BRUNSWICK SCHOOL
FEBRUARY 2012
MONTHLY MAILING A MESSAGE FROM THE HEADMASTER Don’t Overdo It A while back, Nancy Gibbs wrote of a new and interesting phenomenon in Time magazine. The title of her article was “The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting.” The article began as follows: “The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year old’s ‘pencil-holding deficiency,’ hooked-up broadband connections in the tree-house but took down the swing after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school playground and practice field….we were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development….” Over-parenting, in our immediate environment, can take many forms. For younger students, examples can include: aggressive after-school and weekend schedules of music or foreign language lessons 6:00am or 9:00pm weekday ice skating practices for various town/select teams or even private “powerskating” lessons private tutoring in academic subjects even when the student is performing well without it For older students, all of the above as well as; parent-dictated schedules of community service “opportunities,” which might look good on a college application but which evoke little passion or interest from the student repeated rounds of PSAT or SAT tutoring parents showing up at team tryouts both at and away from school just to be certain that the process was “fair” Interestingly, however, in her article Gibbs goes on to share that since the onset of the “Great Recession,” many parents feel like they are awaking with a hangover derived from years of over-parenting, over-programming and over-worrying about their children only to discover that all their well-intentioned efforts have done little but raise both their as well as their childrens’ level of anxiety. “A backlash against over-parenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality. Since the onset of the Great Recession, according to a CBS News poll, a third of parents have cut their kids’ extracurricular activities. They downsized, downshifted and simplified because they had to – and often found, much to their surprise, that they liked it.” Whether an outgrowth of an economic “re-set” or simply an evolution in collective wisdom, it seems that more parents are coming to understand what educators have known for years, that in most cases, over-parenting ultimately proves incredibly frustrating and disappointing for the parent and a source of lingering resentment and rebellion for the child. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that overprotected children fail to find joy in many of the activities with which they are involved, often feel stressed and torn in multiple directions and, perhaps worst of all, prove unable to deal with life’s inevitable disappointments and setbacks when they ultimately come their way. Brunswick’s mission is to “prepare young men for life.” Please join us in making every effort to make sure that the life he is preparing for is more his own than that of his parents.