It’s called over parenting. None of us want to do it, we want our children to be confident, capable, self-sufficient, responsible people. But life’s busy and things are easier if they’re controlled and predictable, so we try to micromanage them. It’s no wonder we find ourselves seeking this in our parenting.
You’ve been micro-managed as a kid, it was called school. If you’ve been micromanaged as an adult, you’ll know even better how unpleasant it is. Yet we do it to our kids, unwittingly.
There are times when they need to be managed. When their safety is at risk, or behaviours could be misinterpreted as disrespectful. A child running down the aisle at a funeral.
But if we’re slipping into it on a regular basis, we need to check ourselves. Here are the signs parenting has slipped into overparenting.
You tell them the right way to do most things - If it’s not going to offend or endanger, then is there a problem with them dressing how they’d like?
You don’t let them fail - It’s not a good feeling when they don’t do well in a test, they ignore their playdate, they just aren’t very good on the pitch or can’t ever seem to get that tune down. But failure is a fact of life, in a way a test of how much something matters. And it’s the best teacher there is.
You get into power struggles - Especially over things that don’t matter, like how they’re sitting, or not on a swing, the daft song they keep singing, whether their coat is done up or not. Again, if it’s doing no harm, causing no offence or isn’t morally wrong, then why try to control it? Power struggles are the result of a feeling of powerlessness. If they have power in some areas of their lives, like what they wear, they’ll cede power to you in others, like important social situations.
You haven’t got age appropriate expectations - If your expectations are too high, you’ll tend to micromanage with the aim of getting them to meet your bar. If they’re too low, it’s a sign you don’t believe they are capable. Learning about, and setting your expectations at an age appropriate level is also great for your patience and satisfaction as a parent.
You overindulge - You don’t let your child do things for themselves, like clearing the table after dinner, doing chores like loading the dishwasher, sorting their laundry, doing their bit of the cleaning. The micromanager, or overparenter, assumes they can’t do them, so they don’t give them the responsibility. Or they’ve seen them do it badly and it's easier and more efficient to do it themselves. But it’s like that little girl pouring juice. The first few times they use the hoover, or stack the dishwasher, it will be terrible. Your job is to teach them how to do it better, and it takes time, so much time, but it’s worth it.
You worry too much - This is a hard one. My son’s 12 and I still worry about him crossing the road. I know, sorry knew, a boy who went to post a letter but never came home because the driver was texting while driving. But I can’t see him across the road when he’s 13, 14, 15, 16. So at some point I have to trust him. And to trust him I have to know he can do it, which means I have to have allowed him to learn. Then I have to have seen him do it properly. I still worry, but I also know it’s an inevitable part of parenting.
Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life was an idea discussed in the newsletter a few editions ago. The choice to over parent, to micromanage, is the easier choice in the moment, because it doesn’t ask anything hard of you. It doesn’t ask you to exercise the self control to hold your tongue and let your child learn from their own failure. It doesn’t ask you to suffer others’ negative opinions from the way your child dresses or behaves. It doesn’t ask you to suffer the painful uncertainty of them making their own way in a world full of risk.
This is why overparenting is so easy to slip into, but actually really painful in the long term. But if there’s one thing parenting is absolutely about, it’s the long term. The best way I have to remind myself of this is a quote from Barbara Coloroso - “If it is not morally threatening, life-threatening, or unhealthy, let it go.”