Stop blaming our parenting

This past week, the middle class parents of Australia would be excused for feeling besieged. And I only mention the "class", because it has been specified in claims by two prominent voices that people in it are destroying our own children.

Boutique private school principal and young-adult author John Marsden dropped a bombshell on leafy suburbs around the country when he informed us parenting styles of "the respectable Australian middle class, which comprises most of the population nowadays", were bordering on "emotional abuse".

American intellectual Jonathan Haidt says middle class parents are creating fragile children.Credit: Andrew Kelly

"It's not visible in the way that physical abuse is, because there are no cigarette burns or bruises or black eyes, but there is terrible damage and it's damage that can't be ever fully repaired. It's lifelong," he told a media outlet.

Then, visiting New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warned that "coddling" of children by middle-class parents was producing a "really disastrous" fragility epidemic. We are, we're told, causing our children to be dangerously anxious and depressed.

Marsden dubbed our tendency to be highly involved mothers and fathers as amounting to "toxic parenting", and in his just-released book, The Art of Growing Up, went so far as to link intensive mothering with family violence.

"Men who feel rage as the result of the failure of their mothers to effectively manage the inevitable eventual separation between mothers and their sons – the transition from what is arguably the most intimate relationship known to males to a relationship that must perforce be of a very different nature – are highly likely to project that rage onto future intimate partners, and often all women," he writes.

Devoted mothers like me and my peers are, if Marsden is right, setting sons up to be violent because we care about them too much. It's a big claim, and one that will leave many feeling, to borrow from the author, somewhat emotionally damaged.

Who wouldn't, given he tells us we are failing so badly – "The scale of the problem is massive. The issue of emotional damage is pandemic."

Mardsen confesses in his book that he drew from the experience of running two, small alternative schools in Victoria's Macedon Ranges (Candlebark School has 176 students from prep to year 7, and Alice Miller school has 200 secondary school students) to draw his conclusions. He says he will not be surprised if some are unhappy with his takes on parenting.

Devoted mothers like me and my peers are, if Marsden is right, setting sons up to be violent because we care about them too much.

They would not be the only ones. Emotion and anger have, understandably, run thick and fast in opinion columns since the promotion for his book started.

But, hurt feelings aside, just how guilty are we of advocating too hard for children, clearing away too many obstacles for them and refusing to let them experience failure or disappointment?

Anne Hollonds, one of Australia's leading experts on child and family wellbeing and director of national reasearch body the Australian Institute of Family Studies, is a reassuring voice. She is not saying we are faultless but, as I would also argue, she believes contemporary parenting styles are heavily influenced by the wider social context in which we find ourselves.

"It is a bloody hard job ... parents today are trying to do it in circumstances of low wages growth, high housing costs, worrying about finances, and a lot of judgment of every single thing they're doing," she says.

"There are lots of positives about focused parenting, what John Marsden might call over-focused parenting. And probably I would lean towards there being, if we look for it, more positives than negatives.

"The negatives are sharp and strong, [but] parenting comes from the environment we're living in."

We have all seen the evidence of the negatives she and Marsden mention, and I would not deny them. The parent who abuses the sports coach, or tries to manipulate a teacher or principal to get a better outcome for their kids, or complains constantly and refuses to see any scenario in which their child is less than perfect and blameless.

No one is doubting these exist. It's just that the messages we have received in the past week imply this is all of us or at least the vast majority of us (and by "us" I mean parents who have had kids in the timeframe Jonathan Haidt describes as "since the mid-1990s") and that we have no insight into our own potentially harmful parenting actions. As a member of the most over-informed generation of Australian parents ever, I can state very comfortably that is totally incorrect.

A full on battery of experts has admonished us for making things too safe and we have listened.

Hollonds says the contemporary, general "sense of entitlement" is, as Marsden implies, causing negative flow-ons to our parenting styles. She says the fabled "helicopter parenting" style flows from this, as evinced by "the parents who demand their child get a better grade, or a better go, that sense 'I'm entitled to this!' where nobody would have dreamt of doing that before".

She agrees (as do I) that the whole "gold star for just turning up" mentality that surrounds early childhood in much of contemporary Australia is not great, and that "it's important that self-esteem is built on something real ... mastery of real-life valuable skills".

This is common sense, and parents have been well and truly informed already of the dangers of over-inflating kids' sense of achievement and under-exposing them to failure and uncertainty. A battery of experts has admonished us for making things too safe and we have listened.

Of claims by Marsen and Haidt that we are building dysfunctional young people, basically through our own parenting indulgence, Hollonds reminds us, "you have to look at parenting within the broader context".

Now, social policy settings are so risk-averse when it comes to child welfare (as they should be) that Hollonds heard a talkback caller last week describe being reported to the authorities by a teacher because her child turned up at school with some cuts and bruises from falling out of a tree.

Parents know we are being watched as none have been before us, and of course this contributes to our vigilance.

As to Mr Marden's claim that mothers are contributing to sons becoming violent by not letting go properly (or something), Hollonds dismisses this outright. "That kind of thinking was from decades ago; there is no evidence to support that kind of claim.

"That is kind of like saying autism is caused by overprotective mothers, or stuttering was an emotional problem caused by overprotective mothers. It is old-fashioned thinking with no evidence."

She points out that historically, mothers were "automatically blamed for everything" to do with the ills of society historically, but, thankfully, "now we approach things in a more evidence-informed fashion".

As to the claim by both critics of  widespread"toxic" parenting (and here was I thinking actual child abuse and neglect deserved that label, not overdoing the care) that we are to blame for young people being more "fragile" and anxious, Professor Ariadne Vromen, a Sydney University expert in youth sociology, is dismissive.

Professor Vromen says the "moral panic" around young people is not dissimilar to the kind of criticisms people in much older generations have made about young people forever. The current fashion for saying young people are feeble due to bad parenting "doesn't take into account the huge structural change in society that has made young people's lives more precarious".

"By focusing on parents, it takes away any responsibility from society more broadly, from government and industry and employers of young people to actually look after young people's futures.

"To suggest that people's depression, anxiety and mental health issues could be attributed to their parents' (overly engaged) behaviour is already not based on medical fact, but is also incredibly dismissive of people's mental health issues," she says, adding the valuable point that surely it is good that we are generally more receptive to young people disclosing their mental health concerns than in previous generations.

So, in lecture halls in which she has taught for 20 years, does she see evidence that young people are generally more "fragile"?

Middle-class parents who, like me, who have slogged to support children's education, their confidence, their optimism, perspective, values and sense of what is really important (hoping all of this will simply lead to a self-aware adult with a secure life), I am happy to inform you the answer is "no".

We may not be perfect, no generation of parents ever is, but to suggest we are building sick and dysfunctional young people simply by being loving undermines the undoubted dignity that exists in a process as arduous as it is consuming.

That, to my mind, is what has emerged in the past week as the thing that is most toxic.