On helicopter parenting

Parental involvement can have a positive effect in their children's lives. In what some call the Authoritative Parenting Style, the relationship between parents and children are typically, "...high on warmth and moderate on control, very careful to set clear limits and restrictions regarding certain kinds of behaviors." Of the Authoritative style, further research shows that "Children tend to be friendly and to show development of general competencies for dealing with others and with their environments" (Butcher, Mineka, & Hooley, Abnormal Psychology Core Concepts, Second Edition (2011), 62).

Yet excessive parenting--sometimes called Helicopter Parenting, because of the parents' tendency to hover over everything their children do--appears to have many detrimental effects for all parties involved. That is the subject of a new study from The Journal of Child and Family Studies, and an article by Bonnie Rochman of Time.com.

In particular with adult children, Rochman says the study found "...helicopter parenting decreased adult children’s feelings of autonomy, competence and connection. In turn, feeling incompetent led to increased reports of feeling depressed and dissatisfied."

A related study by the same research group last year found that the helicopter parent experience also negatively affected parents, who often suffered exhaustion and depression as a result of their hyper-involved parenting.

The emerging picture suggests so-called "Helicopter Parenting" does no one favors. Holly Schiffrin, lead author of the study, is quoted by Rochman as saying, "'Parents are sending an unintentional message to their children that they are not competent.'" This appears to erode a child's sense of confidence, independence, and resilience. It also wreaks havoc on parents's health. To top it all, the damage seems to be more-or-less unintended; parents just want their children to succeed.

The study and article further convince me of the difficulties inherent in parenting generally. A growing child seems to need so many contrary things in hard-to-define and ever-changing measure; rules and freedom, security and uncertainty, space and guidance, and so much else. To borrow an idea from the late historian Jacques Barzun, parents seem to require a kind of "double-vision" that they may simultaneously see the contrary needs of their children from both and all angles. This is not easy, and suggests one reason many caring parents resort to helicopter style, despite its shortcomings; that it simplifies--temporarily at least--the burden of rearing and guiding an emerging adult by taking command of various aspects of the child's life. What was double-vision before thus becomes singular. A balancing-act fraught with uncertainty becomes a problem of jumping hoops and achieving benchmarks, a far more straight-forward challenge for most ambitious and driven adults.

Yet a child is neither a ship to be piloted, nor a thing to be perfected. If Rochman and Schiffrin offer any insight, it is that children need three things which helicopter parents cannot readily provide: autonomy, competence, and connection with other people. These constitute the three legs of the "Self-Determination Theory" stool, and by taking control and constantly interjecting into their children's lives, helicopter parents seem to hamper the provisioning of these three needs. Like a ship captain grooming a young sailor for command, the latter only seems to develop autonomy, competence, and connection with others by putting his or her hand to the helm and experiencing the novelty of top-command. A good captain might also know (or learn) when and how these experiences are best attained, building his or her charge's confidence, and thereby, independence. That is the idea anyway, though likely much harder in practice.

For this reason I am cautious to judge anybody put in a position of raising a child or grooming a competent, confident individual in any endeavor. The challenges they face are different yet on par perhaps with those young folks coming into their own in the world. There's much we know about how this process should work, yet like sailor who would command a ship, we may not acquire the captain's touch until we've had the helm in our own hands for a time.

Reflection: On Soft and Gentle Things

With respect to love, the Malagasy have a proverb which says:

"Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river."

In the Tao te Ching, it reads:

"Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,nothing can surpass it." -Chapter 78

From these two quotations does a notion begin to take shape; that a soft and gentle force, applied persistently, can have profound consequences. The course of a river may change little in a year, but give 10,000 years and the view is usually quite different. The force of gravity does little to prevent a person from defying it temporarily by jumping into the air, yet ask that person to defy it 10,000 times without rest, and the result is likely tired person no longer intent on jumping.

For all the ease it takes to overcome a soft force once, it is remarkable how many examples in nature show evidence of its power. Consider a cork floating in a pond. Push it under water, and it will hardly resist. Yet take away your finger, and straight to the surface it will rise. The cork will never resist, but never remains underwater for long.

If one clasps tightly to a blob of clay, it will squeeze through one's fingers and end up on the floor. If one grasps at something in water with force, the thing flows away. The harder one grasps, the faster it slides away. To carry clay or catch a thing in water, the open hand seems to work better than the tight fist.

We respect force because it hurts, but we respect gentleness because it effortlessly transforms. Frequently this idea is forgotten, or dismissed as inaccurate. I do not know whether it is a fact, but I do think enough instances in the world exist to warrant reflection from time to time.

Happy Saturday :)

A Summary/Response to Christina Boufis’ “Yes, Girls get ADHD too”

The following is adapted from a paper I wrote for Abnormal Psych Spring2013. Enjoy!

