Commitment: Why did you title your book, A Nation of Wimps? Why are we ending up with children who are wimps, and how would you define a 'wimp'? What are some of the most dangerous parenting techniques and behaviors you've witnessed that contribute to creating a 'wimp'?

 

Hara Estroff Marano: I use the term "wimp" to mean psychologically fragile. in 2002, while putting out a newsletter on depression for Psychology Today, I discovered what I called The Crisis on the Campus. It made headlines all over the country. How colleges are reeling from the number of kids who are developing serious psychological problems. 

 

In early 2004 I went back to all my sources (400 men and women who were manning campus counseling centers all around the country) and found that things had only gotten worse. More kids suffering. More severe problems. Major depression, Anxiety disorders. Panic attacks. Eating disorders, especially among the girls, which are really disorders of perfectionism. Self-mutilation. Binge-drinking. I began seriously asking why.
 

And the answer, in December 2004, was an article in Psychology Today magazine called A Nation of Wimps. It just hit a nerve. The article wound up being expanded into the book.

 

The directors and counselors at the campus counseling centers all said the same thing. Many of the students coming in lacked coping skills. And so they were easily overwhelmed by the slightest difficulty. 

 

Increasingly, kids are not allowed to develop coping skills because all the lumps and bumps are being taken out of life for them. They never have to figure their own way through any little challenges of life. And then they hit a little impediment and they fall apart. They have never had to learn to solve problems.

 

Their parents hover and clear the path for them, and they take over task. If a child leaves a book or paper or a uniform at home, the parent runs it over to school. If a child gets a grade or performs in a way that disappoints, the parent doesn’t turn to the kid and ask, how do you feel about your performance, or what do you need to do as well as you want.
 

The parent calls the school to get the grade changed. Or, what may be worse in the long run, the parent says, second best isn’t good enough. Today’s parents do this because they are highly anxious about their kids’ achievement. But then, once the kids leave the protective cocoon of home for college, they break down psychologically. They are psychologically fragile, which is what I mean by wimps.

 

So the big question to consider is, why is it that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them? And that is the question my book sets out to answer: Why are overinvolvement and overprotection so bad for kids?

 

Parents, like lovers, must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. The evidence is that in the past decade, they've stepped way over the line into controlling and solving their kids’ problems for them. And they find a million ways to justify it. They're worried about their kids' success. Or their safety.

 

Commitment: Why are children nowadays more overprotected and overmanaged by their parents than in previous generations?  Isn't there simply a lot more dangers for kids out there nowadays, and so parents need to be ever vigiliant? 

 

Hara: There are a lot fewer dangers, but they get blown up way out of proportion. Parents are, for example, extremely worried about child abduction. But the likelihood of an abduction is minuscule, and most abductions are by relatives or disgruntled ex-spouses. Child sexual victimization is another  fear blown vastly out of proportion to its actual occurrence. Department of Justice data show that as parental hysteria over sexual predators has escalated, child victimization has dropped 50%.

I'm not making this up. There is a huge reservoir of parental anxiety and it gets fixated on things that are not necessarily real problems. 

 

Parents are basically worried about their kids' future success (in replicating their own lifestyle). The adults k now that the world has changed on their watch. They know their kid is not just competing with the neighbor's kid for a job but with the kids in Mumbai. 

 

The parents we are talking about (middle class and above) generally love their kids. They want them to succeed in life. They know that the world has changed on their watch. None of us knows what the world is going to look like in 10 years.
Parents are worried that their kids somehow will be left behind. Not all kids, but MY kid. That they won't achieve the parents’ standard of living.

So they push them to achieve. In school. On the soccer field. They schedule their days. They try to cram everything in that might give them a shot at success. They take away free play and recess because they look like a waste of time. They create a hothouse and hover over the kids.

 

And from the achievements of the children, whether in school or on the soccer field, parents now take their meaning and their status. That, I think, is something new. An erosion of boundaries between parent and child. A fusion of identity. WE won. WE got into Harvard. Parents are living through their children in a way that has not been seen before. For freshman student orientation, the University of Vermont  has had to hire parent bouncers to keep the parents out of sessions designed exclusively for their kids, you know, like about sex and condom use..

