Child-centered parenting means that parents plan activities and schedules around their children. As with gentle parenting, it can lead to your child becoming burnt out or misbehaving. Removing children from child-centered activities increases their resilience and sense of well-being.
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When Michaeleen Doucleff became a parent, she read books about how to ensure the well-being of her children. She wanted to be a good mother so as not to deprive her daughter of something important.
This process began in earnest as my daughter grew older and began to develop interests and friendships. As her world expanded, so did Doucleff’s parenting options. Doucleff dutifully drove her daughter to activities around San Francisco until she was 5 years old. Birthday parties, playgrounds and children’s museums. The weekend was filled with events for children only, so I was very tired, but that can’t be helped.
This is known as child-centered parenting, a style invented in the ’90s that has become the norm over the past decade. The idea is to prioritize the education and well-being of children.
You may have heard of “gentle parenting,” which teaches parents to communicate calmly with crying infants. Child-centered parenting takes it a step further and allows your child’s entire world to be immersed, whether it’s an educational trip or a planned play session.
“Every moment is scheduled with child-centered activities,” Doucleff, who was inspired to write Hunt, Gather, Parent, as an antidote to child-centered parenting, told Business Insider. “Your life is only for your child, not you or your entire family.”
Doucleff’s perspective on parenting style began to change after talking with Suzanne Gaskins, a psychology professor at Northeastern Illinois University who studies childhood habits around the world. “She told me that these child-centered activities are, in a way, depriving children of what they actually need: the adult world,” Doucleff said.
Gaskins is not the only psychologist who opposes child-centered parenting. In a resurfaced podcast clip, prominent psychology researcher Brené Brown tells Tim Ferriss that her family is a “family-centered family” and that she has “a lot of questions about what keeps a family healthy.” My family agrees,” he said.
Now, parents like Doucleff are avoiding the pressure to always make their children the most important family members. They are learning how to accommodate their children in their lives, reduce burnout, and ease their children’s anxiety.
History of child-centered child-rearing
Child-centered parenting is “very new,” Doucleff said. “Even middle-class European American parenting was very different 50 to 100 years ago,” she says.
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Children growing up during the Great Depression found entertainment through family board game nights and radio shows. For many people, going to the movie theater was a luxury. In the 1950s, parents prioritized marriage and encouraged their children to play outside. Born between 1965 and 1980, Generation X grew up as latchkey children, left to their own devices while their parents worked.
That started to change in the 1980s and 1990s. “Intensive parenting” is a term coined by Sharon Hayes in 1996 to describe a major shift in mainstream American parenting. According to Caitlin Collins, an associate professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, intensive parenting is “incredibly time-consuming, expensive, emotionally taxing, and, above all, detrimental to the child’s well-being.” “The mother’s needs are usually subsumed under the child’s needs.” needs. “
It is difficult to know exactly what caused the increase in intensive parenting. One theory is that in the mid-1990s, competition for college admissions intensified, creating a culture centered on children’s personal success. Suddenly, the lives of parents and children began to revolve around education and extracurricular activities to maximize their chances of getting into the Ivy. Great parents made it a priority to give their 5-year-olds interactive educational experiences over the weekend and proper socialization through birthday parties.
“We associate many morals with ideals about parenting. Who is a ‘good parent’ or a ‘worthy parent’ depends on how we view ourselves and our worth.” ,” Collins said. For mothers who compare themselves to wealthy “momfluencers” and feel a strong need to keep up the Disney trips and beautiful lunch boxes, the pressure is only exacerbated, she added.
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Children become less resilient and more anxious as they grow older
Being dragged from playdate to playdate can make it sound like parents are doing the best they can for their child. But in many cases, Doucleff says, these highly structured activities are simply overwhelming. She recalled her daughter spending hours screaming around children at museum activities.
“She screams at the end because it’s so overstimulated and she’s so tired,” Doucleff said. “I’ve had kids who behaved worse.”
“If you want your kids to be truly responsible, good, and competent, it’s all about role modeling,” says Tom, founder and CEO of Mind Brain Emotion and author of 52 Essential Life Skills. ‘s creator, Dr. Jenny Wu, told BI. Ironically, child-centered parenting teaches children that it is normal to give up their own identities and boundaries.
Instead of preparing for adult life, “the child’s world is completely separated from the adult world,” Doucleff says. It causes children to miss the opportunity to learn important life skills and causes great harm. Now, she takes her daughter on errands and to the park to play with other children, allowing her to be more independent.
Doucleff was inspired to make this change after a trip to the North Pole, when he saw his children helping his family hunt whales and prepare dinner. She said having a sense of purpose makes children more emotionally mature.
“I remember flying back to the United States and seeing kids my age screaming at the airport because they didn’t want to share their chips,” Doucleff said. “This is unheard of in many cultures, and children at that age have very little emotional control.”
Wu, who teaches at the University of California, Irvine, said she has seen the lasting impact of child-centered parenting. Some students are “feeling very paralyzed, not knowing where to go, how to do something, who to turn to, without resourcefulness,” causing anxiety.
She said parents of fellow students often pay for laundry services and other assistance to make their (already adult) children’s college experience easier.
Parents are starting to abandon draining parenting styles
A 2023 Pew Research poll of more than 3,700 participants found that most parents in the United States find raising children more difficult than they expected. Some people wonder if stress is caused more by the expectations of parenting than by the demands of parenting. “Encouragingly, more women are resisting these cultural ideals and recognizing that they are not the only ones who should bear this burden,” Collins said.
They are abandoning draining parenting styles. “Personally, it was much more difficult to put my kids in a cart and take them to all these places,” Doucleff said.
It’s not always smooth sailing. Mr. Doucleff said he has had to adjust some of the chores so that the children can join in and tolerate the occasional tantrum. “Parents have to be a little uncomfortable sometimes, but in the end it’s a really beautiful and easier way to parent,” she said. Wu suggested slowly letting the kids take on more responsibility, such as ordering their own food when you go out together.
Some parents are adjusting events like birthday parties to focus on close family time rather than backyard parties with 30 kids. We make our time together more meaningful by taking our children camping and making crafts together.
The real world is richer than the bubbles children are trapped in, Doucleff said. My daughter has developed a strong bond with her mother and has grown a lot since she started accompanying her mother on business trips overseas.
That led my daughter, now 9 years old, to start her own dog walking business this year. “For me, it’s a much more important experience than going to Disney World,” Doucleff said.
