Mollard: Is hyper-parenting to blame for marriages ending?
Parents are creating a generation of entitled children while destroying their marriages, but the solution isn’t as simple as experts claim.
When my firstborn was nearly a year old, I went to interview a wise middle-aged author.
“Imagine you and your husband are a coathanger,” she told me.
“Everything hangs off that coathanger – your health, your happiness, your parenting, your finances. You need to make sure that you put energy, love and playfulness into your relationship, not just your children.”
It was good advice, if unsolicited. I drove home thinking: “Yeah, we’re good,” but nevertheless I booked a babysitter for the following week so my husband and I could play tennis.
It was fun and I vowed to do it again in two weeks’ time. Except we never did.
Life got busy, he travelled a lot and the coathanger was forgotten as we focused on raising two kids and fostering our careers in an expensive city.
I thought of that advice this week as the parenting guru Gina Ford said marriages are falling apart because family life is increasingly revolving entirely around children.
Ford, whose best-selling The Contented Little Baby Book came out the year before I became a mum, didn’t mince her words.
“So many parents, because they’re trying so hard to bend over backwards to make everything perfect for their children, they forget about themselves,” she wrote.
“Everything revolves around the children. And then the stress gets so much, and all you’ve got is a child from a broken home.”
She added that “both parents working” can add to the problem. Ouch.
While I don’t think hyper-focusing on our children was to blame for my marriage ending 13 years after I was given the coathanger advice, it was probably a contributing factor.
I also think it’s more complex than Ford points out.
Parents aren’t stupid: they know that their relationships need time, connection and communication to flourish but when issues become entrenched or unhealthy behaviours don’t change, they direct their energies into their children.
Some feel they can weather a dysfunctional relationship, but they’ll do everything they can not to raise a dysfunctional child.
Except, as Ford points out, a child-focused approach, can also be detrimental.
“A lot of parents are frightened to be firm with their children because they’re frightened that the child will not love them or the child will turn against them … but by setting some boundaries and some rules, their children are just so much happier,” she told The Times.
Like Kate Winslet, who calls Ford an “absolute Godsend” and Jamie Oliver who says his wife Jools was a “militant Gina Ford and it bloody works”, I used Ford’s tips for creating a routine when my children were little.
We had no family living nearby to help and with my husband travelling half the year, I couldn’t have survived without a framework.
Very early on I learned that being authoritative – “we’re leaving the park in five minutes” – versus “shall we leave the park?” was more effective.
The difference between then and now is the rise of “gentle parenting” where children are raised with respect, empathy, understanding and, supposedly, boundaries.
Conceptually, it’s great because kids feel understood and secure but when parents get so focused on meeting every emotional need that they forget their own limits or authority, it can slip from compassion into indulgence and kids end up leading the household instead of learning from it. Without structure, a couple’s needs will quickly become secondary or friction will build up if one parent prefers a firmer approach.
Recently I overheard a couple in a shopping centre arguing about their young son. “For God’s sake,” said the exasperated husband. “Don’t ask him if he’d like to put his shoes on just tell him we’re putting them on.”
Or as Rachel Corbett, podcasting expert and former panellist on The Project, pointed out on Instagram this week, there are parents who never say “no” to their kids.
Recounting how she’d taken her daughter to a sports class, where another child took her child’s spot, she fully expected the other parent to gently steer his son away to another spot. Instead, he told Rachel that maybe her daughter could find another spot.
As she recounted on her post: “Maybe you are creating an a***hole.” As she says, if you’re never doing anything other than laughing hysterically when your kid does something rude, then your kid “is going to grow up to be a d*ckhead”.
She’s right. The real world is never going to fall in behind your child rather they’ll have to learn to fall in with it.
Same goes for families. If you want your relationship to be the “coathanger” from which everything else hangs, then you need to give it the best of yourself, not the scraps that are left when you’ve fulfilled your child’s every whim.
Do you agree? Leave a comment or email us at education@news.com.au
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Originally published as Mollard: Is hyper-parenting to blame for marriages ending?
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