June 2007
Taking the Long View
Thirty Years of Parenting
Depending on your perspective, parenting 30 years ago was more: simple, relaxed, permissive, authoritative or dangerous. And it was less: stressful, complex, isolated, supported or media-driven.
As we at Seattle’s Child approach 30 years of offering practical parenting advice, we thought it worthwhile to talk to four people who have been on the front lines of parenting and teaching for the past three decades or more. While children are still the same wonderful, evolving individuals they’ve always been and parents still want to do their best to help them grow, the parenting climate has gone through some drastic changes.
The Pediatrician: T. Berry Brazelton
Dr. Brazelton, 89, has been the dean of pediatricians and parent advisors for decades, and has just published Touchpoints Birth to Three: Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development Second Edition/Fully Revised, with Joshua D. Sparrow, M.D. (Da Capo Press, 2006). He still keeps up a grueling travel schedule to speak to parents and health professionals around the country. Here are some of his thoughts on the changes parents face from our recent interview and from Touchpoints.
• Choices: On the surface, it looks as though parents and children have more choices – in schools, in food, in media outlets, Brazelton says. “But we’re being driven by big business. The question is, ‘Who does the deciding?’ In a way, choice is being taken away from them.” He agrees that the middle classes may have more choices in education, “but certainly not the lower classes.”
• Co-sleeping: “The rest of the world co-sleeps. In the past 10 to 15 years, we’re getting a lot more aware that people are away from their children all day. They need time at night with them; we’re viewing it with more compassion. The question is, ‘How do we get them out of the bed?’ Rituals for when a child must leave the family bed would be good to set up.”
• Toilet-training: “Elimination communication is a new term for the traditional practice of carrying a baby close throughout much of the day, which allows parents to respond to babies’ physical cues when they need to urinate or move their bowels.” Using diapers and parents initiating toilet training are adaptations to being outside the home and not carrying babies around, Brazelton says. He advocates a more “child-oriented approach” to toilet-training in which parents “wait until the child shows readiness and excitement, so that each step is then a success for the child.”
• Health: “Specialists are saving ever smaller premature infants and other desperately imperiled young lives” and “fetal surgery can sometimes even repair defects,” Brazelton writes in the newest Touchpoints. However, he points to new challenges in the current epidemics of asthma, autism and obesity. “Pediatricians must pay more attention to obesity prevention,” he says. “But we have various kinds of bias in approaching parents. Some want their kids to have enough because they’ve been starving themselves.”
• Stress: Brazelton believes parents are under much more stress than they were in previous decades, as the world is more complex and challenging. He cites changes in family structure and women’s roles (including more dual careers and single parent families); feelings of loneliness and isolation; less time for family rituals, such as sharing meals; lack of values beyond money, power or war; and failures in the education and medical systems. “There’s stress about 9/11 and the national culture of war and violence and aggression and violence in TV and video games,” he adds. “Manmade disasters, added to the natural ones, and new forms of terrorism have forced parents – and children – to find new strategies for coping, and new strengths,” he writes. “In these uncertain times, we can give our children hope by modeling – with our own small acts of generosity – the ways that they, too, can do what they can to help.”
The Principal: George Hofbauer
George Hofbauer came to St. Joseph’s School on Capitol Hill 33 years ago and still loves teaching eighth graders. He has been the principal for the past three decades. He finds today’s kids easier to teach and to engage in learning, even as they become more overscheduled and distracted by technology.
• The Students: “Thirty years ago, Capitol Hill was the ‘Catholic ghetto’ – we filled the school with people from a few blocks around; they were middle class, with large families and the homes were more reasonably priced. Many of the students were the eighth, ninth or tenth child in the family; the parents were kind of tired. I find it easier to teach the kids now. They’re more polite, more caring, more attentive, more engaged. I see a stronger and stronger desire to succeed. It’s not only OK, but it’s good to achieve. There’s not the same formality there was 30 years ago between students and teachers.” Three decades ago, more kids were in trouble or on drugs, Hofbauer says. “There were a lot more wild things going on.”
• Over-scheduling: “There isn’t as much free time as there used to be. Their time is so scheduled now. To compete in sports, you have to go year-round and have lessons. Kids have to have pocket planners because there’s so much more for them to organize and to keep track of and manage.”
• Technology: “So much stuff is being thrown at kids – iPods, TVs, DVDs, blizzards of information and sensory overload. It’s more and more common for them to have cell-phones and to be texting all night long. It hurts their writing ability. I think all of the technology emphasizes quantity over quality in relationships. It’s harder to reach them on a feeling level.” Hofbauer does see a backlash from parents, as more are taking away text privileges from cell phones and not allowing students to have their own e-mail accounts. He also notes that when he first came to the school, there were two phones and three lines out of the building. Now each staff member has his or her own e-mail; there are 20 phone lines; and everyone has a cell phone. “Parental contact is now very high.”
• Academic Competition: “All the kids are trying to get into nonpublic high schools,” Hofbauer notes. “There is a premium placed on education by families who are paying for education and sharing their expectations with their children. Sometimes they’re trying to develop the perfect child. There are so many more educational choices. The high school entrance process is bigger than the college one in many ways. Kids shouldn’t have to go through that.”
• Learning Styles: “We’re seeing more and more children entering school with different learning needs. Some kids need to be physically active, or to read, or to talk among themselves or to write. Teachers must be able to teach to all of the learning styles. For children to succeed, we have to tell them, ‘You have this style, but these are the other things that have to be done. The teacher is like a cook, inviting all these people together – ones with allergies and vegetarians and ones who want seafood – and having to prepare it all in one meal. Teaching is harder than it used to be.”
