For a Moratorium on Parent Blaming

Parent blaming never seems to grow old.

Sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd, in her book of 1958, notes,

“For the last twenty-five years or more, child psychologists have been warning parents, especially mothers, of all the things they must not do or be lest they permanently damage their children. Parents have been censured for being overstrict and overpermissive, overdetached and overprotective, and for a thousand other mistakes of commission and omission."

Now, she adds, citing a New York Times article of May 5, 1957, the child psychologists are exhorting parents not to be "overanxious." Apparently, another parental mistake was to listen to the experts.

The professionals are shifting gears "to correct the effect of such guilt-producing injunctions." ¹

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

But they were just getting started.

Into the 1970s, psychiatry had the theory that the "schizophrenogenic mother" and dysfunctional families were causing young people to develop schizophrenia. Later, we had the trauma recovery psychologists telling us that virtually all adult psychological disorders are caused by dysfunctional parenting.

Meanwhile, the catalog of adverse childhood experiences that parents might inflict on their children grew. In recent decades, for instance, psychologists added "emotional neglect" and "narcissistic abuse" to the catalog of harm. For children, the perpetrators are "narcissistic," "paranoid," "emotionally immature," and other species of self-preoccupied and overbearing parents.

The overanxious parent is back as the hovering "helicopter," "snowplow," "concierge" parent, or "tiger mother." In the psychological writing on this "overparenting," mom and dad are generally credited with having good intentions. Yet, they're hurting their kids.

For some unspecified reason, the experts tell us, they have gotten caught up in an "epidemic of bad thinking." They have become "too attuned" to their children, too ready to protect them from discomfort, too focused on boosting their self-esteem, too permissive with their discipline, and too lenient with smartphone use. It's not their fault, exactly.

Yet the proposed solution is better thinking, and little is said about why parents act as they do. It sure seems like the parents are the problem.

Piling On

The list of damaging consequences of all this faulty and depraved parenting continues to multiply. According to the literature, bad parents can leave their offspring depressed, unmotivated, empty, lacking in confidence, fragile, coddled, narcissistic, angry, anxious, lonely, and much more. At least behind the "schizophrenogenic mother," there was a theory, one that could be tested and discarded. Now, it's open season.

Social media (of course) has become a forum for young people to decry all they have had to endure from their parents. As we know, some parents abuse and neglect to care for their kids, and some of this foul treatment is discussed.

But in watching videos under the hashtag #ToxicFamily (two billion views) or the various trauma labels on TikTok, one finds that most of the discussion is not about egregious behavior or mistreatment. It concerns unwanted advice, parental rules, value differences, setting boundaries, unmet expectations, and other complaints, disappointments, and frustrations.

A similar pattern of parental criticism appears to be driving the burgeoning phenomena of parental estrangement. As the psychologist Joshua Coleman shows in his book Rules of Estrangement, adult children severing ties with their parents often reflect new, previously unrecognizable judgments about what constitutes hurtful or neglectful behavior.

"Stresses, struggles, and painful incidents" once regarded as inevitable features of family life, he observes, are now seen as "life-altering and transforming." ²

For a Moratorium

One alternative to parent blaming is to argue that parents aren't that important to their children's development. We've mistakenly made their nurturing central when genetic inheritance or other parties, such as the peer group, are the key influences.³

Concern with parents is not a mistake. Parents play a very significant role in their kids' lives, and we know they have a large impact on the decisions of their teen and young adult children. No doubt all of us parents could do better in loving and caring.

In our interviews with parents, they say as much. They are anxious for their children, perhaps too anxious. But parenthood has been redefined over the past half century, leaving mothers and fathers constantly challenged to know what is best.

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We are living through a profound institutional transformation in which the rules governing virtually every area of social life have been upended. In the words of journalist Jennifer Senior, the roles of parents and children have changed, leaving both "furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script."

Raising children and growing up are different in a volatile knowledge economy and culture. They are different in a time when confronting new and novel situations becomes the rule rather than the exception, when the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future, when values are incongruent from one context of life to the next, and from one generation to the next.

We all know that much has changed. But we must also see that the social transformations and our lack of a guiding chart (a "script") create the conditions for widespread distress.

We are blaming parents for problems they did not create.

Until we better understand our predicament and the circumstances that have created it, let's have a moratorium on parent blaming. We'll find that parents are not the cause of this mess. Like everyone else, they are trying to cope with it.