Which 'brand' of parent are you?
Wednesday 19th of February 2014 | Category: Opinion | Written by: Leoarna MathiasWho our kids will end up being will be decided by an incredibly complex mix of factors. We cannot really ever know how our approach to encouraging our children, to disciplining them, our use of childcare, or how much we allow others to have influence over them, or the interest we show in their school career or hobbies, or, or, or...or any other aspect of our parenting make-up, is really going to shape our children into the adults they will one day be. It’s all just a little too blended for the truth to ever really be known.
Last week in The Telegraph, Judith Woods cast a somewhat cynical eye over the Swedish brand of parenting, often over-simplistically labelled as permissive or laissez-faire. To quote directly from Judith’s piece;
'A best-selling Swedish academic has concluded that permissive parenting is creating a generation of arrogant young adults who lack social empathy, personal resilience and, after a childhood of pampering, are destined to be bitterly disappointed in life.'
Scandinavia and the UK
The academic involved, Psychiatrist David Eberhard, believes that the problem 'began with stigmatising the punishment of children and mutated into a fear of disciplining them, which is what parents are supposed to do.' Now it is true to say that the Scandinavians do approach child-rearing differently to us here in the UK. But it may just be a generalisation too far to say that all of Sweden’s social problems (that actually aren’t that different to our own, or any other first world nations', for that matter) are borne out of the Swedes' approach to boundary-setting. For me, Judith’s first mistake was to throw baby out with the proverbial bath water; Swedish adults are all messed up because their parents never said no to them, is just a little too crude an interpretation of the evidence. Judith is also worried that all this gentleness and permissiveness is going to infiltrate here too.
I came across the article via the timeline of a friend on facebook, and the discussion that followed there was probably more interesting than the article itself. One wise mum, Sophie, commented, 'Permissive parenting is different from gentle parenting. The latter is all about setting appropriate limits in a sensitive and calm way. Discipline not punishment. The former is about a misinterpretation of gentle parenting and consequently appropriate limits are not set and there's inconsistency. The author said she didn't want to sound smug, but I think she did.' As my friend-of- a-friend implies, nowhere does it say that a gentle parent can’t be a firm one.
Mixing Up
I would elsewhere take issue with Judith’s piece as she confusingly mixes up permissive parenting with an implied criticism of how late Swedish children start their schooling (they are typically 6 or 7 when they begin). She quotes Wendy Ellyat, (with whom I have worked), a woman who works tirelessly challenges the, as she sees it, developmentally damaging excesses of the UK schooling system. Where Judith may have gone wrong is in not familiarising herself with the enormous bank of research (not just one study) that indicates that it can indeed be harmful to begin school at the age British children typically do.
The other thing we can say for certain is that the Scandinavians, and in particular the Swedes, do have a heavy reliance on group day care settings, such as nurseries, for their very young children. In his book Affluenza Oliver James travels the world examining the nature of childhood in many different cultures. When he stops off in Sweden, he questions their over-reliance on being able to put their children into the fee-free nurseries from the age of six months. While it powers their ecomony, in the sense that it allows mothers back to work, he wonders, as have many other academics, about the impact upon their children’s development. Now, I would again exercise caution in assuming that A plus B must therefore equal C, but in our own look at choosing day care we made reference to a rigorously researched piece in The Guardian from 2010, that suggests there may be some link between excessive hours in group day care under the age of 2, and behavioural problems later on. We Brits are currently, by virtue of the policy push of our politicians and the constraints of our economy, being pushed down a similar route, whereby we hand over our children to the care of others for a chunk of every working day. Let me be clear; there is nothing inherently wrong in this, if we are wise in our choice of whom and for how long, but the emotional heartache that inevitably goes along with it can be hard to bear.
Returning to Judith Woods in The Telegraph, she finishes her piece with less condescension than she begins with, by admitting that,
'Most sane parents muddle along in the middle because rearing children is an art, not a science. I will readily admit that I don’t always get it right. I’m not even sure I mostly get it right, but it doesn’t stop me trying.'
And for me, it is in this last sentence that she finally hits the best of the nails right on the head. Good enough parenting is really all about the effort one puts in, and the trying to get it right one does. Eventually, however flawed we feel ourselves to be, our children will see that we were doing our best, and that at least on occasion, we got things absolutely right.
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