30 April 2022

Anxiety in American children

Excerpts from an article in The Atlantic that will be of interest to parents:
Here are some things that, over the course of the SPACE* training, I heard of parents doing to avoid setting off their anxious children:

Going upstairs to get a child’s backpack before school because the child is scared to be alone in any area of the house and the parent doesn’t have time to argue about it. Driving a child to school because the child is frightened of the bus, with the result that the mother is late to work every single day.

Tying and retying a child’s shoes until they feel just right.

Spending 30 minutes a day, on average, checking and rechecking a child’s homework.

Announcing one’s presence as one moves around the house, so that a child will at all times know where to find a parent (“I’m going to the kitchen, Oliver”). Accompanying a 9-year-old child to the toilet because he is afraid to be alone. Allowing a 9-year-old to accompany a parent to the toilet because he is afraid to be alone. Peeing in a bucket—a mother, not a child—because the basement playroom has no bathroom, and the child is afraid to be alone.

Allowing a child to sleep in the parents’ bed. Sitting or lying with a child while he falls asleep.

Always carrying a plastic bag because a child is afraid she’ll vomit.

Cutting a 13-year-old’s food because she’s afraid of knives.

Ceasing to have visitors because a child is intensely shy. Speaking for a child in restaurants. Asking a child’s teacher not to call on her in class.

Installing the Find My Friends app on a child’s phone so that the child can track the parents’ whereabouts.

Preparing different foods for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.

Buying a new burglar alarm. Buying a new car. Seriously contemplating buying a new house.

The list went on and on. The most disorienting thing about it was not its length, but the way it merged stories that seemed to me bizarre but turned out to be commonplace with stories that sounded familiar but upon further consideration seemed unhealthy. Many of us think nothing of preparing different meals for different family members. Bedtime has become such a protracted affair that parents may now do the work a stuffed animal once did.

I barely suppressed a laugh at the idea of a kid tracking his parents, rather than vice versa, but murmurs of recognition sounded around the room. “That’s common,” one therapist said. The idea of buying a new house must have made my eyebrows go up, because another woman leaned over and whispered: “I have a family that moved to a split-level because the daughter didn’t like to be out of earshot.”...

We all have dreams, and Angela and Seth’s was to stop making turkey loaf.

By the time they sought help from the SPACE program’s Yaara Shimshoni last year, they had served it to their then-6-year-old son, Owen, some 3,000 times. (I have changed parents’ and children’s names.) Put another way, virtually every day for four years—two-thirds of his life—Owen had eaten turkey loaf for both lunch and dinner. For breakfast, he favored dry Cheerios.

Calling Owen a picky eater wouldn’t have captured the extent of the problem. He was terrified of most foods. On those rare occasions when he tasted something new, he would gag. Going out together as a family was a minor ordeal: Either they packed turkey loaf to take with them, or they hurried home before the next meal. Mostly, the family just stayed in. “If we ran out of it, Owen would have an absolute fit,” Seth said when he and Angela spoke with me in February. Once, after a supermarket strike disrupted the local turkey supply, he spent the night driving from store to store, searching for enough meat to get through the week... 

Maybe the way to think about recent parenting is this: All kids today are being overprotected the way only girls used to be. Except the changes in childhood are far broader than that. Even girls, after all, used to get themselves around the neighborhood and have summer jobs and chores. Today, only 10 percent of kids walk or bicycle to school, a steep decline from decades past. Forty years ago, 58 percent of teenagers got summer jobs; today, 35 percent do, and the after-school job is an even rarer species. When Braun Research surveyed more than 1,000 American adults, 82 percent said that as children they’d had regular chores—but only 28 percent said their own children did.
Way more at the longread source article.  *SPACE = Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions program at Yale University's Child Study Center.

10 comments:

  1. Regarding kids and jobs -- 40 years ago, the buying power of what a kid could earn at an afterschool or summer job was a lot more than it is today. At this point, except for the neediest families, it's just not worth having a kid work after school -- often it requires either the kid to have a car or easy access to a car or having the parent shuttle the kid to and from work because public transportation is either not adequate or is too costly or time-consuming (in relation to work hours) that it's more trouble than it's worth. What's more -- after school jobs take up the time that's required for all the extracurricular activities that colleges seem to require of applicants as an indication that they're well-rounded. And kids' having summer jobs hobbles the whole family's access to taking any summer vacations, since employers are not going to give vacation time off for a summer employee. I don't think it's a matter of over-sheltering children (although I'm sure some parents calculate that the value of a minimum wage job isn't worth the risk vs. reward of their child being put in danger from robberies, etc.), it's more that families just find the whole thing not worth the trouble.

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    1. "It's more that families just find the whole thing not worth the trouble."

      That statement pretty much is the issue, in a nutshell.

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  2. Eating a really limited diet is more of a sensory issue (often related to spectrum disorder) than anxiety. Sometimes it needs a whole team - occupational therapist, speech pathologist, nutritionist, etc.

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  3. My father would have given me a knot upside my gourd for any one of those behaviors. Family, neighbors, relatives and the police would have applauded.
    xoxoxoBruce

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  4. I too was beaten regularly as a child, and made to work for the benefit of the 'family'. My theory is that we're seeing a generation of now-parents refusing to repeat the dangerous errors of the generations before them. Maybe too much in the opposite direction, but there's reason behind this parenting style.

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  5. I think part of the blame falls is on the disastrous design of modern suburbs where, as the first commenter points out, you depend on a car to get around. So under 17, you can't get to a job. You are not able to get to it, and they're isn't anything around because zoning keeps small businesses out of suburbs.

    Also, it seems parents have gone too far in coddling their kids which had turned a many into asocial little maniacs instead of well-balanced young people who can handle and negotiate adversity.

    But I don't get to soak because I don't have any. I just observe.

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  6. Okay, I'll say it: The American family is a hell of a lot less functional than it was 50 or 60 years ago, as supposedly evil, traditional parenting roles have fallen out of favor. I would begin by citing an "executive function" study of young children, replicating task oriented tests from the 1950s. This was about ten years ago and the results were astonishing. Today's kids were about two years behind their earlier counterparts. Teachers have been telling me about this decline for decades. We are doing a "mad scientist" social experiment. So far, there's one clear winner: corporations, in an age of labor surpluses.

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    1. In the section, "Change in play, change in kids" there's a reference to a 2001 study on decline in executive function. I think the story is much bigger than play related, as argued in this article, given the multiple ways childhood has been transformed. I'd like to find the study:
      https://www.npr.org/2008/02/21/19212514/old-fashioned-play-builds-serious-skills

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    2. Astonishing article.

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  7. https://theconversation.com/a-boom-in-fitness-trackers-isnt-leading-to-a-boom-in-physical-activity-men-women-kids-and-adults-in-developed-countries-are-all-moving-less-177900

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