The audacity of parenting

The invasive parenting phenomenon has been around for a while now in North America. You can easily spot this growing species of parents who hover over their children like a Huey on a search and destroy mission, designing their every extracurricular and academic activity and treating each offspring like a Francis Ford Coppola production. They pipe Mozart music into the kids’ bedroom, install nanny-cams to monitor the helpers, attend to their music and language lessons, discuss and analyze ad nauseam their children’s progress with the teachers, complete school/college applications including writing their entrance essays, and stalk their kids everywhere even equipping their kids with GPS-enabled cellphones. According to some scientific studies (Marano, e.g.), there is some “dark dependency, some transfer of the parent’s identity to the child" behind over-parenting. It is difficult to disagree with this observation.

Now that both sons are grown up, with one still going through the ordeal of graduate school, I wonder if I had been such an invasive parent. Although I did not install any nanny-cam (this never entered my mind, but mind you, nanny-cam wasn’t a developed technology then; there was the baby monitor though but it was there to make sure we responded to them the moment they started wailing in their cribs; our baby monitor had the added benefit of picking up sounds from our next door neighbours who might have monitors on the same frequency as ours - and the voices and fights we heard – but that’s another story!) nor did I pipe in Mozart music into their rooms, I did buy them Mozart cd’s and insisted that my wife listened to classical music while she was in the last trimester of pregnancy (this was for her relaxation and rest). Also I admit I enjoyed the frequent parent-teacher conferences in which we poured over the learning outcomes of each subject to make sure our children achieved some modicum of success. Yes, there were the piano, math and language lessons they had to take, but when they outgrew their interest, they dropped the lessons (especially the Chinese lessons that demanded rigorous and repetitive copying of characters; even now it breaks my heart to remember the large cannon-ball size tear-drops one son would pour on the exercise sheets). And no, we did not write entrance essays for them but I did give him a few pointers of what schools are suited for their gifts.

It’s funny how one compares notes with other parents and how easy it is to see the speck in their eyes. In one instance, I felt embarrassed by that tinge of superiority that came over me when I mentioned I was friend with my children in FaceBook. The general rule of course is that the last people our children wanted to be friends with in FaceBook are the parents; it just leads to strong possibility of cyber-stalking; I am the aberration – or so I consoled the other parents.

I suppose time will tell, whether I had been that audacious parent whose control over their children’s lives lead to their subsequent dysfunction. By that time, I suppose I’m willing to spring for the cost of their therapy. Then, again, reading about the lives of great authors and artists gives me the comfort that all of them in one way or another had to deal with one or both controlling parents and that it was through such conflicts they had found their place as artists. In the novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy writes "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I am hoping my children came from a happy family. I am also betting that their growth will be exceptional and without difficulty. What are the odds though?