Keep Calm and Parent On: A Guilt-Free Approach to Raising Children by Asking More from Them and Doing Less - Hardcover

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Emma Jenner grew up in England and has studied and worked with children for seventeen years. In 2008 she starred in TLC’s Take Home Nanny, and in 2010 she founded Emma’s Children, a consulting service to help educate parents. She is frequently interviewed as a childcare expert and is a parenting columnist for LA Parent Magazine and Huffington Post.

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Keep Calm and Parent On

INTRODUCTION

Fairy Dust

“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS

I’VE WORKED WITH nannies and parents around the globe, and I’ve noticed a growing crisis in how children are raised.

Consider this example: An adult enters a room where there is one seat, occupied by a child. Does the child stand and let the adult take the seat? Or if the adult is seated and the child enters, does the adult stand? When I was growing up in Britain in the 1980s, it was unfathomable for a child to sit while an adult stood. And now? It’s the opposite. Parents are so eager to make their children comfortable, or to avoid the sounds of their whining, that they sacrifice themselves.

I recently overheard a mum asking a dad if he’d gone to the store to pick up bread with their son. “He didn’t want to go,” said the dad. He didn’t want to go? My eyes just about popped out of my head. Who was the parent, and who was the child? If this dad could have only heard himself, perhaps it would have been a wake-up call that it was time to regain some control.

Modern parenting is in trouble, and we must understand how we got here before we can make any sense of it. I see four primary causes for our brewing crisis:

1. We’ve dropped our expectations.

Imagine a raised bar, like a high bar from an Olympics gymnastics competition. We expect our children to surmount this bar. When we were children ourselves, that bar reached our chest level, and to get over it took some effort and discipline, but get over it we did. Gradually, that bar has inched downward. With each passing year we expect less and less of our children. They must merely place a relaxed fingertip on a bar that barely reaches their knee, and we jump for joy. “Daren did the dishes with me tonight!” we say proudly. “What a great kid!” The slippage has been greater in certain countries (sorry, America . . . though in truth, the UK isn’t far behind you), but I’ve yet to see a country or culture beyond reproach.

I once watched while a toddler pulled his father’s hair. The dad smiled and removed his son’s grip, and the little boy immediately grabbed for a chunk of hair again. The situation was repeated several times. Never did Dad use a stern voice and reprimand him or stop playing with him as a consequence of the rough play. Both the dad and the mum felt their son was too young to behave differently. As another example, I frequently hear parents claim that they can’t take their child to a restaurant. “Why not?” I ask. “Because he won’t behave. I’m embarrassed and don’t want to deal with it.” To that I say “Nonsense. He will behave if you expect him to and teach him how.” At the end of the day, you have to put in the work, and though it takes time, effort, and patience, it’s worth it. I can take an eighteen-month-old, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old into a posh restaurant and know they will behave. How do I know? Because I won’t tolerate anything less!

Parents are frequently standing way too close to see their children’s capabilities. There’s a fairly sentimental car commercial that shows a dad instructing his daughter the ins and outs of driving on a journey she’s about to take. When the camera spans to the daughter, she’s no more than six—not even capable of reaching the gas pedal. In another shot, she’s shown to actually be a teenager, but the point is clear: Parents are inclined to see their children through a special lens, one in which they are always smaller and less capable than they actually are. We are so accustomed to them relying on us for everything, that as that reliance goes away little by little, we are sometimes slow to adjust. On the flip side, we must also set up our children for success and not set the bar unreasonably high. You must understand your child and meet her where she is.

With all of this in mind, I am here to raise the bar. If you take nothing else away from this book, let it be this: Expect more from your children, and they will rise to it. Expect less, and they will sink.

2. We’ve abandoned the village.

Parents do not support one another like they used to; they’re too busy competing about whose kids can do better. They don’t talk to one another about the struggles they’re having—a lost opportunity to get much-needed empathy and perhaps some advice—because they don’t want to admit to others when their child misbehaves. Instead of working as a team with other parents and teachers, they’re working against one another.

It takes a village to raise a child, and we’ve lost that village. Though my mum did most of the child rearing in my family, my nana, teachers, the local shopkeeper, and my parents’ friends all played a part. In the United States, in contrast, one’s parenting style is up for critique by everyone. I would even go so far as to say that most parents are scared to set boundaries in public, for fear someone will judge them.

My friend Abby just told me about an incident at her son’s daycare where the teachers were having a difficult time getting her son to eat his yogurt properly without tossing it all about. Abby responded by saying, “Okay, what should I do? Let’s fix it.” The daycare teachers were shocked that she was so receptive.

Most parents, Abby later learned, would reject any criticism of their child. In contrast, once when I was very young and stole a few penny-sweets from a shop, my mum marched me back and made me apologize to the shopkeeper. If that happened today, in the United States or the UK, the parent might chastise the child, but they’d likely be too embarrassed to admit their child’s transgression. My mum was embarrassed, too, no doubt, but it was worth it to teach me a lesson. The bottom line is, without a healthy sense of support and community, parents are on their own trying to do a task that is so much better suited for a village.

3. We take too many shortcuts.

The third problem we face is that parents are harried to such an extent that many take shortcuts wherever they are able. The availability of shortcuts is indeed a blessing in this crazy world, but only if used with care.

The shortcuts I am most opposed to are video games and the TV shows. It will not be news to anyone reading this that our children are too plugged in. Many experts talk about the costs of technology in terms of our children’s attention deficit problems, and I agree with this, but the overuse of media causes problems in many areas of children’s lives. Among other repercussions, it affects their sleep, it affects their schedule, and it affects the rate at which they learn to behave properly. For instance, if you want to attend a baby shower and bring your child, once she acts out, you can plug her into the iPad you brought along instead of doing the harder work of teaching her to conduct herself well in a new setting. It’s much easier to ignore poor behavior and give in than it is to teach. But we must resist the easy way and take the longer view!

Another shortcut is food. Perhaps you eat your food on the go, in the car on your way from one engagement to another. Though it is certainly wonderful that such meals are available, the shortcut means that you are losing...