The Parent Educator: Jan Faull
Jan Faull, with three children, ages 23 to 36, has been a fixture on the local parenting scene for the past 30 years and is now working as a parent educator, Saturday columnist for The Seattle Times and television commentator. She is the author of Mommy! I Have to Go Potty! A Parents Guide to Toilet Training (Parenting Press, 1996) and Unplugging Power Struggles: Resolving Emotional Battles with Your Kids (Parenting Press, 2000). She spoke with us about balancing previous extremes in parenting advice and the increasing demands on today’s parents.
• Discipline: “Thirty years ago, parents struggled with not wanting to discipline our children as we had been disciplined, and yet we weren’t sure what we wanted to do,” she says. She cites the extremes of the child-centered approach put forth by Dorothy Briggs in Your Child’s Self-Esteem and the more parent-oriented philosophy of James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline, both published in 1970. Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton were huge influences on Faull, as she sought for a balance. “Penelope Leach (Your Baby and Child, 1977, 1988, 1997; Your Growing Child, 1986) changed the look of parenting with the advice to look at the child and his stage of development, not just what I as a parent need at this time,” she says. “I think we went from an authoritative to a permissive extreme and now we’re back to the middle. I advise parents that they sometimes need to be authoritative and step in and sometimes need to drop back and let the child get a handle on something themselves.” She uses the term “helicopter parent” for one who hovers too close all of the time and “satellite parent” for one who is too far away and does not intervene enough. “I advocate a ‘Blue Angel’ approach where you move in and out, as the situation requires,” she adds.
• Potty Training: “This used to be a parent’s accomplishment: ‘I got my child potty-trained.’ Then we looked at it from the child’s point of view. Now we’re in between. We tell the child, ‘You do need to do this, and I’m here to help.’”
• Competitiveness: There is more academic competition to get children into the right preschool or school, Faull acknowledges. “A lot of parents push their kids for their own aggrandizement,” she says. “The question should be, ‘How can I do the best for her and her temperament?’ At the same time, there’s the stress of not wanting to miss the boat.” Talking about the competitive push to teach preschoolers, she adds, “Early learning isn’t about academics. It’s about getting ready. Parents don’t realize how important they are to their children’s learning.”
• Media Influence: “The whole influence of the Internet, media, and cell phones for kids has changed parenting,” she says. For example, with e-mail, parents now get all of a child’s school assignments and get pulled daily into homework, so that the child may not take responsibility for his own work. On the positive side, cell phones make it easier to keep track of kids. The proliferation of media entertainment coupled with fear for our children’s safety – which Faull calls the ‘Stranger-Danger Myth’ – has resulted in “vicarious entertainment, vicarious experiences, taking the place of the real thing.”
The Preschool Teacher: Sandi Dexter
Sandi Dexter attended the Wedgwood Cooperative Preschool with her son, now 30, and she has been the lead teacher there for the past two decades. (Her grandson is now in her toddler class). Over the years, she’s seen hundreds of toddlers and preschoolers come and go. Their developmental issues don’t change, but differences in their environmental have altered the ways they look at the world – in good ways and bad.
• Media and Merchandising: “There are more opportunities now for children to explore things that may not be good for them. It used to be Mister Rogers and Sesame Street; now there are so many more choices,” Dexter says. “I do think parents are aware of the inappropriateness of too much screen time. The computer stuff is huge; we make a supreme effort to teach parents that that’s not the best way for small children to learn.” Marketing and merchandising are so much more dominant, Dexter observes: “Children are consumers.” Whether it’s dinosaurs or Thomas the Tank Engine or the latest Disney characters, “there’s pressure on parents to buy into the whole thematic package” in books, furniture, toys, clothes and household items. “Because of merchandising, there’s much more scripted play. A fish toy has to be “Nemo” (from the Disney film, Finding Nemo) and act like Nemo and follow that script. I go around the room and ask the children to tell me their story, and a lot of the time it’s someone else’s story, not their story. They can’t always think outside the box.”
• Family Dynamics: “People are trying to juggle more things now than we used to do 30 years ago – like being a lab parent (participating in the preschool as one of the parent/teachers one day a week) and working part-time. There are so many stressors on families because of the cost of living; it’s harder to buy a home. Parents are being more creative in working out the family dynamic – how to do work and how to do parenting.” One result has been a definite increase in involved dads, Dexter notices. “At Wedgwood, we have a dad on the board and we have a number of dads who are the participating parents. Last week, I had three dads and a grandpa working in the classroom.”
• Physical Development: “Kids (babies and toddlers) are not spending enough time on the floor now, and are having physical and neurological problems. They go from one thing to another thing to another and they’re always contained. If they’re not on the floor moving around on their own, they don’t get a sense of where their body is in space.” On the other hand, she says parents in her coop preschool do still have a great understanding of the importance of play, and want to see their children up and moving around and using hands-on manipulatives. She and other coop teachers are seeing a higher incidence of autism and sensory-motor integration issues and are picking up on developmental issues earlier.
• Support and Enrichment: “One of the wonderful things about having a child today is all the organizations for support,” Dexter says, citing PEPS (Program for Early Parent Support), Mom and Baby dance classes, Little Gym and story times at libraries. “There are more places designed with parents in mind.” She praises the “incredible growth of fine literature for children” as well as “more opportunities for children to experience great life lessons and world views.” She points out that the Seattle Children’s Museum, and many other local children’s museums and attractions, did not exist 30 years ago.
Wenda Reed is managing editor of Seattle’s
Child and has been writing for the magazine for 11 years. Her own
parenting perspective is 25 years long.
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