But the reality isn’t quite so funny. A book, The Price of Privilege, just published in America by the psychologist Dr Madeline Levine, focuses on this breed of parent who interfere in every aspect of their children’s lives and push them so hard that they leave them feeling disconnected, hollow and depressed. While everything may look rosy on the surface, says Levine — the kids may be achieving straight As, seem well-mannered, be picked for all the right sports teams — inside many are seething with rage and self-loathing because they dread falling short of their parents’ unrealistic expectations.
If you are sceptical about extending sympathy to children who enjoy ski holidays, attend schools costing £5,000 a term and are fed on organic alfalfa from the day they are weaned, then the following statistics from Levine may surprise you. Children from affluent homes (those with an income of more than £63,000 a year) are three times more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than the average teenager. This puts them at greater risk of drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm. Since 1950 — during which time living standards have improved immeasurably for children — the number of adolescent suicides has quadrupled.
Levine was spurred to look into this phenomenon when, at her clinic in California, she treated a 15-year-old girl who was bright and personable but highly pressured by her adoring, affluent parents. Levine asked her to pull back her long-sleeved T-shirt and saw that, on her left forearm, the girl had carved “EMPTY” with a razor. Ostensibly her life was full; emotionally she was a vacuum. The girl was representative of many others on Levine’s client list — her appointment book over the previous year had been increasingly filled with advantaged yet saddened teenagers who seemed to lack any real capacity for pleasure. She began to talk to colleagues around the country; they were noticing the same thing — children complaining of the same feelings of emptiness. It seemed that the most privileged teenagers in the US were suffering unprecedented levels of mental illness and emotional distress.
Rather than assuming, as most of us do, that money and status safeguard children’s emotional health, Levine says she was forced to consider the opposite, that “some aspects of affluence and parental involvement might be contributing to the unhappiness and fragility of my privileged patients”.
One needn’t look very far in Britain to see similar obsessive behaviour from parents when it comes to a child’s school or performance. We’ve all heard stories of parents suddenly becoming avid churchgoers to get their child into a good faith school, lying about their address to get into a certain catchment area, staying up late to do their children’s coursework. At weekends, the children of helicopter parents — those who hover over every aspect of their children’s lives — never lie in until midday: they are marshalled between sports events, music tuition and various other “improving” activities, with little chance to do what children often like best: daydreaming and doing nothing. But this, by the way, is often when they learn who they really are, what they really want and when they are at their most creative.
Linda Blair, a psychologist who writes for Psychologies magazine, says: “If there is one sentence I would say parents should always remember it is this: Permit boredom. Kids need to be bored sometimes.” She says such parents are often looking for meaning and fulfilment through their children. “But [they] are looking in the wrong places. It’s not outside, it’s inside. It’s not driving your kids to endless organised activities; it’s having a laugh around the dinner table together. If you don’t give your child proper love, time and attention it won’t matter which school they are at.”
Indeed, Levine says that if you ask most parents what they want for their children, they will reply: “To be happy.” They should know, then, that various research shows that there is zero correlation — and she repeats the word zero — between the school you attend and how happy you are in your life. “There is a kind of collective panic,” she says. “If children don’t go to the right school, play the right sport, play the right position at that sport, they are somehow doomed. It’s crazy. There is tremendous anxiety about parenting status in the community. It’s not because they are bad parents, but they are unbearably anxious parents.
“Why is it the most affluent kids [suffering from depression?]. Because performance is so highly valued. Many children experience their parents’ love as conditional on performance. That’s where kids fall apart. If you are not loved for who you are, at the very best you are angry.”
While helicopter parents might think that they are helping and protecting their child by doing their homework, intervening to challenge a bad exam result or writing CVs for them, they are actually depriving them of something fundamental to healthy child development: to experiment with different things, sometimes fail and develop a repertoire of responses to challenge.
As Elizabeth Meakins, a London-based psychotherapist, says: “People who have too much done for them suffer a kind of theft.” She believes that the problem is especially prevalent in London, where finding “good schools” is more of a preoccupation, but adds that it has increased everywhere. “People have become fixated on the product, not the process.” Why? “Everything is so much more public now. Parental anxieties are whipped up. In the 1940s and 1950s you probably weren’t quite so aware of how the rest of the country was doing, whereas now we know everything. I have had parents come to me late for an appointment who say ‘Sorry, I was doing geography coursework’.”
It is a mistake, she says, to assume that children who are “tutored to the hilt”, carted off after school to lessons in Kumon maths or French, end up happy, confident people. Though years down the line they might be high achievers in their jobs, inside they are intractably insecure, worried that they will some day be “found out” because they feel that their achievements were not really their own, they were never “trusted” to do it themselves. Meakins sees many of them as adult clients and says: “There is often confusion over where the parents’ identity ended and their own self-expression began.” Sometimes this manifests itself as eating disorders or self-harm, sometimes as self-doubt and poor self-esteem.
Of course, a certain degree of involvement in your child’s studies and development is a good thing. Dr Peter Congdon, a British psychologist who specialises in working with intellectually gifted children, says research suggests that children who can read and write at 3 are ahead by adolescence, while dyslexics are up to standard. He also believes that the problem might have been exaggerated slightly: pushy, over -involved parents have been around for ever (when the US General Douglas MacArthur began his studies at West Point military academy in 1898 his mother moved to be right outside the academy’s gates so she could keep her eye on him). However, he agrees that too few parents manage to maintain a healthy balance, and push their offspring far too hard. He, too, believes that this is more common in London. “I heard recently from one psychiatrist who had treated four children in the same class for depression at a leading private school. You have to ask yourself, is the parent doing it for the child or as a status symbol for the parent? It is well known that the best preparation for growing up is to have lived fully as a child.”
