A pandemic parent’s best friend
IF YOU ARE A PARENT OF A CHILD under the age of, say, 10, it’s unlikely that you made it through the pandemic without coming across Dr. Becky. The clinical psychologist has become the parenting expert of the moment, an attractive 38-year-old Manhattan mom of three who is a fount of easily digestible advice about what to do when your kid won’t go to bed or throws a tantrum when it’s time to leave the playground or is in Zoom kindergarten for six hours a day, or when your in-laws visit and can’t stop criticizing your parenting. She counsels mostly on Instagram, via videos that she records with her iPhone against a wall in her apartment, and she does it all while reassuring parents that they are, in fact, doing a good job. Because if there is anything that parents who have been cooped up with their children for more than a year need to hear, it’s that even if they yell, even if they collapse with frustration at the end of yet another seemingly endless day, they’ve got this.
These mostly millennial parents flock to Dr. Becky not just because they want to be better parents but because they want to understand how the way they were raised impacts the way they’re raising their own kids—which, for many of them, means rejecting the highly anxious, carrot-and-stick reward-and-punishment style of suburban American middle-class boomer parenting that they grew up with. These are parents who were born in the ’80s and early ’90s, a time when the milk they poured in their cereal came from cartons plastered with the faces of missing children, when so-called helicopter parenting—the idea that you could literally not be too involved in your children’s lives—came into vogue, leading to a generation of children whose parents thought it was totally fine to contest a college term-paper grade.
In a 2012 reflecting on the trend of helicopter parenting, authors Laura Padilla-Walker and Larry Nelson described “a form of parenting that includes intrusive and unnecessary micromanagement of a child’s independent activities, and strong affection in the absence of child distress or need for comforting,” which research in the ’90s and early 2000s repeatedly found leads to anxiety-related problems, social withdrawal and peer difficulties in young children. “Given that involvement, protection, affection, etc., tend to be aspects of ‘good’ parenting,” wrote Padilla-Walker and Nelson, “it leads to the question of when and whether a parent can give too much of a ‘good’ thing.” Indeed, a 2019 Blue Cross Blue Shield study of millennials’ mental health found that millennials are experiencing depression and other behavioral-health issues at a much higher rate than Gen Xers did when they were the same age—and some experts connect that trend with the helicopter parenting that was common when millennials were growing up. Is it really any surprise that this generation now wants to break that fear-anxiety cycle in their own families?
