Colman Noctor: Is being a parent more challenging today than ever?

I have heard many adults say they are glad they grew up when they did as children have it so much harder nowadays. But I have also heard many others say that children today don’t know how easy they have it as life was much more difficult when they were growing up. Which group is right? Or is there an element of truth to both claims?

When we reminisce about roaming the streets all day and only returning home for dinner or to go to bed, it’s easy to believe life was better during our childhood. But while life may have appeared simpler, it was also uninformed and secretive, putting children at risk. These were also the times when institutional abuse was rife and voiceless children were taken advantage of by those entrusted with their care.

Is there a danger we are over-informed now, so much so that we are becoming paralysed by the fear of what ‘could’ happen when raising our children? And whose voice are we hearing? Is it the child or the parent? From what I see in my clinics, an over-correction has occurred — parenting today is not more challenging than before — it is just more complex.

Perhaps complexity is an inevitable by-product of progress. The generational differences are significant if we consider the ease at which things can be done now in terms of travel, communication, and information sharing compared to 30 years ago. No one can deny that technological advances have expanded our lives. But these advances have also brought significant complications.

While we can now communicate with greater ease, we also communicate with less supervision. When we open our doors to the global village, we instantly create a broader network to maintain our sense of safety. Our physical environments have never been so small, yet our virtual environments have never been so big. This is a significant difference regarding the complexity of modern-day parenting.

Parenting in an era of technology is a new experience, and we don’t have the knowledge of the elders in the village to show us how to navigate this new and complex world. The very nature of the information superhighway means there is no end to the amount of advice we can get about parenting, but does this avalanche of suggestion overwhelm and confuse us more than offer solace and direction?

Children no longer walk three miles to school daily in their bare feet and carry a bag of coal on their backs. Still, they have to navigate the hyperconnected world of cyberspace, where predators, bullies and extortionists lurk with eerie regularity. The challenges they face are not less — they are just different.

High aspirations

While the parenting goals in the ’70s and ’80s might have been to keep children safe and well-fed, parents in the 2020s have high aspirations for their children. Parents in previous decades were less involved in their children’s lives and there was less pressure to ‘produce’ impressive children. The advent of social media has undoubtedly played a role in ramping up parental expectations and anxiety as we compare ourselves to the highlight reel of other people’s lives. This has created even more opportunities for parental guilt.

The change from an era where parents would rarely attend a child’s sporting event to a time when parents are now becoming obsessed with tangible measurements of success is remarkable. When a child receives an accolade, this is paraded to demonstrate their success and by proxy ours. This association between our offspring and our success means children are under increasing pressure to perform for the vested interests of the adults in their lives and not for their own sense of achievement.

This scenario is often played out on sports grounds. Most sporting controversies that have occurred in recent years involved adults and not children. The accounts of aggressive sideline behaviour, the physical violence toward referees and the incidence of children being left on the sidelines for weeks on end are due to the actions of the adults, not children.

The PEW Research study I referred to earlier found that parents spent more time with their children than previous generations, which is a welcome development. But some parents might see this time as an ‘investment’, and therefore children’s success reflects the success of that investment.

The world of academic achievement has a different focus now too. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, teenagers were sent to grinds because they struggled to pass a particular subject, whereas now teenagers are sent to grinds to guarantee high marks. Again, it is rarely a teenager who signs themselves up for grinds; it is usually the parents.

Perhaps as parents, we are over-complicating things. Maybe the answer to our current parenting dilemmas is not about creating more information but stripping back the task of parenting to the fundamentals. Most parents want their children to have a strong moral compass, to navigate the world reasonably successfully and be content with themselves. If that is the aspiration, then the list of accolades and parental competition has no bearing on those outcomes.

Childhood anxiety is a growing problem. Recent figures in the Journal of American Paediatrics stated that about 11.6% of kids had anxiety in 2012, but now some 20.5% of youth worldwide struggle with anxiety symptoms. Perhaps their anxiety is a feature of our high expectations.

Our role as parents is not to control our children’s lives but instead to instil core values that enable them to prioritise what is essential and not sweat the small stuff. To support them as they navigate our complex world, the key is to worry less, not more. Let the child’s wellbeing be your focus. Keep it simple, keep it real.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist