We're Overthinking Parenting

How parenting is becoming optimized—and why it’s making us so anxious

Gentle parent. Lighthouse parent. Panda parent. Free-range parent. Helicopter parent. Snowplow parent. There’s a million ways now to do the most basic thing in the world: parent.

Early on as a mother, scanning social media and websites for various tips on how to breastfeed or put my baby to sleep, I could see that overconsumption and indeed, overthinking, had seeped into parenting same as it had everything else.

All the information seemed like it should help, but I wondered if it was backfiring and making an already hard job harder.

Advice was plenty, in every nook and cranny of parenting: “Don’t say good job!”—you’ll kill the child’s inner motivation. Wooden toys aren’t just aesthetic—they stimulate the imagination. Ask before giving a hug. Ask before changing a diaper. Don’t you dare put a kid in timeout!

All that preoccupation with the child seemed to me to be a recipe for anxiety in the parent.

And I wondered if perhaps that would end up achieving the opposite outcome: that the parent’s heightened anxiety around doing the wrong thing–their trepidation about every conversation impacting the child’s development–would seep down into the child themselves.

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The hygiene hypothesis is that in the absence of real pathogens to fight, the immune system is more prone to attacking one’s own body: autoimmune illness.

The body needs to fight something, but the valid, the reasonable, the necessary, is not there to occupy it, so it becomes preoccupied with itself—to its own detriment.

I wonder if modern motherhood is suffering a similar fate. Despite being among the most stable countries, American parents are among the most anxious. And despite their resources, wealthier parents in America actually report enjoying parenting less.

Why?

My hypothesis is the excess of resources: the excess of time feels like you have to fill it, the excess of wealth feels like you have to spend it, and the excess of advice feels like you have to act on it.

In the pre-modern era, kids needed to be part of the workforce for the family unit to function and survive. Mothers weren’t sitting on the floor guiding toddlers through a sensory bin. Everyone was just out in the fields toiling for their food, far away from a selfie camera and anxieties about whether the child felt enriched.

Babies weren’t kangaroo-carried because mothers were performing attachment parenting, but because those working mothers needed to haul those babies into the field, too.

Kids were also let loose early on, without so much supervision and explaining. Nobody provided a gentle-language script for a parent to recite beforehand: kids just took off.

At almost no other time have mothers been this preoccupied with how to parent.

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The adage that has informed my parenting the most is this: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

In this age of autoimmune parenting, without dangers like fatal infections and predators, we’ve made ourselves the thing to worry about, to obsess over.

We (thankfully) don’t have to worry as much as we once did about extreme danger, illness, and death, but instead of worrying less, we’ve now directed our concerns to the little pricks and discomforts of life. We contort ourselves to curate a childhood—something magical, extraordinary, never boring, and with a lot of effort and planning and explaining.

An ordinary day of going to the grocery store or the mosque for asr? No! It’s kid-focused programming. Activities! Entertainment! Learning! Think about your child’s development, always.

Maybe I have it wrong. But all this obsessive tracking of how our kids are doing, feeling, needing, of every minute of every day…I think it’s probably about the most unnatural way we could parent.

The toys may be wooden, but the parenting is plastic.