Summer camps are finding that parents won’t leave on visiting day. In many arenas, there's lots of evidence that parents increasingly insist on taking part in the activities of their children. 

 

There’s this huge anxiety-driven emotional investment in the kids that leaves no room for the kids discover themselves or experience themselves, because parents take over. The kids have no real sense of self other than the ability to perform to adult standards and to please them.
 

But openly exposing the kids to adult anxieties creates fragility in the kids. It directly makes kids anxious. To double the whammy, the kids have never been allowed to develop coping skills, because all the lumps and bumps are being taken out of life for them. Without coping skills, they are easily overwhelmed.

 

I also think that parents are anxious to make their kids happy—but they have a completely mistaken idea about how you achieve happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of doing things other than looking for happiness. It comes from working towards challenging goals where the outcome is uncertain.

In the brain, maximum positive feelings are generated, and negative feelings turned off, not after you reach a goal but as you approach a challenging goal, one you’re not 100 percent certain you can reach, one where you have to muster all your resources and stretch, in that last final sprint towards it. There is no happiness without challenge and risk and growth.

 

 

Hara: The evidence I used was the evidence from America's college campuses, showing that kids are increasingly breaking down once they left the protective cocoon of home for college. Colleges can't fake this phenomenon. They experience a demand for services and resources and they have to provide some kind of help, because no student can learn if his brain is hijacked by depression or anxiety or some other problem.

 

There are various measures that colleges use: an annual survey of campus counseling center directors, surveys of student mental health done by the American college health association, head counts on demand for services by students, numbers of incidents (such as breakdowns) of various kinds. I track all these data in the book to draw the conclusion that by any way you measure it, there is more psychological fragility among young people today than there was a decade or two ago. 

 

 

Hara: In all relationships, these are the two issues that we struggle with. To nurture is to provide help and support but not determine the outcome; you respect the autonomy of the person you are nurturing. But sometimes we get impatient. Or someone wants something different from what we want. Then relationships begin to get difficult and negotiation has to take place between two people's needs.

So there is often the temptation to exert some kind of control; it is often more efficient. But it comes at the cost of autonomy.

 

And, in adult relationships, usually at the cost of resentment; control is ultimately corrosive. But when parents exert control over children, and children don't know any other way, they become compliant. That is not the way to create adults who can eventually sustain a democracy or an economy, which increasingly depends on innovation.

 

 

Hara: You don't create an independent child overnight. Children don't just turn 21 and automatically become independent. You have to gradually prepare children for independence. You have to gradually let out the leash. This is a very inefficient process requiring some understanding of your own child and his/her readiness for next steps, and it requires some trust in the child's ability. But it is necessary. Trust is especially important. 

 

Children fail to develop independence when they have been unprepared for it, when they have not been allowed to experience and practice all the little steps towards it. Then it seems almost overwhelming, and you have kids who are eager to move back home after college (and parents who are so emotionally invested in their children that they are willing to welcome them).

But such kids lack the coping skills and the confidence to function on their own; the confidence is gained only by having the opportunity to learn to do things on your own and discover that you can do them.

 

The protectionism that takes all the lumps and bumps out of life for kids rests on a notion of children’s frailty—the assumption that children are easily bruised.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact is, too much protectionism CREATES frailty. Not only do children fail to develop coping skills for life’s vicissitudes, and fall apart when they hit a speed bump, kids come to think that something must really be wrong with them if they need so much protection.

 

 

Hara: I have not criticized the motivation of parents to protect their children. All parents want the best for their kids. But there is such a thing as overprotection, and the data clearly show that it cripples kids. So if you take the long view—which is absolutely essential in parenting—then you understand that overprotecting kids now ONLY defers their hurts until later.

 

Kids in previous generations were indeed exposed to different emotional experiences. There are many parents who used to believe it was harmful to show love or affection for their children. These children grew up with certain emotional challenges.
 

But they didn't fall apart in droves the way today's kids are doing, and they didn't all fall apart at the same time, when they left the protective cocoon of home for college. Other generations largely experienced emotional difficulties when they got into adult-adult relationships.

