There Are Worse Things Than Being a Wimp

You know, I can rant about "parents today" as much as the next person. I can tsk about over-involved Little League dads who beat up coaches; I can shake my head over moms picking kindergartens based on how they'll look on a Harvard application; I can wag a finger over parents demanding perfect grades and insisting that every child should be an honor student.

Parent-bashing's a sport these days, and yeah, I've played. We all have. But I've gotta say, my hackles were raised by a particularly high-handed example of it in a recent Time magazine interview that asked "Are You Turning Your Child Into a Wimp?" It's an interview with Hara Estroff Marano, author of a book called A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. This is the quote that got the goat of this particular invasive parent:

"Parents go out of their way to have their kids declared defective so that they can get the drug and so that they can also have 'accommodations.' This is a big deal. It has been going on for five or seven years now. Parents go out of their way and spend fortunes. Neuropsychologists do the testing. It's a huge business. 'Accommodations' is not an informal word. It's a formal thing that schools do. Almost all of the accommodations are centered around prolonging the test time the kids have. It's no longer something that gets marked on your record. So colleges don't know if you had twice the time to take your SATs. That's why parents find it so highly desirable. But in the course of doing it, they have their kids tested to find some little quirk, some little vulnerability. And that's a measure of parental anxiety. And the parental anxiety is willing to put a negative label on kids. That's really something very new. You don't boast your strengths. You boast your weaknesses."

Now, maybe in her book, Marano acknowledges that there are children with legitimate learning disabilities and neurological differences and developmental delays who do need accommodations, not to get a higher SAT score or choicer college placement but to, you know, learn to read and write and sit in a classroom.

Maybe she does, but it doesn't matter, because the number of people who read that little interview in Time is likely to be greater than the number who read the book, and the number of people who read the title and go, "Heck, yeah!" and leave it at that will be greater still. These people will fall into two categories: Those who are not raising children right now, and have no idea. And those who are raising children, and figure an advantage given to someone else is one taken from their kids.

The attitude that all these high-falutin' diag-noe-sees kids got these days are just a bunch of hooey parents use to keep their pampered offspring from having to pull on their own bootstraps doesn't damage the cheaters nearly so much as it damages the kids who honestly need help and understanding. Our kids. The kids who freak out on airplanes and in church. The kids who are unpopular in kindergarten. The kids who would just like to go to school without going into anaphylactic shock.

I'm not even sure that so very many people really do co-op diagnoses to get their kids a leg up. In my experience, I've mostly met parents who have wanted to avoid help for kids who actually need it because it might go on their permanent record and wreck their futures in law or medicine or running Fortune 500 companies. Again, though, it doesn't matter, because the bogus-diagnosis theory sounds good, and allows people to ignore inconvenient legitimate needs and still sleep at night.

Also sounding good is the argument that all today's messed-up generation needs is some free time outdoors. Like Last Child in the Woods, Marano's book appears to advocate loosening the reins, letting kids be kids, setting them loose in the world to play on their own, and not putting stock in scare stories about dangers lurking around every corner. Well, maybe. Maybe for some kids, that's a good idea. But you've also got to acknowledge that for some kids, it is so not. Not every impulse-control problem is made up, not every executive-function deficit is a trick. Some kids need invasive parenting, lady.

I'd rather have a wimpy kid than a dead one, you know?

_{Image by Terri Mauro}