Parenting Article Fail

~ Laura

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry rants about online articles about parenting.

Here’s the lede of a recent story about parenting on Atlantic Media’s business news site Quartz: “Kids who understand gratitude have better grades and are less likely to get depressed.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. The reason why you should teach your kids gratitude is…that they might get better grades.

Apparently parenting stories are the new cat photo slideshows for high(middle)brow websites (thank you Amy Chua) because I see more and more of them (the most popular story on Quartz right now is this cruel, insufferable one about how to brag on the internet about mistreating your kids). And each time it is like an ice cream headache.

 

Published by Laura

15 thoughts on “Parenting Article Fail”

  1. Speaking of kids and gratitude, “The Giving Tree” is the worst book for kids in the whole world that doesn’t involve a licensed character.

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    1. It’s worse than many books with licensed characters also. But whoever decided to novelize Legos isn’t helping.

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  3. The contrast between the “I know the rules” parenting listed by Chua & Thompson is interesting.

    Chua’s methods are designed to raise “superchildren” who will perform at Carnegie hall and go on to Harvard (and, I presume, supported in doing everything that doesn’t advance towards that goal (i.e. hothousing for the production of divas). It’s designed to develop talent

    Thompson’s style seems designed to produce children who will survive in the world without support (and potentially without any particular extra talent). Someone who can repair cars and computers, clean toilets, eat food they think is yechy, use good work habits to produce acceptable outcomes, . . . .

    I don’t think either was necessarily cruel, though, ’cause my suspicion is that both sets of parents could conveniently pat themselves on the back because their children could follow their rules, and potentially, thrive under them. I don’t know anything about the Thompson children, but I think there’s no reason to think the Chua children aren’t fine. The key isn’t that the rules will work for everyone (the smugness) but that it will work for some kids. The parents who aren’t cruel might change their rules if they had had a different set of kids (and, I think, Chua actually did for her 2nd child, even with as small a sample as 2)

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  4. I don’t really see that the parents here were cruel. There’s a lot to be said for self-sufficiency, as well as for freedom to screw up without being belittled. My parents required me to earn at least half the cost of any group trips I wanted to go on–marching band competitions, academic games national meetings, etc. They couldn’t have afforded to pay for everything anyway, so they weren’t simply refusing to support (financially) my activities on principle, but still…chores seem reasonable, and so do a lot of these other family rules. Did I miss something?

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  5. I think the doctrinaire no exceptions is where the cruelty potentially comes in, say, in you must eat what’s offered, or learn to fix your car, or do well in AP classes. At some point, those demands might stop being about teaching self-sufficiency, but asking something of your child they can’t do.

    But for children who handle the demands (both in practical terms and psychologically) I don’t see cruelty either. Amy Chua is expecting her child to be the best at whatever she sets out to do, Francis Thompson for his children to be self-sufficient and independent, even when he has the resources to ease their way. If a child doesn’t need help and can be the best at what they do (and has the psychological mettle to deal with the pressure), neither of those pressures is cruel.

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  6. fair enough. I guess I read it with the assumption that children who really *couldn’t* do what was required would lead the parents to modify their requirements.

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    1. I agree, that most parents will modify their requirements if they determine that their kids *can’t* follow the rules (including, I think, Chua/Thompson). I think part of the interest in these rules ideas circulating the nets is that the alternatives are the positive parenting models, in which you guide without requiring, never say no, . . . . I simply reject that style of parenting, and so find these rules interesting to hear about. But, I don’t think they’ll work for every child and that a good parent/teacher needs to modify their rules for the child. The danger of the circulating rules is that they give people who are not dealing with any particular child the idea that there’s a rule, and that a child not complying (eating their peas) is just not being parented properly (which may or may not be true).

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      1. Yeah, I don’t think that it would be reasonable to require an intellectually-disabled (not just delayed, nor dyslexic, etc) to take every AP class offered by the high school, for example. Honestly, it would have made my own sibling nuts and/or depressed, and this is someone who went on to finish high school and college and embark on a professional career. (And our high school only offered 6 AP classes: European history, American history, Chemistry, Calculus, and 2 years of AP English.)

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  8. I hate Rainbow Fish, even more than the giving tree. The wikipedia entry says that the author’s message was merely supposed to be about sharing, aimed at small children who don’t like to share. And I believe her. But, I think her development of the analogy of sharing your toys into giving away your desireable body parts (and, non-renewable ones, ’cause the fish ends up without the scales after they’ve given them away) goes pretty badly awry.

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