And remember, for the most part they didn't experience the lack of basic life coping skills many of today's kids do, and they were more emotionally resilient. they also understood that 

 

 

Hara: Happiness is a byproduct of doing things other than looking for happiness. It comes from working towards challenging goals where the outcome is uncertain. In the brain, maximum positive feelings are generated, and negative feelings turned off, not after you reach a goal but as you approach a challenging goal, one you’re not 100 percent certain you can reach, one where you have to muster all your resources and stretch, in that last final sprint towards it.
 

There is no happiness without challenge and risk and growth. And challenge and risk are the very things overprotective parents want to remove from their children's lives. 

 

If we allow children to take on the lumps and bumps of life, we allow failure, which is a great teacher. Kids need to learn that it’s OK to feel badly sometimes. Because we learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences.
 

Through failure we learn how to cope. We learn WHAT we can cope with. And beyond a certain age, we learn more from failure than from success. This is hot off the presses, the very latest info on adolescent development. Children over 12 learn better from their mistakes than from their successes. Around age 12, the brain switches learning strategies.

It makes sense that learning from mistakes is an acquired ability. Learning from mistakes is complicated. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible. It takes some analytical skills. And they start coming online around age 12. 

 

 

Hara: Of course. Let them have their own experiences. Allow them to fail sometimes; let them learn that the world doesn't come to an end.

 

 

Hara: By never trusting a child to navigate the real world, parents are breeding an outsize fear of that world. Children need to do some things on their own and to gain the coping skills of doing things and the confidence that they CAN handle things on their own.

 

 

Hara: The value of play is almost entirely counterintuitive. Play looks like a waste of time. Notice that I said LOOKS LIKE. Because it is not goal-directed. That is the very essence of play. It’s activity that’s not goal-directed. And we adults are goal-directed.

So parents now trivialize kids’ play. It gets in the way of other things they want to do on their way to achievement, a goal they also very much want for their kids and are very worried about these days.

 

But play turns out to be critical neurologically. And that is the great hidden secret of play.
 

Research reveals that vigorous play turns on genes in the brain and it acts in specific areas. It generates the production of a nerve growth factor called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), and it does it in the frontal cortex of the brain, the executive control center of the brain.  
 

BDNF is well recognized as the key modulator of nerve cell development, the creation of new nerve cells, called neurogenesis, and the branching of nerve cells that literally gives us behavioral flexibility. 

 

What play does, by stimulating neurogenesis, is hasten the development of the frontal cortex. It solidifies the executive functions of the brain. In other words, it fosters the maturation of the very centers of the brain that allow children to exert control over attention and to regulate their emotions and to control their behavior.
 

Here is the very subtle trick that nature plays: it uses something that‘s NOT goal-directed to create the very mental machinery for children to BE goal-directed. It creates the inhibitory circuitry of self-regulation and attention.

 

Because play does this, lack of sufficient play may result in the impulse control problems we label ADHD. And vigorous play may be the very specific solution for the puzzle of the sudden explosion in diagnosis of ADHD, the most common childhood psychiatric problem in America. 

 

These findings are emerging just as free play is vanishing. America’s parents and schools are removing recess and play in the belief that less time for play leaves more time for study. Play has been sacrificed to the mistaken, mechanistic belief that the path to educational efficiency is straight and narrow and runs in a very rigid curriculum. This is a kind of ACADEMIC FUNDAMENTALISM totally incongruent with the nature of human nature and child development.

 

Commitment: What can a parent do who may suddenly realize they have already raised a wimpy, fragile child, but want to now better prepare their child for life? How can an "Alpha Mom" change her parenting techniques?

 

Hara: By backing off. By encouraging her child to have experiences of his own. By not solving their problems for them; by asking the child how he or she would solve the problem, and allowing him/her to do so, even if it doesn't seem like the perfect solution. By letting him/her know you have confidence in his ability to handle things. 

 

About the Author: Hara Estroff Marano is an award-winning writer and editor-at-large for “Psychology Today.” Her articles have appeared in many other publications, including “The New York Times” “The Los Angeles Times” and “New York” magazine. She writes a regular advice column for “Psychology Today” called “Unconventional Wisdom” and is a columnist for msn.com. To learn more about this subject, visit www.nationofwimps.com

 

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