‘Push Parenting’ Your Kid Right Over the Edge

You may be the kind of parent who is content with your perfectly imperfect children. It may actually be OK for you that your preschooler can’t read yet or your high school junior barely broke a 1,000 on the SATs. Maybe all you want is for them to be reasonably smart, healthy and to occasionally clean their rooms.

Yet sometimes a nagging voice creeps in, asking if I’m doing enough. Especially when the parents in your 2-year-old’s preschool are lobbying for computers in the classrooms. Or the other soccer moms compare notes on shuffling their A-plus offspring from ballet to tutors to cello lessons.

“Even when you are OK with normal, you can’t help but feel the pressure,” says Elisabeth Guthrie. “You may be a perfectly well-adjusted parent. But it’s going to make you doubt yourself if everyone else around you seems to be pushing their kids.”

Guthrie, clinical director of the Learning Diagnostic Center at the Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, N.Y., urges parents to avoid the traps and pressures of expecting their kids to overachieve in her new book, “The Trouble with Perfect” (Broadway Books).

Guthrie, who co-wrote the book with Kathy Matthews, says she has become increasingly concerned about the number of burned out, distressed kids she is treating. She views them as victims of what she calls “push parenting.”

They include teenagers such as Maya, a 14-year-old whom Guthrie counseled after her mother gave the teen a nose job for her birthday. Maya didn’t want the surgery but was afraid of disappointing her family. Then there was the mom who wanted to write her son’s college essays.

Even though Guthrie thinks they are doing their children a disservice, the mother of three says she empathizes with the pressures to push and prod. “I didn’t write this book to make parents feel guilty or encourage them to let their kids do nothing but play video games,” says Guthrie. “I just wanted to let parents know there’s nothing wrong with you if your instinct is to let your children be who they are.”

Guthrie says she was inspired to write the book by a group of parents of children she treats at Blythedale, some of whom have suffered serious trauma and have disabilities that limit their academic and physical potential. “I find it remarkable that these are parents who are able to find balance and fulfillment,” she says. “They still have the ability to see their children’s special gifts and make their kids fell great about themselves.”

This positive parenting was in marked contrast to the parents of so-called normal kids Guthrie was seeing in her private practice, who, she says, “were struggling with so much doubt and low self-esteem.”

To help parents sort through some of the dilemmas they are facing, Guthrie deals with perfection pressures that begin during gestation and continue through the college years. Here are some of her observations:

* Birth and infancy: Guthrie encourages parents of newborns and toddlers to let their kids develop at their own pace. She takes issue with prospective parents blasting Mozart at their pregnant bellies and signing their infants up for developmental classes.

She says studies looking at the benefits of the so-called Mozart effect are shaky at best, and movement and music classes for babies are “more for the benefit of the parents than the child.” “If you recognize that those classes are parent-centered rather than child-centered, that’s fine. But if you go expecting your child to perform, you’re already in trouble.”

* The toddler years: Guthrie says many parents start to worry, needlessly, if their child is the last in a play group to walk or talk. Yet they are buying French tapes for their 2-year-olds and vying for spots in the “best” preschools. Guthrie says worries about school readiness are premature. “The focus should be on whether [preschools and day-care centers] are safe, well-supervised and happy,” Guthrie says. “They should be playing, not doing algebra yet.”

* The grade school years: While Guthrie supports parents introducing their children to sports and enriching activities such as dance and music lessons, she urges parents not to be too intense. “If your child wants to quit piano, it should be OK,” she says. “The most important question you should be asking about any activity they engage in is, are they developmentally appropriate,” advises Guthrie, who says grade-school kids, with the exception of self-motivated prodigies, should be spending no more than 15 minutes of their free time each day practicing sports, music or dance.

* Middle and high school years: It’s an unfortunate fallout of push parenting that your high schooler really can’t take the SATs these days without taking some kind of preparatory course, says Guthrie. “I don’t like that it’s become an industry, but I wouldn’t say don’t do it,” she says. “I can’t give any advice that would put your child at a distinct disadvantage.”

That said, Guthrie urges parents to relax, noting in her book that as college admissions become more competitive, it will only enhance the cachet of second- and third-tier schools. “We really have to get that not all of our kids are headed for the Ivy League,” she says.

Beth Cooney writes for the Stamford Advocate, a Tribune company.