I don’t know why.
And I am not sure when it happened.
But I ask my peers – parents with children still at home – if they spend more time, energy, and money parenting than their parents did. They always say, “Yes.” I have heard and read about this trend towards relentless and intensive parenting. I have lived it.
My daughter plays club soccer. It is expensive, but that is not the most painful part. The worst is how time consuming it is. In August we traveled down to San Diego for a soccer tournament with matches on Saturday and Sunday. Then the woman’s professional team in town invited all the girls to come watch a pro match for free Sunday afternoon (but other family members had to buy their own tickets). We left Friday afternoon and got back late Sunday evening. The whole thing cost somewhere around $1,000, with the majority of the cost in hotel rooms ($335 after taxes and parking per night room with breakfast for two nights, plus gas + meals + incidental costs). But after some 48 hours of non-stop soccer activity I was exhausted. Weekends like this happen relatively often. I look at our family calendar chocked full of parent-led youth activities and I sigh.
Parenting, in one guise or another, has taken over my life and that of my wife. It sucks the life energy right out of us.
My sister was an all-state CIF soccer player who went on to play for her university’s D1 team back in the late 1980s. But my parents never paid or spent that much time in her youth soccer efforts. My sister did most of it by herself, without the string of weekends spent away from home in hotels at soccer tournaments. But my sister spends oodles of time on her own daughter’s youth sports efforts and has done so for many long years. And my sister spends way more time, energy, and money on my niece’s sports than I do. It boggles the mind how much it costs the upper middle class suburban mom to try and be all the things to all people in the ultra-intensive parenting of today. My sister does not have a job, and that is a good thing; her parenting duties seem like a full-time job. But the bottom line is this: our parents did not work as hard as my sister and I do, and we are far from unusual in this. Almost all the parents around me are super involved parents. For his part, my father angrily says he thinks these youth sports coaches today are unreasonable in their exorbitant demands on family time. He thinks the huge commitment of time, money, and energy these coaches demand is absurd. He claims it has gone way too far. I tend to agree with him. Yet I engage in the practice my parents never countenanced.
And my mother and father back in the 1970s and 80s were excellent parents. I don’t blame them for not spending more time than they did on us. In fact, I think I would have disliked that. “Mom, get a life of your own! And stop obsessing over mine,” I might have said to my mother if she had become fixated on growing my list of extracurriculars and insisted on driving me to yet another activity. (I mostly rode my bike to my sports commitments.) As an emerging adult I was given agency and that was important. I had “skin in the game.” My parents encouraged and helped me, but I took control of the direction of my life from early adolescence on. It would be hard to underestimate how crucial this was for me. I was not cursed with “helicopter parents.”
Perhaps this is a class issue. Affluent parents sink unbelievable amounts of time and money into parenting, in the competitive effort to have offspring achieve on campus and off, and so gain entrance to competitive colleges and succeed in the race of life. Parents with fewer resources – who might be overwhelmed just holding a job and paying the rent – tend to spend less time cultivating their children’s enrichment. I come across huge amounts of parents who pay little attention at all to their offspring. Some kids virtually raise themselves.
Regardless, I myself find parenting exhausting. It takes way more of my life’s energy than it did my own father. I am not sure when things changed or why, but they have changed. Has it gone too far? I don’t know. I think if you looked at the choices I have made I might be the picture of an uber-involved parent whose children have substantially and directly benefited from my constant presence in their lives. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” a critic might say. Fair enough.
But I keep reminding myself that I need to dial back my involvement in my kid’s lives as they get older. “A strong leader makes for a weak people,” was the critique of dictatorships in the time of Stalin and Mao. Can the same be said about children? “An over-involved parent makes for an under-invested kid,” you might extrapolate. But I don’t think that is true. Most kids raised in a “hot-house” environment with huge amounts of support do thrive in life, in my experience. And it is the rare kid who is a success story doing it all by himself. Young people who don’t have parents worthy of the name usually flail: this is what I have witnessed.
But I can only really speak for myself and my family. I have been a super-involved parent for the past 17 or so years. And I believe those early years were the crucial ones. “What is well begun is half done.” You have to get the beginning of any important ventures done well: from conception to some six years of age is where all the most important parenting gets done, in my opinion. So get it done during those years, for sure. And I did. In spades. It took over my life, more or less. Parenting has taken its pound of flesh.
But now my daughters are almost 14 and 17-years old. It is time to offload the heavy lifting of moving forward to them. I will always love and support my daughters. Even when they are independent adults living their own lives, they are still my children and always will be. But it is their lives, not mine. They make their own choices. They walk their own paths. I hope to recede into the background, as they emerge into the forefront. This is important.
Successful parents make themselves redundant. They raise kids who arrive to adulthood able to take care of themselves. In contrast, it is the peril of being a “helicopter parent” that your children are in college texting you for advice and support on a nearly daily basis. If your kids are still emotionally and financially dependent on you as they approach 30, and even beyond that, have you failed them as a parent? I don’t wish that.
I know, I know. “You write about parenting all the time,” you might say, esteemed reader. “Rich. You are a ‘one-tune Charlie.'” It is true. Apart from parenting and sports and a few other subjects I’m not sure I know much about anything.
But my blog is where I work out what is on my mind, so I revisit some themes again and again. Being a dad is one of those subjects close to my heart. I wrestle with what to do and why, and so I work out my concerns through writing.
Because my God, I could forgive myself for screwing up any number of important endeavors in life. But I would not screw up the raising of my daughters. I want to get that right. And if I have done the early stages of parenting well, I want to finish the latter ones well, too.
God help me.
