As a psychologist who works with a lot of kids, I try to stay up-to-date on the body of parenting advice that is available to the public. I periodically go to bookstores to look for interesting new books on parenting and I read very many internet articles on the subject. I also have a personal interest as the father of a five year-old. The current state of the information that is readily available to parents is pretty sad.
The problem with parenting advice is not that there isn’t enough being written. There is probably far more written material available on parenting today than there has ever been. The problem is that most of this stuff is hardly worth reading. The vast majority what passes for information actually consists of nothing but opinion supported by anecdotes that are disguised as evidence. It all seems to be written by authors of a specific demographic for readers of the same demographic yet it is riddled with assertions that “most parents” this or “most children” that.
If you read enough of these writings, you might be fooled into believing that “over parenting” is the single biggest problem facing our society today. This might even sound plausible if the parents that you meet in the parenting section at the book store or at your kid’s soccer practice were representative of all parents but they’re not.
You see, I usually work at the other end of the pool. You won’t run into my clients’ parents at soccer practice because they don’t take their kids to soccer. If they are even allowed to play, the kids have to find their own way to get there. This is not simply some misguided attempt to build character or teach responsibility, at least not among the kids I’m talking about. Most of my clients come to me with significant histories of abuse and/or neglect. I certainly don’t want to sound like I am bashing my clients’ parents because that is not my intent. Some of them might deserve it but many do not. Most of these parents were poorly parented as children and many of them were still children when they became parents. It’s hard to blame a sixteen year-old for being a bad parent when nobody has ever shown him/her what good parenting looks like.
So what can we do to help parents before their kids are abused or neglected? How can we best reach parents and parents to be, who don’t hang out in the parenting section at Barnes and Nobel? I have some ideas which I’ll explore in future posts but I would really like input from others in the community. If you have an idea or an opinion on the subject, please post it. If you know anyone else who might, please share this with them. Together we can create the change that we want to see in the world.