Afraid of being authoritarian or permissive, parents trying for the preferred "authoritative" middle ground still end up reasoning with their kids too much, writes Neil Swidey in the Boston Globe's Sunday magazine.
Some negotiating with your kids is good. But spending 20 minutes debating your 4-year-old on why it's time to leave the park is not. Children's mouths can keep up, but as research is showing, their brains cannot....there is something decidedly different about parenting today, particularly within the educated, professional class. It's the degree to which many parents are struggling to persuade their kids to see things their way, and how they often end up simply talking too much, negotiating matters that probably shouldn't be negotiable, and failing to say "no" very much at all.
This is true for parents of toddlers. It is true for parents of teenagers.
Considerable research has shown that it makes all kinds of sense for parents to do a certain amount of reasoning with their children. The problem is knowing when enough is enough. Parents often lose sight of that line, mistakenly believing their kids' brains work the same way theirs do.
Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of cognitive neuroimaging at McLean Hospital in Belmont, has conducted pioneering MRI studies suggesting that adults and teenagers use different parts of their brains to make decisions. Teens rely more on the "emotional" part of the brain that controls their gut instincts, while adults rely on the "executive" part that governs functions like planning and judgment.
This misplaced faith parents have in the ability of their kids to think like adults starts early. Trained in the art of negotiation at a young age, accustomed to being spoken to with far greater complexity than previous generations of children, today's kids have become expert in talking the talk. But no matter how articulate a 4-year-old is, his brain is not built for adult concepts like abstract reasoning and delayed gratification.
"Just because they can verbalize something," Yurgelun-Todd says, "doesn't mean they really understand how to weigh decisions and process information."
Stop by any playground and listen to the parents giving their kids 20-minute explications on why it's time to leave.....like those droning, indecipherable adults from the old Peanuts specials.
It's a slippery slope. Parents out there: any tips, or reactions?
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 8, 2004 09:53 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rosenblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/567