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"As so-called hyperparenting continues to dominate modern childrearing with its flash cards, over-programming, hovering and handholding, a number of conscientious objectors are taking a big step back," writes Tralee Pearce in The free-range child.
"They are not slacker parents — they don't celebrate 3 p.m. martinis and serve Happy Meals for dinner.
"But they are returning to a parenting style in which kids' time is filled with free play, unsupervised activities and plenty of downtime. Some call it free-range parenting.
"In his new book Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, Canadian philosopher and writer Carl Honoré wrestles with his own well-intended overparenting and taps into a number of schools and families inspired by the free-range child.
Carl Honoré
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'Hyperparenting is a kind of bizarre cultural perfect storm,' he says. "All these remarkable and in themselves not evil trends have come together to produce the moment of collective hysteria about children and collective panic that touches everything we do with childhood."
Mr. Honoré was online earlier to take your questions on hyperparenting, why he thinks it fails our children and how we can do better.
Your questions and Mr. Honore's answers appear at the bottom of this page.
Carl Honoré was born in Scotland, but grew up in Canada. After graduating from Edinburgh University, he spent time working with street children in Brazil. Since 1991, he has worked as a journalist, writing from all over Europe and South America. His articles have appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic: the Economist, Observer, National Post, The Globe and Mail, Houston Chronicle and Miami Herald. At the moment, he lives in London with his wife and their two children. His most recent book, Under Pressure, is available in stores now.
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Rasha Mourtada, Globe Life web editor: Welcome, Mr. Honoré , and thank you for joining us today. What do you think are the overarching effects of hyper-parenting? What's your best advice to parents on how to achieve balance?
Carl Honoré : Thank you for having me!
Given the time, money and energy that we are plowing into our kids, we should be witnessing the emergence of the happiest, healthiest, brightest children the world has ever seen. But that's not what's happening. Just look around. Child obesity rates have rocketed. Athletic kids are suffering from sports injuries at younger ages. The number of children on medication to alter their mood or behaviour has soared. Child depression and anxiety - and the substance abuse, self- harm and suicide that often go along with it - are now most prevalent not in the urban ghettos where families struggle to make ends meet but in the leafy suburbs where the go-getting middle-classes are project- managing their kids.
We're also starting to see the first children coming out the other end of the assembly line that is modern childhood and many of them struggled to stand on their own two feet. Every moment of their childhood has been so micromanaged, supervised, structured and measured by adults that they don't know how to cope on their own. University counselling services are overwhelmed by students going to pieces. You hear of 19-year-olds handing the cellphone over to the professor and saying "Sort this out with my mum." And the umbilical cord remains intact even after graduation: Parents are now turning up at job interviews to help negotiate salaries and vacation packages! And in all this striving and anxiety we're also losing the simple joy of being a child, of seeing a world in a grain of sand and holding infinity in the palm of your hand. The joy has been squeezed out of parenthood, too.
As parents, we need to realize that child-rearing is not a cross between a competitive sport and product development. Children are not lumps of putty to be moulded into whatever we desire; they are people and big part of parenting is discovering who your children are rather than forcing them into being what you want them to be. We need to shut out the sound and fury that surrounds childhood today - the one- upmanship in the playground, the endless barrage of parenting advice - and try to find the inner voice that we all have as parents. We know our kids better than anyone else and when we close out the hysteria we can find the right balance for our family. I recommend swearing off parenting advice books or magazines or websites for a few days. Also look at the people around you that you most like and admire and think about their childhood: how many of them were members of Mensa or Rhodes scholars? My guess is that some were late-bloomers and they probably all followed very different paths to a successful adulthood. The thing to remember is that parenting is not all or nothing: it's not only the Alpha children who thrive.
