Another reason to relax

The new therapy client

The July/August 2011 edition of The Atlantic included a very insightful article on "How To Land Your Child in Therapy". The author, Lori Gottlieb explains how obsessively good parenting can undermine the future happiness and resilience of children.

Not that I am encouraging you to be a BAD parent. But there is, as she explains, a big gap between June Cleaver and Mommy Dearest, and there is room for a lot of variety in between best and worst.

Apparently, a good parent can choose to be more relaxed, and less worried about shielding her child from every possible microdisaster.

Do you think Gottlieb is correct when she says:

". . . underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids. . . "

Is it all right, then to just go ahead and nurture our kids a little less? And to do it our own way? What does that look like for you?

I think that when my kids were little, my friends would have called me an obsessive parent. And maybe I still am one. But now, one of the things I'm obsessing about is the need to let my kids take their own lumps, and make choices which are not perfectly safe. Is that a change for the better? I'm liking the results I see so far- I'll let you know if that changes :)