Paranoid Parenting

This morning I discovered the book Paranoid Parenting, written by British sociology professor Frank Furedi. The publisher's blurb says:

Hardly a day goes by without parents being warned of a new threat to their children's well-being. Everything is dangerous: the crib, the babysitter, the school, the supermarket, the park. High-profile campaigns convince parents that their children's health, safety, and development are constantly at risk. Parents are criticized by one child-care expert after another, but even the experts can't agree on matters as simple as whether or not it is wise to sleep next to a child. Parents don't know whom to trust; the only clear message is that they can't trust themselves....

I thought that sounded interesting. When you bring up homeschooling with most people, the response is essentially fear: fear that the child won't develop any social skills, usually, or fear that they won't get into college, or fear that they'll never learn algebra. When it comes to raising children, people are afraid of attempting it without the intervention of experts. (Moreover, they're sometimes threatened if you try it yourself.)

I stumbled across an interview with Furedi as well, on the radio show Counterpoint. It was one of those moments, like when I first discovered John Gatto, where my own half-formed thoughts were suddenly articulated. I'll end with a longish excerpt from the interview-- hope you like it as much as I did.

Michael Duffy: Why do you think we have started to worry so much?

Frank Furedi: I think there are several reasons. One reason is that we’ve tended to regard human relationships as, by definition, very difficult and complicated, and we tell ourselves that, particularly parents, are not competent enough to deal with children, that apparently they are very difficult, that you almost need a PhD in developmental psychology to know how to manage your children. I think the more we treat parenting as a skill rather than a fairly naturally developed relationship, the more parents lose confidence in themselves. And when you lose confidence in your ability to mother or to father it becomes very easy to opt for, ‘You can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t go outdoors, you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t talk to strangers.’ That’s the easy way we can compensate for our insecurities, and I think that’s been pretty much institutionalised within the Anglo-American environment.

Michael Duffy: You mean we—the parents are feeling insecure about themselves, and they’re sort of pushing this off onto the children?

Frank Furedi: Yes, I think sometimes we create a poisonous atmosphere for parents; it’s not the parents' fault. But quite often…for example, at the moment there are big campaigns being organised in Britain to teach parents how to touch their children. So you can get massage classes, and there are classes that are designed to tell parents how to cuddle their children. Now, call me silly, but I used to think that touching your child and cuddling your child is something that you could work out for yourself; it often comes very naturally. But the very minute that we turn that into a skill that requires the support of professionals, we actually make it more difficult for parents to spontaneously touch their children, and to intuitively and instinctively cuddle their kids because it’s now seen as, somehow, a complicated task. The more we send out that kind of message, the more we, as parents, lose confidence in ourselves and stop believing in our intuition.

. . .

Frank Furedi: In many ways what we’re doing is we’re turning help-seeking into a primary virtue. We’re told that a responsible parent is somebody that seeks help. A responsible parent is not somebody that just gets on with life and does the business; it’s somebody that seeks support, calls up help lines. So the more we tell parents that they need to look for help and look for support, the more we incorporate the idea that actually they’re partners with some professionals in the joint task of bringing up their children.

Michael Duffy: Frank, I’d just like to continue with what you were just saying; there are people and companies, indeed entire industries, who benefit from this paranoia, aren’t there?

Frank Furedi: There are. In one sense, we all suffer from it because, if you are a parent, bringing kids up in this environment is not really good for anybody, but there are people who kind of benefit from this. I think governments, for example, who often are confused and disorientated about what kind of policy to pursue, find it easier to go for what I call the ‘politics of behaviour’, which involves regulating people’s lifestyles and basically preying on people’s fears and insecurities at established points of contact, and they provide support. You, in return, are meant to be the grateful public who responds positively to this.

So politicians use our insecurities as a point of departure for policy making. There’s a veritable parenting industry that has developed which insists that they’re in the business of bringing children up, and their ambition is continually expanding. For example, in the UK and in America, the parenting industry is now targeting very young children between the age of one and three, and they’re claiming that unless they get their hands on them and train them, they’re not going to be fit to go to school because they’re not going to learn certain social skills, they’re not going to have the ability to concentrate on their work, and therefore we need to have the kind of institutions established…schemes established where, already at that early age, they can be trained in a particular way. So in that sense there’s an industry that’s evolved around parenting which thrives on our own fears and insecurities, and which puts us in a perpetual state of dependency in relation to the things they tell us.

Michael Duffy: I’m fascinated by the advice industry. Obviously, if one sits down with a number of books, they often give wildly contradictory advice, and there’s also a magazine that I read from time to time for parents and it literally differs from each month; one month it will tell you to do one thing and the next month it will tell you to do another, and no one seems at all worried by this. The ultimate effect is to create this sort of state of permanent neurosis, which people seem to accept.

Frank Furedi: Well, they do, because what happens is that once you get on the treadmill of listening to advice, you then become almost like a junkie and you try out a particular strategy, it doesn’t quite work and then you read somebody else’s advice, and they tell you that when your child goes to sleep make sure that the lights are on. That doesn’t seem to work either, then you read somebody else’s advice and they insist that there mustn’t be any lights on, they must be very quiet and maybe you can put some music on…and you can go through all these books and all these self-help manuals, and after a while you don’t realise that you’ve tried five or six different techniques and you don’t realise the most important lesson of all—that, in the end, you are the only person that actually knows your child well enough to know what’s the most appropriate way of going forward, and without listening to your intuition and cultivating your intuition, you’re kind of perpetually listening to people who are giving very boring, routine, formulaic advice that’s actually often quite inappropriate to your circumstances.