Should Parents Ignore Their Kids More Often?

Why a clinical psychologist argues for 'mindful underparenting'

I don't have kids, but 80 percent of my friends do.

As a friend to parents and a fan of their kids, I regularly witness parents who are stretched to the breaking point. A lot of their stress, at least in the United States, has to do with the fact that these parents are often overworked and under-supported in terms of government services such as paid maternity and paternity leave or subsidized childcare.

However, some portion of that stress comes from a relatively new phenomenon: the sense among parents that it is their job to cater to their children's desires (not needs) and keep them constantly entertained.

At no point in history has parenting operated this way. If you are an elder Millennial, a member of Gen X, or older, "stop bothering me" or "I don't want to see your face again" were things you probably heard from your parents on a regular basis. Nobody asked about your preference for how to spend the day or where to vacation.

It turns out there is an evolutionary purpose to this kind of ordering. For every generation in the history of the world until recently, childhood was a time of organizing your life around your parents, not the other way around.

In a guest essay for the New York Times, Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and mother, made an argument for ignoring children more often:

The modern parenting style is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups where they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect daycare is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.

This doesn't mean letting your children roam freely, though it could, if you live in a safe area. It's more about letting go of the idea that parents need to entertain their children or order their lives around their preferences and ignore their own.

I met a someone here in Italy who told a story about their brother visiting with his children. So that the children wouldn't be bored, they were able to invite their friends to come on the trip, along with their parents. The parents were not friends and, in fact, didn't get on very well. So the parents had a sort of miserable vacation, while the children had fun and were never—god forbid—bored.

But apparently, being bored is an important developmental task for children.

For this reason, Saxbe encourages parents to do what every parent in prior generations did, which is dragging their child around with them on their errands or visits to friends or older family members' homes (or, presumably, their vacation of choice) and letting them be bored:

[F]ollowing adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. There is evidence from neuroscience that a resting brain is not an idle one. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people's minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don't keep their brains too occupied.

Needless to say, many of the comments on Saxbe's essay were extremely defensive because parents are working so hard and understandably don't want to feel criticized. But that wasn't the point of the essay any more than that is my point here. The point is to say, "Parents, you are expecting too much of yourself, and your children don't even need all this attention for their development."

My 85-year-old mother has a caregiver who is raising her grandchildren, so when she goes to look after my mother, they come with her. When I last visited, I was confounded by one of her grandchildren, a bright, engaged eight year old who happily sits and talks to us or sometimes wanders off and plays by herself.

At one point, I asked her, "Aren't you bored?" and she said no. I suspect that her entire childhood has been like this and she has learned how to entertain herself, and it feels normal to her, even though many of her peers would be bouncing off the walls if they were put in this situation.

Her grandmother simply doesn't have the time or the means (or the inclination) to entertain her grandchildren or even to send them to daycare. While many people might feel sorry for this girl, the fact is she is having the exact experience that Saxbe recommends in her essay — she is learning a lot by shadowing and observing her grandmother during the hours she tags along with her, something that has traditionally been important to children's development.

It's not clear what has caused such a major shift in terms of what is expected of parents in just one generation.

Some parents say the world is more dangerous, even though most experts say the opposite. But even if that were true, that wouldn't explain why so many parents feel they need to keep their children entertained and feel like they are living their best lives while the parents struggle with exhaustion and worse.

I suspect hyper-capitalism and consumerism (amplified by the Internet) are involved in the change since they are the major structural differences that have occurred between the childhoods of Gen X and elder millennials and today, but I don't have a coherent theory that takes us from A to B.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else does have a good theory.

To be clear, I'm not romanticizing prior eras of child-rearing. There is plenty that was problematic in past generations in terms of parenting. Parents today are doing many things better than prior generations of parents. In fact, I'm not even really talking about the best way to raise a child, per se.

I'm talking about the experience of being a parent in today's world.

It feels like Saxbe is on to something important: that parents should feel okay letting their children be bored a lot of the time while the parents have space to have lives of their own.

As I mentioned, I'm not a parent, just someone who loves parents and their kids. I absolutely am not giving child-rearing advice but highlighting something I’ve been thinking about a lot and talking with other parents and non-parents about. Let me know what you think in the comments.