Responses to Comments Concerning the Harm of Intensive Parenting Beliefs

I respond here to questions about the definition of intensive parenting, why it is harmful, the difference between care for little kids and older ones, and more.

Keira Burton/Prexels

Dear Friends,

In Letter #56, inspired by the recent U.S. Surgeon General Advisory about the mental health effects of being a parent in today’s U.S., I made two general points about why being a parent is so hard in the U.S. compared to many other countries.

The first point was that as a nation we do not provide the public support for parents that many other countries do. Those supports include guaranteed time off from work for infant care, flexible work hours to accommodate parents’ schedules, and financial support for high quality daycare. I pointed to research showing that parents are much happier in countries that provide such supports than in those that don’t.

The second point was that over the last four decades, we have seen a continuous increase in parental beliefs in a set of attitudes referred to collectively by researchers as intensive parenting. These are attitudes that, if you try to live up to them, make being a parent unduly difficult, time consuming, anxiety inducing, and guilt inducing for parents as well as kids.

The post generated many thoughtful comments and questions, for which I am grateful. I have gone through them carefully and organized them into themes. Here are some of the themes and my thoughts pertaining to them.

What do researchers mean by “intensive parenting”? How is it defined or identified?

Lila Krishna questioned the concept of “intensive parenting” and the negative connotations associated with it. She wrote: “I think wanting to spend any amount of time with your kid is now called intensive parenting.”

Claire also questioned the concept. She wrote: “There doesn’t seem to be a fixed definition of intensive parenting within research articles and more general pieces. Is intensive parenting a specific set of actions? Is it an attitude towards parenting? Is it going over a certain time or expenditure threshold? Is it having a particular goal for one’s child?”

I agree that I didn’t do enough in Letter #56 to explain how researchers define and assess intensive parenting in their studies. I simply said there that it is “the idea that parenting is hard work and that parents must be intimately involved in overseeing and directing everything that children do.” So, here is some more, taken from the research literature.

According to Nomaguch & Milkie (2020), in a review of research on intensive parenting up to 2020, the primary assumptions of this approach are parental determinism (that children’s development is strongly affected by how their parents treat and guide them) and child vulnerability (that children are easily harmed by negative experiences, so must be protected from such experiences). The authors add: “This childrearing approach is characterized by parents painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics, and futures through everyday interactions and activities.”  This and other descriptions of the approach make it clear that intensive parenting is a work-intensive approach that focuses on consciously trying to prepare the child for an unknown (and unknowable) future, going well beyond what the child would choose to do without parental pressure.

Research on the emergence and growing acceptance of intensive parenting beliefs reveals that it began to grow in the U.S. in the 1980s, which is when the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. began to increase sharply resulting from changed economic policies during the Reagan years. In a future letter I may discuss the evidence that intensive parenting correlates, across nations and across time, with economic inequality. The greater the gap between rich and poor, the more parents worry about their children’s economic future, which in turn causes them to work toward encouraging and pressuring their kids toward achievement goals aimed at increasing their odds of financial success in the future. By the beginning of the 2020s, surveys indicated that a majority of U.S. parents of all economic means held intensive parenting beliefs, even if it was impossible for them to devote the time or money to act much on those beliefs.

Several studies have shown that parents holding strong intensive parenting beliefs experience more anxiety and guilt about their parenting than those who don’t hold such beliefs (e.g. Kim & Ker, 2024). This should come as no surprise. If you are attuned to every problem or possible injury your child experiences, and if you believe that essentially everything you do related to your child will affect your child’s future for better or worse, you are likely to be anxious indeed. And if you believe it is your duty to follow all the advice of “experts” about how to care for your children and enrich their lives you will feel guilty because it is simply impossible to live up to all that advice. There is even research indicating that the guilt and frustration experienced by parents laboring under intensive parenting demands sometimes explodes into anger, which, of course, leads to further guilt (Prikhidko & Swank, 2019).

So, if you enjoy time with your kid and your kid enjoys time with you, that is not intensive parenting. That is having a good parent-child relationship. But if you are obsessively keeping track of everything your child does, regularly protecting your child from experiencing the normal bumps in the road of life, enrolling your child in tutoring and enrichment experiences beyond what your child truly wants, and pushing your child toward higher “achievement” in and out of school, that is intensive parenting.  Far more parents are doing those things today than in the past.

[Parenthetically, I should add that debates about how involved parents should be in controlling kids’ lives are not historically new. See this interesting post by Gail Rose Stevens, who drew attention to the long history of the debate in a comment on Letter #56.]

