Leave those kids alone

Parents should step back, let them make mistakes.

A training session for an Under 10 soccer team. A father yelling across to his child, “that’s not worth a tenner”. He helpfully explains to surrounding dads: his son, who’d just hit a header that bounced off a post, gets $10 for every goal scored and a fiver for every assist. I look at this telling little scene and think of the child primed for financial reward for every tiny achievement, even on a training pitch; I think of all the boys around him who do not get paid to score goals against their teammates. I wonder if all this is being done for the child’s benefit – or the parent’s. Is a resilient, emotionally stable superstar of backbone and stamina being created here, or another Nick Kyrgios?

I think of the parents around me who live through the achievements of their children. Those intriguing individuals who repeatedly boast about their child in the firsts, or the leadership role, or in the representative team for god knows what; the practised, faux-casual mentions sliding out on slippery cue. Were these people’s own dreams so frustrated that they must now live greedily through the success of their child? Is their sense of self so fragile? And what added pressure does this create within their family dynamic? What about the siblings not on the hallowed path?

I think of the mother who gradually pulled away from the claustrophobia of the school gate because she had a child who struggled with school, a girl who did not find it a breeze, who was never on the Presentation Day stage. It became incredibly hard for this woman to be around the wittering, crowing, blithely insensitive mothers; they had no sense of empathy for a child on a different but no less stupendous path. The woman detached, for her own mental equilibrium; she cultivated other friends.

It never used to be like this, surely, in those days before children became the “special projects” of their intensely focused parents. Now it seems every second working mother is taking several months or a year off work, through long service leave or extended holidays, to provide support/assistance/a hand to hold for their precious teenage darling who couldn’t possibly be left alone to tackle their final-year exams. Why? Why can’t the kids just get on with it themselves? It’s a valuable life skill. How will they cope when they’re out in the big wide world?

Back off parents, leave them kids alone, let them bloom like flowers in a well tended garden. That’s the message of child psychologist Alison Gopnik, author of The Gardener and the Carpenter. Gopnik’s thesis is that raising children should not be a goal-oriented task, like a carpenter sculpting a chair. Parents should simply provide a loving environment in which a child can flourish; they should step back, let them make mistakes, stumble and fail and learn from it. “Parents are not designed to shape their children’s lives,” the author contends. In Gopnik’s Room 101: crammed after-school schedules. Standardised national testing. Academic league tables. She argues that kids need fewer lessons but more love. The gift of attention, just not of the helicopter variety.

And all this as levels of anxiety and depression are increasing in high schools. The cruelties of social media, a bullying culture, academic pressures, the expectations of parents, anxiety, mental fragility; it’s a potent poison. And all this as yet another private high school student commits suicide. It’s a pattern of hushed voices and horror within certain Sydney circles that feels like it’s becoming heartbreakingly common. No, please, not another one. Yet there always is, and you wonder why, what is it about this world now.

A tenner for every goal scored against a teammate? Not sure about that one.