Books Say Just Take It Easy, Sit Back, Enjoy Rewards of Parenthood

It has become many a parent’s mantra, a near-unanimous whine of the affluent who multi-task on either coast: We are too busy.

We aggressively pursue all the activities we think will bring us and our families happiness. Empowered by cell phones and Palm Pilots, we can drive our daughter to a travel-team soccer match two hours away, reassure our boss we will meet our 6 p.m. deadline and confirm our doctor’s appointment, all at once. So why aren’t we satisfied?

Two new books suggest why. In the midst of all this running, their authors say, we haven’t stopped long enough to figure out what things are truly important to us and how we can enjoy more of those things. As Katrina Kenison writes in “Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry” (Warner Books): “When we race through life we miss it.”

Ominously, we may be shortchanging--even damaging--our children as we run, according to Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, authors of “Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?” (St. Martin’s Press). “By the age of 18, 20% [of children] have suffered a major depression,” they write. “Close to 9% of adolescents have been diagnosed with anxiety disorders. . . . Should our goal be preparing our kids to get into the college of their choice or to live the life of their choice?”

Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist, and Wise, a journalist, are neighbors in Stamford, Conn., a wealthy suburb of Manhattan. They hatched the idea of a book after chatting one day about some of the parents they knew who were going to extremes to raise perfect children. “Hyper-Parenting” is filled with examples: the 8-month-old girl whose nanny was instructed to follow a step-by-step video promising to enrich a baby’s intellect; the 7-year-old girl whose week was filled with piano lessons, gymnastics, religious school, choir practice, ballet and horseback riding; the 13-year-old boy whose parents took him to a psychiatrist saying that he was too laid-back and needed to be more aggressive in order to succeed.

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“Hyper-Parenting” traces the reasons why, in the authors’ view, the current generation of parents is so driven. One reason is that we can afford to be. “We are the most well-off, most well-educated generation ever,” said Rosenfeld, 54 and father of three. Past generations had enough to do providing food, adequate housing and decent schools. Fortunate parents today do not worry so much about physical resources so they’ve turned their attention to what used to be the domain of children themselves: their hearts and minds.

As well-informed as many of these parents are, they question their ability to parent well, according to Rosenfeld. This makes them even more hyper. “We don’t trust ourselves, partly because there are all these experts telling us we can’t,” he said during an interview. Parents also feel competitive with other parents. “Who can hear the soft voice of reason in the midst of a stampede?” he asks.

Kenison’s book provides that soft voice of reason. A former book editor in Manhattan, N.Y., Kenison, 41, left the publishing world to work at home in a suburb of Boston when her first child, Henry, was born. She was moved to start writing “Mitten Strings for God” at her parents’ home in Florida, while reading “The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life” by Thomas Moore.

In that book, Moore suggests that finding joy in life begins by recollecting carefree feelings of childhood. Kenison, who lived in a small New England town for much of her youth, realized that she could do that easily enough. But what kind of memories would her two young sons have when they were in their 40s?

As she jotted down her thoughts over the next year--in between carpools, recitals and business trips--Kenison came to believe that change was possible by making “small shifts in thinking and behavior rather than full-scale self-improvement.”

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“Mitten Strings” suggests what some of those shifts might be, based on changes that she and her husband, Steve Lewers, a former publishing executive, have made. Among the first, obviously, is paring down the family schedule. For Kenison, that meant her boys didn’t start playing organized baseball until this year when Henry turned 10. Henry and Jack, Henry’s younger brother, made up their own teams in the backyard instead, inviting Dad to play with them.

Cutting back also meant turning down invitations to parties--including an end-of-the-year party at Henry’s school--when Kenison sensed that the boys needed more free time. And it meant forgoing elaborate decorations on Easter eggs when grocery store dye kits would suffice.

Building space into the daily planner forced her boys to find ways to spend time by themselves. Kenison believes both are more self-reliant as a result. It also allowed her to relax so that she might savor what she calls dailiness, the moments “that arise unbidden in the course of any day--small, evanescent, scarcely worth noticing except for the fact that I am being offered, just for a second, a glimpse into another’s soul.” The hues of any given day, she writes, are made up of “a lip-smacking good-night ‘guppy kiss,’ . . . a spoonful of maple syrup on snow, served to me in bed . . . a conversation with a tiny speckled salamander.”

“Some days seem to offer their own quality of space and ease,” she continues. “Other times I have to switch gears midway through--postponing the errands, canceling a play date, ordering pizza for dinner, skipping an evening meeting--so that I can pull my children out of the swift current of a day and guide them into a calm pool instead.” The pool often sucks them deep into one activity, such as reading “Charlotte’s Web” several times instead of running through a summer book list.

During one such interlude, Kenison decided to crochet mitten strings for her boys’ mittens--those threads that hold two mittens together, making them harder to lose. Jack cuddled up with her, finger-knitting a ball of blue yarn. It was a moment of pure peace, she said, and provided the title of her book as well. Holding out one very long piece of yarn, Jack said, “I’m knitting a mitten string for God.”

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Kenison’s family is not tempted to switch on the television during these quiet moments because, for several years, the TV has remained off. In an interview, Kenison is emphatic about the benefits: “If there’s a single thing parents could do to protect their children, it would be to turn off the TV,” she said.

Her sons don’t even think about it anymore, she writes in her book, relating a story about Henry’s friend Jake who, on a visit, asked to watch television. He was astonished to be told no.

“No TV? How do you live?” he asked Henry.

“We just live,” Henry replied.

Kenison and family also regularly eliminate all artificial noise in their home: tapes, compact discs, radios and alarm clocks, in addition to television. With even a couple of machines whirring, “how easily the decibel levels rise!” she writes. “When adults and children have to compete with a soundtrack, everyone ends up shouting.” That’s not to say she doesn’t listen to her Grateful Dead CD when baking a birthday cake. But every time she moves to flip on a switch, she asks herself: “Do I want to exchange quiet for sound?”

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Kenison’s recipe for happiness calls for a healthy dose of self-control initially. But sometimes, Kenison said, parents must surrender control.

One area in which they have trouble doing this is their children’s intellectual growth, Kenison, Rosenfeld and Wise all say. Parents find it difficult to honor the pace at which their kids’ minds grow. “They push and press on,” Rosenfeld and Wise write. “If a preschooler knows her ABCs, shouldn’t we get her to start reading? Once she masters simple words like C-A-T and R-U-N, why not step up to a basic book? And if she can handle that, well, maybe we should find an accelerated school for gifted children . . .”

Identifying a child’s natural rhythm comes more easily when a parent is relaxed, these authors believe. Going on regular dates with a spouse, practicing yoga, and meeting a buddy for tennis are gifts to the family as well as to oneself.

“At some point, we may begin to ask ourselves: Just whose standards am I living by, anyway?” Kenison concludes. “An advertiser’s? A neighbor’s? A parent’s? A corporation’s? A culture’s? Only when we stop long enough to figure out what we really care about, and begin to make our choices accordingly, can we create lives that are authentic expressions of our inner selves.”