Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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OK, y'all, are you a parent or parent? Have you talked to a parent recently? Well, newsflash, the parents are not okay. And I mean this in a couple of ways. Yes, there's the financial strain of raising a child right now, but I'm also talking about this underlying anxiety that seeps into every conversation I have with a parent. The question of, am I a good parent?
For the next few weeks, we're going to look at the culture of parenting in America today. From the political propaganda that preys on new parents to the challenges of raising a child equipped to survive in our rapidly changing world. We're showing you how not to fall for the parent trap.
The parent is thinking differently.
Chapter 2: What cultural factors contribute to parental anxiety today?
My identity as a parent is very important. If the child succeeds, then it shows that I'm also succeeding as a parent.
That's Cynthia Wong. She's a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University. And she studies how fear and shame affect a parent's self-image and, in turn, their kids.
But if the child fails, then it's a reflection on my parental identity in a negative manner.
Lord have mercy. It seems like it's very driven by this idea that your child is an extension of you and you are on the hook for every single thing that could ever happen to them or that they could ever do good, bad or indifferent. It's a lot of pressure.
It is a lot of pressure. And I think identity drives so much of our decisions. We have professional identities, but one of the strongest identities is this parental identity. I mean, they're literally a part of us. And so we view them as an extension of the self.
The question of, am I a good parent, isn't a new one. But in the era of the self, the era of who am I and am I doing okay, I'm seeing some extra baggage parents are putting on themselves. You can think of a couple different types of fear-based parenting styles. Go ahead and ask yourself, based on your own personality, which kind of parent are you or would you be? Are you a perfectionist parent?
So it's this idea of overachievement pressure. You need to get those straight A's. You need to become a lawyer or a doctor. And it's this desire to put pressure on the kids to be perfect. And you would think that that pressure is coming from, I want my child to succeed, but often it's a self-reflection of the parent.
Or are you a helicopter parent?
It's the belief that if I can monitor things, nothing bad will happen. And if you think about it, it is driven by fear. It's fear of chaos. It's fear of the unknown. And a typical behavior you see from that is that you're going to overprotect. You're going to be constantly checking the child. And what that's trying to manage is the emotion itself. It's, hey, I'm going to manage my fear.
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Chapter 3: How does parental identity influence parenting styles?
You know what I mean? I think everyone's brain goes into fight or flight and you pick up your kid and you run. But I wonder about more like perceived threats, like if a parent is seeing on the news that video games will corrupt their child's mind, you know, what leads them to gain new information like that and then maybe to decide?
oh, I need to take video games away from my child or, oh, I need to put my child on an even stricter curfew or, oh, you know, I need to remove all of the, you know, plastic from our home.
Yeah. And that's a great question. In terms of a lot of the research I do, it's about how do people react to uncertainty and a loss of control?
And so when we see these threats in the environment, whether it's these games or these comic books or things that are unknown, and psychologically what happens to parents is that when they are in a situation of threat, they look to see patterns in the environment that can help explain things. And on top of that, they use oversimplified explanations to try to regain agency.
So in parenting, what this can mean is that they're clinging on to what they view as the right ways of parenting, things that will prevent anything bad from happening. And what's the best way to prevent bad things from happening? Well, let's take it away. Let's get rid of it. Rather than, hey, let's unpack this. Let's unpack our feelings of fear and why it's driving it.
You're focusing on the object of fear and trying to take it away.
Yeah.
I wonder, can fear ever be helpful in parenting? What's the difference between a healthy fear and an irrational, dangerous fear? Karen, let's hear from you first on this.
Well, what parents are really scared of is this kind of loss of control that I think Cynthia has actually sort of identified as well. Not just that you don't know exactly what you're Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 4: What are the different fear-based parenting styles?
This could influence the child such that our kids learn that anxiety is the price of caring almost.
Ooh, anxiety is the price of caring. Yeah. I think a lot of people are going to be taking that to therapy this week. That's a really good one. I'm wondering, what do some of these parenting fears, parenting panics reflect about our times? And even thinking about current parenting panics, what are they reflecting about our times right now?
I can speak to it from the vaccine hesitancy point. When there's a lot of uncertainty in a particular time, let's say during pandemics, during COVID-19, for example, during Ebola, these types of events have sparked historically and even more recently.
This sense of uncertainty and what we tend to see during those times are that conspiracy theories tend to abound a lot more, whether it's microchips in your vaccines or during Ebola. It was that it was, of course, manufactured in a lab and spread by pharmaceutical organizations.
Right.
So what we tend to see over and over is that this uncertainty of the situation, some sort of big event, uncertain event is happening, it drives a lack of control, and then people become a lot more vaccine hesitant because of that. And parents particularly,
are very driven by these fears because, once again, it's a combination of their parental identity plus all the uncertainty in the environment. So this is why fear-based messages take hold when parents feel powerlessness and they start distrusting systems, bigger institutions. They'll reject expert advice as a way to try to reclaim control, right?
And because of that, they might say, hey, I don't want my kid to get vaccinated. It's too risky because of this distrust they feel.
Karen, I'd love to hear from you on this as well. Like, what do you think the parenting fears of today or the parenting panics of today are reflecting about our current culture?
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