Why Today’s Parents Are Too Permissive or Too Controlling and What It Means for Children

By Janet Strassman Perlmutter

American parents today are a study in extremes

Some are obsessed with orchestrating their children’s success from birth on with “brain-boosting” products, a slew of enrichment activities and high-stakes applications to private schools. Others indulge their children’s TV and computer time, but don’t keep track of whether homework or chores have been done.

Some worry so much about abduction that they won’t let their kids play in the front yard. Others let their children roam the neighborhood freely, without a regular curfew.

There are working parents who let their children stay up late at night because they haven’t seen them all day, while others micro-manage their kids’ homework and mandate a strict bedtime.

What’s fueling these stark differences? Our lifestyles, for one. Gone are many of the family traditions of yesteryear: Routine, sit-down family dinners; set times for completing homework; even lazy afternoons for kids to spend simply playing with friends. Meanwhile, our expectations for our children are higher than ever. Driven by a sense that there’s so much at stake, we race from one extracurricular activity to another, with meals, homework and other routines jammed in between. Add the demands of parents’ jobs and the pressure and anxiety mount.

As a result, experts say, we’ve increasingly lost the middle ground – the balance – in parenting itself. Without the community norms and expectations of the past, and with greater emphasis on individuality, parenting today is “more improvisational,” notes William Doherty, Ph.D., a University of Minnesota sociologist and the author of Take Back Your Kids: Confident Parenting in Turbulent Times. We’re either so involved and hovering that we hamper our kids’ independence, or we indulge our kids so much that we’re barely parenting at all. And it’s not necessarily all one extreme or the other. We may be overinvested in one area and too lax in another.

Just how much is enough, and what’s too much when it comes to raising children?