Mindful Underparenting

A Surgeon General’s Advisory is a public statement that calls the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action. You may remember advisories about smoking, AIDS, or more recently, loneliness or the dangers of social media. Earlier this month, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory calling attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers of children.

If you have been paying attention, or if you are a parent yourself or know someone who is a parent, this advisory seems redundant. For years, particularly during the pandemic, studies have shown that parents are struggling financially, emotionally, mentally, and/or physically. A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is “completely overwhelming,” compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same.

I recently spoke to a young mom at church who said, “It feels like I am always making choices and decisions for my infant, and whatever I decide turns out to be the wrong one.” She was talking about waking her child to feed him or letting him sleep but I think that feeling is one many parents relate to. According to one study, parents make 1,750 difficult decisions in the first year of life.

Personally, I have entered a new phase of parenting, leaving behind the years of diapering, nighttime wake-ups, car seats, and strollers and entering the stage of pre-adolescence, navigating friendships, extracurriculars, developing identities, and slang I will never understand. We limit the number of extracurriculars our children do, but even then it feels like a non-stop game of scheduling whack-a-mole of who goes where, when, and how they get there. I feel like I traded physical exhaustion for emotional exhaustion.

We love to believe that there is a right answer for every question, but in parenting there often is no one right answer. These days, we can find a parenting expert around every corner. Parenting content is everywhere — in the newspaper, on social media, on tv, and shelf after shelf of our local bookstores. With so much content, it’s easy to believe that someone has an answer to your problem. And yet, we cannot seem to find it. Even if we know in our brains that there is no perfect answer to sleepless nights, introducing solids, choosing schools, selecting extracurricular activities, whether or not to get our children technology, we still want to find the right way. It is like we are looking for a missing puzzle piece that was never even in the picture. Our brains turn decisions over and over, desperate for a fix or solution. In reality, I think what we mostly want is control.

I’ve thought a lot about how much we rely on machine metaphors in our bodily experience — macros, bio-hacking, overload, etc. The metaphor creeps into all aspects of our life, parenting not excluded. There are many nights I can remember believing that if I got the bath timing right, the book reading right, and the swaddle or blankets just right, my children should sleep through the night. The right inputs should lead to the right outputs.

Now I have days of thinking if I just provide them with the right enrichment activities or personalized extracurriculars, invite the right friends over, or promote certain behaviors, then my children will turn out all right. All of this is due to a deep desire to control the outcomes for my children, to keep them from suffering the experiences I have either had or seen others go through — being left out, being teased, being in the wrong crowd, getting hurt, or failing. You may call this helicopter parenting or perhaps snowplow parenting, clearing the way for our children to go through life unscathed. We’d all bubble wrap our children if we could.

I have nothing on the Surgeon General — he is the expert here — but perhaps what needs to be done is what is advocated by psychologist Darby Saxbe: mindful underparenting. In her article in the New York Times, she argues that:

In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value ‘quality time’ over quantity of time … we don’t ignore our children enough.

Saxbe goes on to suggest that our style of parenting is not only exhausting (and stressful) for parents but also denies our children the opportunity to observe and learn from grown-ups around them. Boredom is a key factor in the development of patience, resourcefulness, and creativity. Allowing our children to feel uncomfortable feelings, like boredom, is the opposite of the snowplow I sometimes find myself resembling.

Because here’s the thing: we cannot skip over suffering for our children. If we are truly people of the cross, then we know that the only way to grace is through pain. If I were to ask you about the most formative or growing experiences in your life, I can almost guarantee they were not in victory but defeat. In trying to control the outcomes of our children’s lives, with all the stress and anxiety that control costs, we may in fact be trying to short-circuit the very place they might find grace and freedom.

By overparenting my children, my vigilant monitoring for any and all adversity and suffering, in my constant search for the key to their success, I am fighting desperately against the very place that God is always at work: the hard parts of our lives. No parent wants to watch their children suffer, even just the pain of being lonely or not making the team, but what gives me hope is that God does his best work in the bleakest of times. Giving children the freedom to fail, to be bored, or un-entertained is a way to remember that we are not in control. We can rest that God always cares for his people, including our children, in the hard times, the lonely times and yes, even the boring times.