I admit, when the condition ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyper-activity Disorder) comes to mind, the first thing I imagine is the proverbial first-grade male with the energy and concentrating abilities of a humming bird. As it turns out, not only is this view shared by many in popular culture, it also misses important facets of the condition. ADHD is not just a medical name for ants-in-your-pants, nor is it necessarily predominately-male. As the following article suggests, girls get it too, and frequently they go far longer without help than their male counterparts. Much to their detriment, the popular view of ADHD tends to make us miss the signs in girls as they pass through formative years in education and maturation. 

According to the article, one of the reasons we tend to associate ADHD with males is because the signs of it tend to be more obvious in them. Dr. Harlan Gephart, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington medical school in Seattle, is quoted as saying, “‘Of the three traits that define ADHD—hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and inattentiveness—the first two are thought to be more descriptive of boys.’” Not surprisingly, a recent national study found that “…the majority of parents and teachers perceived ADHD to be more common in boys, who they believed had more behavior problems. Almost half of teachers that participated in this study also reported that they had difficulty recognizing the signs of ADHD in girls.” A second study from Australia found that“…even when parents and teachers acknowledged the disorder in girls, they were less likely to recommend [girls] get extra assistance because they believed it wouldn't help them as much as it would boys.” It is for this reason perhaps that for girls, “…an ADHD diagnosis isn't made until middle or high school or even later, when school becomes more demanding and a girl is having trouble completing her homework, or her undiagnosed ADHD leads to depression.”

This is unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising. The research cited in the article goes some way in showing how popular perceptions not only blind us to ADHD symptoms in girls, but also compel us to believe treatment for them would be unhelpful. As a result, many girls go years without a diagnosis, potentially leaving them far behind their peers in cumulative subjects such as mathematics and science. In this respect we do both girls and society a disservice by our bias and oversight.

Yet correcting them is liable to be difficult, particularly since, as Gephart is quoted as saying, “‘The big problem with ADHD in girls is that it presents itself differently.’” As such, the example presented to us by males may not serve as a useful indicator for detecting the condition in females. A deeper and more nuanced understanding, to say nothing of a more open perspective, seems necessary to counter the prevailing notion of ADHD as a primarily male disorder with male symptoms. Preconceptions and general ideas are useful, but as this case suggests, they too have their limits.

The Utility of Depression?

The following is adapted from a paper I wrote for Abnormal Psych Spring2013. Enjoy!

Does depression have uility? At first one might think no. After all, don't the depressed frequently neglect their own well-being, their relationships with others, and contemplate such serious acts as suicide? If so, how has depression—a condition with no obvious evolutionary utility—passed through thousands of generations to continue affecting human beings today?

From this logical predicament does Jonah Lehrer of the New York Times begin his attempt at arguing yes, depression does have utility. Entitled, “Depression’s Upside,” the piece describes how new research points toward a painful, albeit useful, function for depression. Following the work of Andy Thomas (psychiatrist of the University of Virginia) and Paul Andrews (Evolutionary Psychologist of Virginia Commonwealth University), Lehrer begins by focusing on the double-edged capacity of rumination, a “…thought process which defines [depression].”

Rumination typically means to physically chew something over and over again. In this case, however, it means a kind of mental chewing of ideas in a closed loop without interruption. One might characterize it as an intense form of focus. According to Leherer, “The capacity for intense focus …relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead.” In addition, “Several studies [have] found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients.” Curiously, rumination tends to make our thinking more analytical, because it “…is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to ‘work’ with all the information stuck in consciousness.” It is for this reason Thomas and Andrews have called their idea the “analytic-rumination hypothesis.”

Even more strange perhaps, some research by Andrews found that after performing an abstract-reasoning test, “…nondepressed students showed an increase in ‘depressed affect...which made people think better.’” From this Lehrer suggests that “the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy…that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems.” Accordingly, we have reason to believe that the capacity for extreme focus and abstract reasoning shares links with the capacity for unremitting negative thought.

This is interesting, because it suggests two-directional causation; that depression makes us more analytical, and analytical thinking makes us more depressed. How should we take this, particularly within the context of a world which places increasingly greater value on analytic skills and reasoning? On the one hand, analysis has arguably made us better off: we live longer, communicate more widely, and understand processes in the world more completely because of it. On the other hand, we've replaced many problems of the past with those of our own time, among them technology addiction, increasing narcissism, wide-spread obesity, and a seeming collapse of personal support structures within society generally. One may argue against any one of these claims, but the point is that while analysis has solved many problems and reduced the prevalence of many superstitions, it has produced many of its own as replacements. And if the research cited by Mr. Lehrer is any indication, a world preoccupied with analysis may in some respects be a sadder one. Analytic intelligence is but one kind, and while it has its benefits it also has its costs. Wisdom and intelligence often seem akin, but perhaps not synonymous.

"A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can." -Michel de Montaigne