In "A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting," Hara Estroff Marano spares no detail telling us that snowplow parenting is risky business, shortsighted and selfish, even stupid.
Parents, gird your loins. This is not bedtime reading. Marano lays out a scary story.
Protective parents have morphed into "death-grip" parents who hold on to their children so tightly that nothing is left to chance, raising them in "hothouses" where every aspect of life is under parental control. The normal course of child development gets short shrift, if it's not completely short-circuited. The results, writes Marano, are "teacup kids": "Without opportunities to experience [for] themselves, to develop and call on their own inner resources, to test their own limits, to develop confidence in themselves as problem-solvers, they are fragile and shatter easily."
Researchers, educators, and authors before Marano have been saying in one way or another for a number of years that childhood is in trouble, particularly because of a cultural devaluing of imaginative play. They have linked the loss of play to a demise in creativity and self-esteem. Marano takes it a step further: She claims that nothing less than the survival of democracy and, indeed, all of humanity is at stake.
Marano, the former editor of Psychology Today, lays out cogent arguments. Chapter 7, "Crisis on the Campus," shows that our country is churning out a well-credentialed generation of people who can't - and often don't want to - think for themselves. "College is where the fragility factor is having its greatest impact," she writes. "By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. . . . There isn't a meeting of college presidents where the subject of student mental health doesn't come up."
Afraid to take risks, afraid to fail, these students don't know who they are. Extensions of their parents? Trophies for their parents? They don't even know how to separate long enough to figure it out.