Here, humorously stated, is a quip about the difference between being a mom today and being one decades ago, originated as a FB post by Bunmi Laditan in 2017 and reprinted here:

How To Be A Mom in 2017: Make sure your children's academic, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual, physical, nutritional, and social needs are met while being careful not to overstimulate, understimulate, improperly medicate, helicopter, or neglect them in a screen-free, processed foods-free, GMO-free, negative energy-free, plastic-free, body positive, socially conscious, egalitarian but also authoritative, nurturing but fostering of independence, gentle but not overly permissive, pesticide-free two-story, multilingual home preferably in a cul-de-sac with a backyard and 1.5 siblings spaced at least two year apart for proper development also don't forget the coconut oil.

How To Be a Mom In Literally Every Generation Before Ours: Feed them sometimes.

Infants and toddlers need much more from parents than do older kids.

Darcia Narvaez, a leading researcher in developmental psychology and author of The Nested Pathway substack, which I highly recommend, gently cautioned me in her comment, as follows:

“Peter, a cautionary note when you discuss the topic of parenting.  I think you need to emphasize that babies and babyhood are different from childhood. Adults blend them together. Parents are advised to detach from their babies and their signals (e.g., leave them untouched most of the day and night, sleep train them, put them on an adult-convenient schedule, etc). These are violations of our species' evolved nest that impair their neurobiological development and comprise early toxic stress. Too many adults lump babies together with children and then justify the under care of babies with the need for children to be independent etc. Well-raised (evolved nested) babies will grow into independence through the course of well-supported (nested) development.”

Yes, thank you Darcia. Maybe because my own research and writing is about children over the age of about four, I sometimes forget to caution that younger ones need more. Decades of research, including cross-cultural studies, indicate that children who receive close, responsive, loving attention from caregivers early grow more smoothly into independence as they become older than do those who lack such early care. Research shows that prior to about age 4 children want to be close to nurturing caregivers and then, beginning around age 4, they start to venture off increasingly with other kids away from adults.

As a society we need to find ways to provide much more help to families during the time when their kids are babies and toddlers than we currently do.

In today’s society, even if one follows the “gardening” approach, being a parent is not easy.

In Letter #56 I quoted Allison Gopnik on the distinction between the “carpenter” and the “gardener” approach to being a parent. The carpenter tries to build the child according to some plan. The gardener, in contrast, lets the child grow in their own way but provides a fertile environment to support that growth. Several commenters pointed out that the gardening approach is not easy in today’s world. The fertile environment is generally lacking, and parents might have to work hard to create it. Here are some of those comments:

Shawna Roar: “Is trustful, relaxed, joyful parenting possible? As a former career nanny, a Montessori guide, and now a child therapist, I “want” to believe this is possible. Unfortunately, our culture actively works against it.”

JustFarmerJuliet: I definitely think joyful and relaxed parenting is possible, but I think we need communities of people/relationships who believe in the things that make it possible.

Jim Dalrymple II: “I think better parenting practices are possible. But I also think people are going to have to rebuild the kinds of communities in which that parenting thrives. You need a village-type web of relationships, which many don't have today. But I do think it's possible for people to build that back as well.

Bianca van der Meulen: “As the parent of an only child with no extended family support … “gardening” still feels like a lot of work! I want to actively find and cultivate alternative spaces (like the forest kindergarten he attends) where can learn and play and just be. Hanging out alone at home with two tired parents all day does not seem good enough.

Yes, I very much agree with these comments. In fact, much of my research and writing has been about this problem. As a society we are not creating the kinds of environmental supports required for kids to run free and chart their own ways of living as kids are designed by nature to do. I am currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Restoring Childhood, which is largely about what we can do, as individuals, as communities, and as a nation, to enable children to be children. For some thoughts about what parents can do even in our present society, see my letter entitled Thirteen Ways to Enable Free Play and Other Independent Activities for Your Kids.

What if your teenage child is doing something bad for their health?

The “let them be” philosophy gets challenged when your kid starts doing something that is harmful to themselves. Concerning this,

Julia wrote: My 16-year-old daughter sometimes vaped when she was with friends, and I didn't like that, but I could understand her need to experiment. However, this week I found a vape and she told me she bought one herself last week. So now she regularly vapes. What would be the best thing to do here? We had a conversation about it, especially how bad it is for her health, and talking about why she decides to vape. I asked her to give it to me, but she wanted to keep it and use it. However, it was so hard for me to let her keep it, and eventually I asked her to give it to me and I threw it away... My husband said it was a bad idea, because she can just buy a new one and she will start lying about it. Is this also something that we better let be? Is this too much "parenting"?

