Darren Levin: Millennial parents seem to fail in every way possible
You’d think the sleepless nights would be the worst part of parenting. But it’s the countless experts forever waiting to say you’re doing it wrong that really gets you, writes Darren Levin.
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How do you raise the perfect child?
That may seem like a hypothetical question, but you’ve asked the right person because I’ve managed to raise three of them.
What makes them perfect? Let’s start with the nine-year-old, who now answers all of my questions with variations of the timeless response, “What the hell, Dad?”
“Hey, reckon you can …”
“What the hell, Dad?”
“I thought maybe if …”
“What. The. Hell. Dad.”
Do you think you could just put away …”
“The hell Dad, what?”
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Then there’s the absolutely perfect way our five-year-old twin daughters pull every item of clothes out when they’re getting ready for school. The perfect way the dark haired twin likes to crawl into our bed each night at 3am and sleep on our heads. The perfect way the blonde twin turns into a human wrecking ball when she’s bored, tired, or a combination of both.
What I’m trying to say is that our imperfect kids are perfect to us, and any attempt to make them parenting-textbook-guide perfect would be a failure because they’re human and they’re flawed. But we can always try a little harder, right?
This week, an article from The Atlantic has been doing the rounds in parents WhatsApp groups because it suggests millennial parents are once again failing our children. Apparently, we’re not helicoptering or snowplowing too much, but instead instilling achievement as a core value as opposed to caring and kindness.
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The article’s author, organisational psychologist Adam Grant, suggests society’s fractures are partly linked to our failures as parents. As opposed to previous generations where societal failures were linked to Black Sabbath and Marilyn Manson?
“We’ve observed many fellow parents becoming so focused on achievement that they fail to nurture kindness,” Grant, who presumably doesn’t own a Ferrari or an ASX-listed company, writes. “They seem to regard their children’s accolades as a personal badge of honour.”
Grant then suggests reframing dinner conversations around what your kids did that day to help others, as opposed to how well they went in the NAPLAN.
In other words: “What random acts of kindness did you impart on your brethren today?” instead of, “Please tell me you smashed the other kids at maths”, which isn’t really a question as much as it is an expectation parents of winners tend to set.
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The reason the article is doing the rounds is the same reason articles like this always do the rounds. Millennial parents seem to be trying harder than ever to mould their kids into the most perfect humans they could be. A lot of that is driven by our own desires not to repeat the same mistakes as our own parents, which is built on their attempts to not repeat the same mistakes as people with post-war PTSDs.
There’s also the unprecedented amount of parenting information – and disinformation – we’re exposed to each day. Today’s “we need to prioritise kindness and caring” is tomorrow’s “children need to be resilient and selfish in order to succeed”, so who are we to believe?
The answer – and I’m no organisational psychologist – probably lies in the middle somewhere. You’re allowed to ask more than one question at dinner, so why not ask what they did that day to be kind and also how they went in the maths homework?
If your kids are as perfect as mine the answer will likely be monosyllabic. “Fine” or “good”, but more likely, “What the hell, Dad?”
Darren Levin is a columnist for RendezView.com.au