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| Political theory thrust into parenting. Photo by Kindel Media |
Leonard Sax MD PhD is a practicing family physician, a PhD psychologist, and the author of four books for parents, including The Collapse of Parenting. In an article this month, he tells us what he is now observing in his interactions with parents and children at his practice:
A mom brought her six-year-old daughter into the office with a fever and a sore throat. I asked the little girl to open her mouth and say “Ah.” She shook her head and clenched her mouth shut. “Mom, it looks like I’m going to need your help here," I said. "Could you please ask your daughter to open her mouth and say ‘Ah’?” Mom arched her eyebrows and replied, “Her body, her choice.”
Wow. This mom was invoking the “My body, my choice” slogan of abortion-rights activists to defend her 6-year-old daughter's refusal to let me, the doctor, look at her daughter’s throat.
I have been a family doctor for nearly 34 years. Until recently, I saw no connection between politics and parenting. Left-of-center parents were no better and no worse parents, on average, than right-of-center parents. Some left-of-center parents were Too Harsh, some were Too Soft, and some were Just Right; and the same was true of right-of-center parents.
Eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Collapse of Parenting, which became a New York Times bestseller. I wrote the book because I had noticed that more and more parents were becoming too permissive. As I showed in the book, that trend toward permissiveness wasn’t confined to families in my practice: scholars now find that the culture of the United States is increasingly a culture in which “children rule.”
Sax identifies the trending root of the problem:
Every day that I am in the office, I now encounter parents who believe in “gentle parenting,” or its close relatives, mindful parenting or intentional parenting. The gentle parent lets the child decide. The gentle parent never uses punishments of any kind, not even time-outs. [...]
But Sax is not alone in grasping how disabling this behaviour is for parents, who live in the misery created by a little dictator, and for the child who is in great danger of never learning self-restraint or a willingness to relate or repair. Sax continues:
Jessica Winter, writing for The New Yorker, [...] predicts that the next generation can “anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the over validation and under correction native to gentle parenting.”
The source of the mentality of the parents following this fashion is of significance:
As a family doctor, I simply did not encounter this kind of parenting 10 years ago. Now I see it every day. And the parents who are practicing gentle parenting are (in my experience) almost always politically left-of-center.
This change may help to explain some new findings regarding political views and depression in teenagers. Researchers have known for decades that teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be depressed. But some recent studies have called attention to the intersection of politics and depression among adolescents: namely, the finding that left-of-center adolescents are increasingly more likely to be depressed than right-of-center adolescents. This finding is so pronounced that left-of-center boys are now more likely to be depressed than right-of-center girls.
Though there are several possible explanations for the explosion of depression, especially among girls, Sax says that for him the issue is not an academic one but one that presents itself as a matter of experience from which he can draw ready conclusions:
I am now encountering more and more parents like the mom I described in the opening paragraph, parents who might best be described as aggressively permissive. They believe it’s actually virtuous to let kids decide everything. And those parents are not randomly distributed along the political spectrum: they are, as I said, overwhelmingly more likely to be left-of-center. Conservative parents, especially conservative church-going parents, still insist that their kids open their mouths and say “Ah” when they bring their kids to the doctor with a fever and a sore throat.
This is a big change. As recently as 10 years ago, it wasn't unusual to find left-of-center parents who were authoritative, even strict. That is less common today. In my experience, permissive parenting is now more common among left-of-center parents than among right-of-center parents. That’s important, because researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to young adults with “less sense of meaning and purpose in life, less autonomy and mastery of the world around them.” Other researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to lower emotional intelligence and lower personal growth.
Still other researchers report that permissive parenting is associated with an increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse, and lower academic achievement, while authoritative parenting is associated with lower risk of drug and alcohol abuse and higher academic achievement. The children of permissive parents are more likely to become anxious and depressed. Two decades ago, Brad Wilcox showed that conservative religious parents were most likely to be authoritative—both strict and loving. From my perspective, that’s even more true today.
Today, when I counsel permissive parents on the importance of being more authoritative—setting rules and enforcing those rules, while communicating love for the child—left-of-center parents are more likely to push back. They tell me that they don’t want to be “controlling” or “coercive.” A decade ago, I could have persuaded such parents that kids need structure, rules, and consistency. Today, I don’t have much luck with permissive left-of-center parents: “Her body, her choice.”
I am a family doctor, not a politician. I am not suggesting that left-of-center parents should adopt right-of-center politics. I just ask that parents keep politics out of their parenting. Your child, your teenager, needs you, as the parent, to provide structure, to set boundaries, and to lay down guardrails that are enforced. This has nothing to do with Blue states vs. Red states or Democrat vs. Republican. This is about what every kid needs to thrive.
In his article, Sax refers warmly to an article by New York University professor Jonathan Haidt which has the title: Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.
Haidt notes how use of smartphones and absorption in social media, with liberal girls the fastest and most thoroughly to be involved, led to new set of social mores and ways of thinking. He accepts that through the powerful influence of the young, especially in a university setting, the elite of society largely turned healthy mental and emotional norms on the head, in what he terms reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). By that he means that whereas this therapy emphasises personal agency in treating depression, those absorbed in the word of social media espoused a set of untruths that are the opposite of what makes for recovery from depression. Haidt reports the research findings that:
Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. [...M]any universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.
Sax and Haidt, from different vantage points, observe how society, under the influence of what has become fashionable on social media, has already taken on board principles governing parenting and thinking that harm the child and family life, and damage the delicate strands that hold society together.
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