We live in the era of hyperparentingsince never before had there been so much information about parenting, and paradoxically, never had so much guilt been felt. The fact that some parents are terrified of giving a bad answer, a separation or too much screen time will irreversibly ruin their children. But the truth is that we are overprotecting children.
An expert. Faced with this anxiety, child psychologist Ana Aznarauthor of ‘Educating also means saying no’proposes a paradigm shift: realistic parenting. His thesis is that overprotection is creating a generation with low tolerance for frustration and that parents need to regain authority (not authoritarianism). And given this, science has a lot to say about the true weight that parental decisions have in children’s adult lives.
The myth of determinism. One of the greatest sources of anxiety in these cases may be the idea that what happens in childhood is an immutable destiny. But this is not entirely the case. A classic study that followed thousands of people born in 1958 and 1970 pointed out that all childhood variables together, such as economic status, family traits or health, only explain between 2.8% and 6.8% of the variability in life satisfaction at age 30.
This does not mean that childhood does not matter, of course it does. The evidence indicates that human development is cumulative and plastic, causing subsequent factors to take a greater step in the adult phase. With this we we refer to adolescencethe first social relationships or the work environment that have great weight.
Paradox of overprotection. Although the pretext, which is basically to avoid the child’s suffering, the truth is that this style of education has important side effects. This is something that has been validated by sciencewhich found that parental overprotection is positively associated with internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression.
The mechanism is perverse in this case, because by “clearing the path” of obstacles, we prevent the child from Build your frustration tolerance. Recent studies link intrusive parental overinvolvement with less autonomy and poorer emotional adjustment in adulthood. This means that making a child never get frustrated by being in a constant cloud makes the adult break down at the first “no” in real life like at work.
The problem of screens. Currently one of the big questions is when to give the mobile phone to children for the first time. Science suggests that the important thing is to offer it but educate about its use from the first moment.
A study on the Canadian population showed a clear relationship here: exceeding 2 hours a day of recreational time in front of screens is associated with a greater probability of anxiety and psychosocial difficulties.
The real thing. However, the key nuance provided by organizations such as the American Pediatric Association is displacement. The problem is not always the pixels themselves, but what the child stop doing by looking at the screen: sleeping less, moving less and socializing less face to face.
The strategy backed by science is not just to “remove your cell phone”, but to “fill your life” with alternatives such as sports, sleep or free play and monitor the quality of the content, rather than obsessing only with the stopwatch.
The conflict. Something that can be deeply internalized in families is that witnessing a divorce within the family destroys a child. But the reality is that the most important thing is the climate of coexistence as a study that analyzed hundreds of families points out.
This clearly showed that the quality of the relationship between parents, such as support or the absence of hostile conflict, is a much more reliable predictor of child well-being than whether or not they live with both biological parents. In this way, a home with two parents in constant war is, according to PMC data, a more toxic environment for the development of children than having a single-parent family where there is calm.
Images | Christian Mai
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