of risk have been completely distorted by commercial interests whose sole reason for existing is to stalk parents and frighten them into buying more stuff. Big business has created a culture of fear and paranoia which has scared parents into thinking that they need to put lorryloads of effort into what comes naturally anyway. Not only that, but parents are now habitually regarded as incompetent fools who need extensive training to make up for their glaring inadequacies. We have gone from ‘Mother knows best’ to ‘the child is king’ in two short decades, and consequently parenting today has become incredibly demanding and stressful.
In a world obsessed with safety, progress and development, the culture of over-parenting is being sold by marketing maestros as the road to success, and yet over-parenting doesn’t improve the life of either the child or the parent – it merely adds to everybody ’s stress levels. As Tom Hodgkinson, the author of The Idle Parent, has pointed out, “An unhealthy dose of the work ethic is threatening to wreck childhood”. This would perhaps be forgivable if children were happier but, sadly, they’re not. Both parents and children today are more anxious and discontented than ever before, despite children being safer, healthier and cleverer today than ever before. When 250 children aged eight to 13 years old were asked in an extensive UNICEF study what they needed to make them happy, the results were an eye-opener: children want friendships, their own time and the outdoors. How often do we hear parents stating matter-of-factly, “It’s dfferent now; we can’t give our children the freedom we so enjoyed as kids; times have changed”? And yes, in many ways times are different – but it’s not more dangerous.
We parents need to fight back against the culture of fear, and instead begin to address the true risks that are impacting our children. We needn’t fill our lives acting as social secretaries for our children, we needn’t ferry our children from dance class to drama to football, and we needn’t wrap them in cotton wool – rather we can simply send them out to play.
*Stella O’Malley is an accredited psychotherapist with over 10 years’ experience as a mental health professional. This article is an extract from Cotton Wool Kids: What’s making Irish parents paranoid? published by Mercier Press.