The Parenting Dilemma - Free Range or Battery Hen?
Parenting has undergone a significant overhaul from the days of children should be seen and not heard.
I think that most of us would agree they are seen and heard constantly, agonisingly frequently, incessantly demanding of any available adult.
The anti-smacking legislation passed in 2007 sent shock waves through the parents who had relied on fear as their primary method of control. This coincided with the self-esteem movement where parents were told that our children suffered from low self-esteem and so the guilt trip, shame game began.
Parents were told that we had to praise our children more and tell them how wonderful they were in every circumstance, regardless of the fact that they may not have been at all. We heard the false praise of: “Good Girl!” “Great job!” “Well done!” “Awesome!” “Amazing!” “Fantastic,” over and over again. This coincided with the “Kiwi” sport initiative where someone decided that we would have no winners and everyone was a champ.
The combination of the self-esteem movement, playing sport with no winners, or everyone’s a winner produced children that had no reality about life and the subsequent school of hard knocks they were likely to encounter. They had been lulled into the wonderful world of Disney where there is always a happy ending.
Parents were left scrambling for new strategies to motivate their children to do what they wanted them to without the fear of physical punishment. Sadly this defaulted to what I like to call the “Bribery & Corruption strategy,” that being a series of continuous bribes of If you do this…. You will get that.
And so the new age parenting produced children who expected the instant gratification of a treat or a reward. These children became Dopamine addicts full of the happy hormone surging around their bodies as they received an abundance of rewards for doing what the adults had asked.
This instant gratification in turn produced children who before they would consider doing anything at all asked “ What's in this for me?”
If our end goal is to raise children with a strong sense of well-being who can form strong connections and relationships and demonstrate pro-social skills to enable them to live life well. We need to empower them to do so in a self-managing, independent way with no carrot and stick required for extrinsic motivation.
We want them to have the opportunities to develop their emotional intelligence and show empathy with a sense of self-identity that can maintain the rigours of everyday life and the challenges developing adolescence can bring. Currently, I see parents in two main categories:
those that have opted for the “free-range approach”.
the “battery hen” parents
Free-range parents have everyone jumping to every need and whim of the child twenty-four-seven until the reality of life presents to them that this approach is not sustainable for everyday life. These parents then become upset and emotional that their children are not doing what the other children at preschool or school are doing. They become involved in difficult conversations about their child and they feel embarrassed that they seem to have failed in the parenting game. This can often result in them changing tactics and resorting to what their own parents did to raise them. This is also hugely unsuccessful and results in the parents being excessively stressed out and the child being an absolute ball of confusion. Flip-flopping from no boundaries at all, to an authoritarian style of parenting sets everyone up for even more failure.
Free-range parenting in my opinion ultimately sets the child up for failure in many ways, if we look at the child's ability to make age-appropriate cognitive decisions then these can be manageable.
For example, you can ask a toddler:
What pyjamas would you like to wear tonight and present two choices…
But do not ask them, What time would you like to go to bed tonight?
They are not cognitively able to make the choice of an appropriate bedtime, that is a decision for the adult to make.
The “battery hen” parents are those attempting to parent the way they perceive society expects them to, this usually means that they draw upon their own childhood parenting experiences. This can be successful for some but not others, it seems our children are intrinsically wired to reject this style of parenting in favour of a more modern age approach.
Battery hen parents try to fulfil their parenting responsibilities in a consistent way developing expectations and routines so that their child can conform to society's expectations of prosocial behaviour. This approach can sail along peacefully until the child presents some resistance to these strategies and then the parents start overthinking about what they have been doing and searching for a magic solution so that life can again become peaceful and not full of conflict. This also leads to confusion in the child as the parents try new ways to coerce the child into maintaining the previous expectations they are now resisting and rebelling against.
Parenting is a complex and challenging role, there is no qualification for us to pass before we tackle this incredible job.
I believe the ingredients for success lie in:
Consistency
Communication
Respect