I’m sympathetic to both sides of this question. My wife (who is a physician) and I faced a similar issue when her son (my stepson) took up smoking at around age 16. I must admit that my wife handled it much better than I did. She clearly explained to him the proven harm of smoking, including the difficulty of quitting once you start. But she recognized that was all she could do. There was no way she could stop a 16-year-old from smoking if he wanted to. All she could do is provide the information, and it would be better if he smoked openly than if he hid it and lied to her. She did not fight with him about it and did not get angry with him. She did not withdraw any of her love for him or expression of that love.

I must confess that although I intellectually understood that she was doing the right thing, I felt angry with my stepson (about this and a few other things), and that anger for a while interfered with our relationship. Fortunately, we have overcome that rift, but it took time. He still smokes, still periodically tries to quit, but we have a great relationship now and I just need to keep in mind that his life is his, not mine.

Here's what I already believed but learned in practice from my wife. On issues like this, consider what you would do if the loved one who took up smoking was not your child but your beloved spouse or sibling. How would you handle that? What would you say? To what degree would you feel you can control that person’s behavior? The answer you come up with in that thought exercise is probably the way you should handle such matters with your teenage child. Express your opinion, give the information, get a little mad if you must, but don’t say or do anything that jeopardizes an honest, loving relationship with that person.

What about athletes who are pushed by parents when very young and become great performers?

Adrian David Cheok wrote: “I have a question, how about those professional / Olympic sports players. When I look at their history, they are mostly homeschooled and (for example) swimming 8 hours a day etc. For sports, those kids need to start really young, like maybe even 3 or 5 years old to become champions. This means the parent must push the child to train like crazy, as no young kid would choose that. I guess once they are 8 or 12 they have their own motivation to continue training in sports. But if they do make that choice, surely it is somehow the parent who has molded them to be like that. What I am asking is, should there be a special category for professional sports kids/people?”

Great question. My answer is that there should not be a special category. I would even go so far as to suggest that pressuring little kids to devote their very young lives to a particular sport (or chess, or whatever competitive activity the parent has chosen) is essentially child abuse. I recommend this opinion piece that appeared recently in the New York Times: Why in the World Are We Sending 11-Year-Olds to the Olympics?.  I can do no better than to offer these quotations from the article:

“We need a model for youth sports that isn’t hellbent on producing Olympians and that abolishes the early sorting of child athletes based on perceived ability. What’s best for kids — including that tiny subset who might grow up to become Olympians — is lots of outdoor free play, exposure to a variety of athletic options and an approach to youth athletics that promotes widespread participation and sparks engagement and joy. …

“Michael Phelps, the decorated swimmer who appeared at the Sydney Olympics at 15, has talked about the damaging pressure he endured as a young man, training for five to six hours a day. In her memoir, the Olympic figure skater Gracie Gold shared the disbelief she felt at age 10 watching eager parents hand their kids over to a coach who shamed children as young as 8. Dominique Dawes, a three-time Olympian who also debuted at 15, condemned gymnastics’ culture for tolerating the mistreatment of children: “While I might have reached the pinnacle in the sport, it was a very harmful environment, physically, verbally, emotionally, and it’s not worth the sacrifice; it’s not worth the cost.”

To this, I might add, does the world gain in any reasonable way because some athlete has set yet a new world record in some sport? Why should this be any parent’s goal? If I could raise a child to solve the problem of climate change, or the threats of war, or racism, I might try to do that. But just to be a performer? Why do it? Some would say for fame. But fame, as every famous person will tell you, does not bring happiness. It sometimes brings misery. 

Further Thoughts

I have not addressed all of the great questions and comments presented by readers of Letter #56, just the ones for which I thought I had something worth saying.  Again, I thank all readers who take the time to pose questions and comments. You make these letters much more interesting, for me and others, than they would be otherwise.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Kim, C.M., and Kerr, M.L. (2024). Different Patterns of Endorsement of Intensive Mothering Beliefs: Associations with Parenting Guilt and Parental Burnout. Journal of Family Psychology, 8, No. 7, 1098–1107

Nomaguch, K. & Milkie, M.A. (2020). Parenthood and Well-Being: A Decade in Review. Journal of Marriage and Family 82: 198–223.

Prikhidko, A., & Swank, J.M. (2019). Examining Parent Anger and Emotion Regulation in the Context of Intensive Parenting. The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 27, 366-372.