A new study reveals a sharp decline in moms' mental health. Is overparenting part of the problem?

Boston Globe

a day ago

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There's so much in this world to justify our stress. But: Is overparenting burning us out on top of it all? I chatted with Elkins (in between reminding my eighth-grader to stay after school for homework help and clicking 'refresh' on my second-grader's soccer schedule) to find out.
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Let's start with your thoughts about the study, and then we'll go into the overparenting stuff.
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It's confirming what we're all seeing firsthand, which is that moms are really struggling. The focus is really timely, especially in light of last year's surgeon general
I liked that they highlighted in the article that [more] research on maternal mental health centers around the perinatal period. … But what about moms whose babies are older than 6 months? We're in this for a while. Maternal mental health is suffering. We can't blame it all on COVID.
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Where do you feel it's coming from? Is the problem overparenting?
We can't draw clear, direct conclusions between overparenting and declining mental health based on the study.
That being said, I think the fact that the study highlighted a decline in maternal mental health across the sociodemographic spectrum suggests that there's more here than structural racism, access to resources, housing insecurity, and other [systemic] factors that are impacting well-being.
It suggests, at the very least, that we need to discuss and hopefully study the cultural factors to which I think this generation of parents is exposed and how it influences beliefs and values, which ultimately translate into behaviors. This is where I actually think that overparenting is a timely construct.
Are we all competing with each other? What are we doing?
I'm an elder millennial. I think that, somewhere along the line, we became convinced that parenting is both really high stakes and also controllable.
It's a perfect storm.
We came of age during this boom in brain science and child development research, and a growing interest in attachment theory and the impact of adverse childhood experiences. At the same time, media was shifting, so these insights started making their way into headlines. We had this explosion of the science behind [parenting], but also the dissemination behind it.
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Today's parents are often delaying parenthood. A lot of us are older, which often means that we're more highly educated, and that means that we've spent all these years in achievement-driven environments where hard work and problem-solving get results, and we're used to having agency. If something is broken, we fix it, and our boss says, 'Good job.'
When it comes to parenting, we're bringing the same mind-set: We're analyzing and optimizing and deep-diving on the internet to figure out research. We're trying to manage every variable.
What's the difference between overparenting and snowplow or intensive parenting?
Overparenting is a more deeply held core belief. It's not just about hovering behaviors or snowplowing behaviors.
I find that it's usually rooted in two beliefs. The first is that negative emotions are unsafe or somehow harmful, and they should be avoided. We feel that the normal emotions that we might all expect kids to be exposed to — shame and fear and sadness and boredom — are somehow bad. We need to protect our kids from them.
The second belief is really fueled by the intensive parenting narrative, which is that it's a parent's job — almost their sacred responsibility — to shape every part of their child's life, including how they feel. The belief that whatever is uncomfortable is actually unsafe, then that belief is going to drive us into all sorts of overparenting behaviors because we feel that we're responsible and are going to condemn our kids to a lifetime of emotional floundering if we're not doing this right.
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Is this just an upper-to-upper-middle-class phenomenon?
You'd think that it's primarily an upper-middle-class phenomenon. There's some research to show that this might be more prominent among women with a higher educational background. I think the data is a little bit tricky on that, because most of the research is going to come from clinical populations, which tend to skew more white and upper-middle-class, because they're the ones who can access the care.
But we do have data indicating that families across the sociodemographic spectrum value the things that intensive parenting values. It's not like they dismiss it; I think perhaps their opportunity to live it out in real time might be diluted.
How does this manifest in real life? It's funny: While we were talking, I was mouthing to my
eighth-grader to check in with his teacher about a grade as he walked out the door. I guess I'm guilty. What are some prominent examples from your practice?
In the child anxiety world, [there is] what we call parental accommodation, the behavioral and clinical descriptor for how overparenting plays out. These are changes that parents make to our own behavior in an effort to decrease the distress of our kids. We see this in clinical populations: [about] 95 to 98 percent of parents of anxious kids accommodate.
There's not a lot of research on the prevalence of accommodation in non-clinical populations, because most of this is studied in clinics like mine, but one study found that one in four parents of non-anxious kids report daily accommodation: That's 25 percent of parents changing their behavior daily in an attempt to minimize their kids' distress. … It's related to parents' own core beliefs around what is safe for our kids and what our responsibility is to our kids.
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[We need] warmth with limits. But somewhere along the line, our social media feeds told us that setting limits around your kids' emotions is bad.
One example is your kid gets cut from a sports team. Obviously, they feel really upset. Maybe, the overparenting response would be to call the coach and to complain, or to tell the child that they were treated unfairly: 'You were treated poorly, and I'm going to do something about it.' The aim is to protect the kid from feeling shame, rejection, and failure.
A love-and-limits approach might be to acknowledge the disappointment, to express a belief in your child's ability to cope with that disappointment, and to put it back on them: 'What do you want to do next? Do you want to try another league? Do you want to do something else?'
If your kid is anxious over a really tough homework assignment, the overparenting path might be getting highly involved, giving a lot of scaffolding around the assignment, and maybe ultimately doing the majority of the work.
A love-and-limits approach might be validating the distress: 'This is a monster of an assignment,' suggesting one or two coping strategies, but then dropping the rope. It's validation of the distress, but with the narrative that: 'You can cope with this hard feeling, and I bet you can come up with a solution. I'm here if you need a suggestion or a hug.'
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Overparenting becomes such a problem because with a parent's well-meaning intention of swooping in to cushion the distress, the kid gets the message: 'I can't handle this by myself.'
Devil's advocate: Parents actually call coaches to complain that their kid got cut from a team? I find that mortifying. This is a thing that happens?
Oh yeah. … It's this hyper-awareness of what a child must be feeling in this moment, and that if they feel rejection, they're going to crumple.
But the problem is that, if kids haven't had the opportunity to experience normative negative emotions and recover because parents are jumping in, then they flail spectacularly when things get really hard.
You know, you've got a kid who trends anxious. They express distress. A parent jumps in, which sort of sets the framework that a kid can't handle it on their own. It becomes a really vicious cycle, and this is all swimming in intensive parenting culture.
But mental health is so precarious. Of course, we want to protect our kids, because we hear horror stories about what can happen if your kids are undergoing mental distress. It's hard to unlearn that.
We parents have to acknowledge the waters in which we're swimming, to first notice this tendency and get curious about our own behaviors, and the beliefs that might be driving them: What do you notice about yourself when your kid is becoming distressed or anxious? What urges do you feel driven to do? Are there behaviors you're engaging in that you wouldn't ordinarily? Get curious: What's behind these behaviors? You can start challenging yourself to tolerate your own distress in the moment by resisting the urge to jump in.
Maybe there's low-hanging fruit: Your kid says that they're stressed because they've got all of this homework and got home late from dance class. You notice the urge to take responsibilities off their plate: They don't have to bring their plate to the sink, and they don't have to walk the dog, even though those are their responsibilities.
Do a little exposure: What happens if they're stressed and they still have expectations in place that they participate in family life. Does your kid crumble? They're probably [mad] at you, but can you handle that? What's so bad about your kid being mad at you? It's not a kid's job to make a parent feel good about parenting decisions.
So many of the questions I get around this are: How do I explain my decision not to give them a phone? At the core of that question is: How do I make it so that my kid isn't mad about my decision not to give them the phone?
Your kid doesn't have to be happy about every decision that you make. Basically, it's: How can you challenge yourself to tolerate your own distress at your kids' distress.
This is a micro-exposure to build their resilience, and it builds your resilience, too.
Interview was edited and condensed.
Kara Baskin can be reached at