So it’s not just Americans who have lost all sense of perspective when it comes to parenting. The Brits are nutty too.
A few years ago, author Judith Warner wrote Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, about how affluent American mothers were slowly losing their grasp on reality in order to attempt to be “perfect” and to, essentially, envelop their offspring in bubble wrap and then, ironically, unhealthily wrap their own lives around their children’s.
Now we learn, according to Meg Sanders and Annie Ashworth, authors of The Madness of Modern Parenting, that it's not just an American problem. After interviewing parents, teachers, psychologists and doctors, Sanders told the Manchester Evening News that: “. . . [T]hey were seeing a great upsurge in neurotic, hyper-parenting which comes out of over-anxiety and competitiveness. Parents are constantly feeling judged, and that breeds insecurity.”
Among the great examples quoted by the Evening News was from a section of the book – no, I haven’t read it yet – entitled “School Life: Forgery and Fraud,” about parents who just can’t let their own kids do their own homework: “Teachers aren’t stupid. That’s why they write WDM very small at the bottom of the page of homework – Well Done Mum.”
(Image from Amazon.com.)
A few years ago, author Judith Warner wrote Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, about how affluent American mothers were slowly losing their grasp on reality in order to attempt to be “perfect” and to, essentially, envelop their offspring in bubble wrap and then, ironically, unhealthily wrap their own lives around their children’s.
Now we learn, according to Meg Sanders and Annie Ashworth, authors of The Madness of Modern Parenting, that it's not just an American problem. After interviewing parents, teachers, psychologists and doctors, Sanders told the Manchester Evening News that: “. . . [T]hey were seeing a great upsurge in neurotic, hyper-parenting which comes out of over-anxiety and competitiveness. Parents are constantly feeling judged, and that breeds insecurity.”
Among the great examples quoted by the Evening News was from a section of the book – no, I haven’t read it yet – entitled “School Life: Forgery and Fraud,” about parents who just can’t let their own kids do their own homework: “Teachers aren’t stupid. That’s why they write WDM very small at the bottom of the page of homework – Well Done Mum.”
(Image from Amazon.com.)
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