Does Child-Centered Parenting Damage Kids Psychologically?

News by The Next Family
1-7-2011 in Health / Parenting
By: Joe Newman

I was excited to see not only Julie Gamberg’s article railing against my time-out blogs, but also the ensuing conversations. She did a good a job of capturing the sentiments of the child-centered parenting movement, and in so doing laid open its many fatal flaws.

Yes, time-outs ARE the new spanking! Parents are now giving children consequences without violence and judgment. Is this supposed to be a bad thing? It’s clear that Ms. Gamberg thinks it’s not enough to take the violence and judgment out of consequences, she thinks we need to take the consequence out of consequences. She attempts to take the conflict and struggle out of life –the effect out of cause and effect –which simply isn’t possible, even for children. Conflict and struggle are natural parts of life, without which children cannot develop into healthy adults.

The sentiment Ms. Gamberg conveys (and I must speak to the sentiment since she offers very little in terms of concrete solutions) is that parents must, at all costs, protect children from struggles and difficulty. I say, to do so is to create children who are psychologically feeble, have difficulty with intimacy, lack self-discipline, and grow up to be unhappy adults.

  ....If you’re not sure of my conclusions about child-centered parenting you don’t have to take my word for it –the results are already in. Since the 1960’s our culture has moved closer and closer to child-centered parenting that attempts to replace actual consequences with self-esteem, talking, and moralizing –and look at the results…

In the last twenty years the number of children disabled with mental illness rose thirty-five fold. In the last ten years there has been a 4000% increase in the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a 400% increase in prescriptions written annually for stimulant drugs to increase attention, and a 333% increase in the use of antidepressant medications for children. The GAO, in its June 2008 report, concluded that one in every sixteen of this country’s young adults is now “seriously mentally ill.”

 Add to these the startling statistics about the rise in narcissism (see Jeanne Twinge’s book Generation Me) and the freefall in our children’s academic capacities when compared to those of other first-world countries and the jury is in: child-centered parenting is a disaster!  FULL STORY

Also see How Dr. Spock destroyed America