You may have heard of Michael Carr-Gregg. He’s a high profile psychologist and parenting expert who is a regular commentator in the media.
Well, he has a new book coming out, called Strictly Parenting: Everything you need to know about raising school-aged kids. And the publicity that’s preceding the book is very interesting. Here are a couple of headlines:
‘Crap’ Australian parents raising a generation of spoilt brats’
‘Australian parents doing CRAP job’
‘Psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg lashes out against ‘crappy parenting’ in new book’
We know that publicists and media love a controversial angle on any story. But Michael Carr-Gregg is using the term ‘crap parenting’, and the media is taking it on.
According to reports, Michael Carr-Gregg thinks that there are too many parents using what he calls ‘crap parenting’ practices.
Let me just clarify that I haven’t read the book yet because it hasn’t been officially released. So this is based on the media reports and information on his publisher’s website.
Here are Michael Carr-Gregg’s 7 signs of crap parenting…
The helicopter
The hot-houser
The best friend
The trophy
The bubble-wrapper
‘But I just want them to be happy’
And here’s an extract from the introduction, which explains his position a bit more…
“Indeed, many of the parenting practices I have observed over the last decade fly in the face of a mountain of sound research. We know what children need to help them grow into happy, healthy and resilient adults – to feel safe, valued and ‘heard’, to be given opportunities to solve their own problems, to have boundaries to push against and to experience the consequences of failure – yet I’m seeing large numbers of Australian parents hesitant to set limits or boundaries, to use moral language or to enforce consequences when their kids make bad choices.
Their mantra has become ‘you can be anything you want to be’, and their children are coddled, coached and told they are magnificent when they are mediocre at best. Accustomed to receiving rewards divorced from actual effort and accomplishment, these children arrive in the real world equipped only with a heightened sense of entitlement and soon become anxious and depressed when they discover that life isn’t what they were promised.”
And the reason for all the problems we’re facing? Michael says…
“How did it get like this?
If you google the word ‘parent’ you will get 192 million results in just 0.17 seconds, thousands upon thousands of pages of parenting advice on the websites and blogs of health departments, educational organisations and self-proclaimed parenting gurus. How does a bewildered mum or dad sort through this tidal wave of advice that is often contradictory, lacking an evidence base or just plain quackery?”
So the problem is all those parents googling and listening to quacks.
You’ll be pleased to know that Michael Carr-Gregg’s book is not just finger-pointing. He also suggests some ‘good’ parenting practices.
His top parenting tips of all time are…
Don’t do anything for your children that they can do themselves
Give your kids a regular dose of vitamin ‘N’ [meaning No]
Listen to your children
Do stuff with your kids
Handle meltdowns with dignity
See the glass as half-full
Stick to routines
Get a life [for yourself]
I don’t disagree with a lot of what he’s saying about parenting practices that don’t help kids, and those that do. I agree that kids need to feel bad sometimes, they need to fail, and they need to experience all of life. It’s not our job to protect them from these experiences, but to support them when they happen. And yes, kids do need boundaries and love and support and they need to take on responsibilities.
But I do question is approach to getting his message across. Does it really help to call parents ‘crap’? That may get headlines, but does it really help parents?
And I do question his reasons for why this is happening. Yes, there is parenting information overload. But is the answer simply to listen to him and ignore all the other quacks?
So I have three questions for you…
- Presuming that you agree that crap parenting does exist to some extent, is it info overload that’s the problem? Is it because parents are listening to quacks and not the hard evidence? Is that why there is crap parenting?
- When we hear criticisms of parents like this, do we stop and take a good hard look at ourselves and see if it applies to us? Or do we just dismiss it as ‘all those other crap parents out there’?
- Michael Carr-Gregg says that “My hope is that by reading this book, parents will have the knowledge, skills and strategies to help their children become resilient, confident and considerate human beings.” Does his talk of crap parenting make you want to read his book, heed his call, become a better parent? Or not?
Plus any other thoughts are welcome!
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