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Discuss: the scourge of pushy parents
Join the debate and let us know if you agree or disagree with writer Mark Ellen
I was at a rock concert in the summer when someone I’d met a couple of times charged up to me waving a CD. The music magazine I edit should be covering it, he insisted. It was by his enormously talented daughter. Talented and also "very beautiful", his wife chipped in. Brilliant, original – and, yes, "very talented and beautiful", they agreed. I introduced myself to the person beside them only to discover this was the daughter, blinking shyly while her parents did the selling on her behalf.
This happens a lot in my business. So many students want to join us for work experience that we strongly favour anyone who writes their application themselves, because people I haven’t seen for 30 years pitch teenagers I’ve never met. In fact the current record is the sister of a school friend I last bumped into 43 years ago, offering us her – again, vastly talented, attractive and conscientious – daughter, adding "she’d be far too modest to tell you all this herself".
Would she? I very much doubt it. She’s probably never had the chance. She just has the sort of parents who, when not loudly trumpeting the talents of their children, are opening all the doors children ought to be opening themselves. Did Bob Dylan get a contract with Columbia Records because he mooched about in reception while his parents banged on the front desk demanding to see the Chairman? I don’t think so! Not an episode of Desert Island Discs goes by without this week’s high-achiever revealing that much of their drive derived from trying to prove their disbelievers wrong – and that tends to include nervous parents unable to visualise the trajectory their children have taken, but either powerless or unwilling to help.
Now it seems to have swung the other way. Parents are all too keen to be involved on every inch of the journey.
I know people who’ve given their children houses, set up businesses for them, even stepped in to help run those businesses. They say they’re being kind and that’s clearly their fond intention.
In a way that now seems coldly detached but was, in retrospect, rather far-sighted and mature: their own parents had nudged them out of the nest in the Sixties and Seventies and let them fend for themselves: their generation now feels the need to over-compensate.
But aren’t they being too kind? How can anyone feel a real sense of achievement if they never personally set something up in the first place? And if your parents pave the way for a certain career direction, isn’t it tempting to blame them when it all goes horribly wrong?
The well-meaning mothers and fathers constantly quacking on about their kids' achievements tend, later, to be the ones who never quite know when to let go. Part of the blame can be directed at modern communications – mobile phones allow you to monitor your offspring’s every thought and movement, like a microchip that can be tracked 24 hours a day. But there’s a certain species of parent who has confused affection with control. They can’t bear to sit back and watch, convinced that it’s their intervention that might make all the difference.
And it’s very hard to feel superior. There’s a bit of it in all of us.
(Mark Ellen is the editor of The Word)
This article was first published in the February 2010 edition of Saga Magazine.
What do you think?
Is it pushy parenting or just loving help? How far did you go for your children? Discuss this online at www.sagazone.co.uk.
