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  3. The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting What parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century? Overobsesse

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting What parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century? Overobsesse

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问题                 The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting
    What parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century? Overobsessed with our kids’ success. Demand that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it’s never too soon to prepare for the global competition. Send high school teachers angry text messages protesting an exam grade before class was even over. College deans describe freshmen as "crispies," who arrive at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seem ready to break at the tiniest stress.
    Just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst. So there is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the overprotectiveness and overinvestment of parents. It goes by many names—slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting— but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering (飞机盘旋) is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.
How We Got Here
    Overparenting had been around long indeed. But in the 1990s it went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety! crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight) the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41 % in 1969 to 13 % in 2001. Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to 1997, and homework more than doubled. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby’s Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points.
    Once obsessing about kids’ safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America’s Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results—all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous.
Reports From the Front Lines
    Fear is a kind of parenting fungus (真菌): invisible, and perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader’s race for class report, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he’s headed off to college.
    Some of the hovering is driven by memory and demography. This generation of parents, born after 1964, waited longer to marry and had fewer children. Families are among the smallest in history, and we guard them all the more zealously. Therefore, helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, all races and ethnicities, says Patricia Somers of the University of Texas.
    Studies have reinforced the importance of play as an essential protein in a child’s emotional diet; were it not, argue some scientists, it would not have persisted across species and millenniums, perhaps as a way to practice for adulthood, to build leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids—they’d taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models—JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants’ play backgrounds into interviews. "If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being in life," Brown has argued, "play is as fundamental as any other aspect."
Remember, Mistakes Are Good
    Many educators have been searching for ways to tell parents when to back off. It’s a tricky line to walk, since studies link parents’ engagement in a child’s education to better grades, higher test scores and better college outcomes. Given a choice, teachers say, overinvolved parents are preferable to invisible ones. The challenge is helping parents know when they are crossing a line. A guidance counselor at a Washington preparatory school urges parents to find a mentor of a certain disposition. "Make friends with parents," she advises, "who don’t think their kids are perfect." Or with parents who are willing to exert some peer pressure of their own.
    A certain amount of hovering is understandable when it comes to young children, but many educators are concerned when it persists through middle school and high school. Some teachers talk of "Stealth Fighter (隐形战斗 机) Parents," who no longer hover constantly but can be counted on for a surgical strike just when the high school musical is being cast or the starting lineup chosen. And senior year is the witching hour, since for a lot of parents, a college admission is like their grade report on how they did as a parent. Many colleges have had to invent a "director of parent programs" to run regional groups so moms and dads can meet fellow college parents or attend special classes where they can learn all the school cheers.
What You Can Do?
    The revolutionary leaders are careful about offering too much advice. Parents have gotten plenty of that, and one of the goals of this new movement is to give parents permission to disagree or at least follow different roads. "People feel there’s somehow a secret formula for parenting, and if we just read enough books and spend enough money and drive ourselves hard enough, we’ll find it, and all will be OK," Carl Honore observes. "Can you think of anything more sinister, since every child is so different, every family is different? Parents need to block out the sound and fury from the media and other parents, find that formula that fits your family best."
    Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, teaches seminars. He and his coaches will even go into your home, weed out your kids’ stuff, sort out their schedule, turn off the screens and help your family find space you didn’t know you had. But any parent can do it just as well. Payne says, the average child has 150 toys. "When you cut the toys and clothes back... the kids really like it." He aims for a cut of roughly 75%: only the classics that leave the most to the child’s imagination and create a kind of toy library kids can visit and swap from. Then build breaks of calm into their schedule so they can actually enjoy the toys.
    Finally, there is the gift of humility, which parents need to offer one another. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they argued in USA Today. "By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it’s too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago—what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children."
    If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D. H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child? First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."
What can we learn about Lenore Skenazy?
选项 A、She is not a qualified mother in balancing her job and her son.
B、She is an enlightened mom to give her son free-range education.
C、She is irrational trying to infantilize her son into incompetence.
D、She is over-obsessed with her son’s safety and success.
答案B
解析 推理判断题。本段讲述Lenore Skenazy因为让9岁的儿子独自乘坐纽约的地铁而招致批判的事。她认为父母们担心的都是不应该担心的问题，这会让孩子们变得焦虑且不敢冒险。由此推断，这是一位非常懂教育、知道应该放养孩子的开明妈妈，因此答案为B)。
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