The high expectations that many parents have about how to parent and what their children should do leads to physical and emotional exhaustion in the former and worse behavior and more mental health problems in the latter. This is stated by Bernadette Melnyk and Kate Gawlik, researchers and professors at Ohio State University (United States) in a report published today that measures the level of exhaustion of a sample of American parents and how it impacts their parenting model.
According to their research, 57% of parents say they are exhausted and the degree of exhaustion they report is strongly associated with internal and external expectations, whether they feel like a good father or mother, the judgment they perceive from others, the time that he spends playing with his children, the relationship he has with his partner and his demands regarding household chores.
Gawlick, who launched this research based on her experience as a working mother of four children dealing with stress and exhaustion, says that social media has a lot to do with “the high expectations we have for ourselves as parents,” because In them you see people who seem to have everything under control and have time for themselves and their children to do countless activities and that comparison leads to feeling judged, demanding more of themselves and, in the end, being exhausted. “And when parents are exhausted, they have more depression, anxiety and stress, and their children also have worse behaviors and lower emotional well-being,” Melnyk noted when presenting the work.
The psychoanalyst José Ramón Ubieto emphasizes that “a perfect father is the worst thing that can happen to you; It is a guarantee of a mental disorder, because you will never be able to live up to it and that will cause self-esteem problems and difficulties.”
“Being the perfect child suffocates and being the perfect mother or father causes a lot of stress, anxiety, and disappointment and guilt if it is not achieved,” agrees Cristina Gutiérrez, researcher in the field of applied emotional competencies and creator of the scientific method of education. emotional The Farm.
And he explains that for more than a decade he has been detecting (and observing how they intensify) these effects of what he calls the “perfect family syndrome” (parents who want the perfect house, the perfect body, the perfect teeth and also the perfect son) in the tens of thousands of schoolchildren who participate annually in the camps and workshops it organizes (38,900 last year).
“Today the child is made a personal project, and fathers and mothers want their paternity or motherhood to be a 10, and they look for the best educational books, that the stories they choose are perfect, the best school, that the teachers and coaches of their child are perfect… and they are building a house of cards with their plan of perfect parents that conditions and falls on the children, who what they want is for dad or mom to feel proud,” he argues.
He gives the example of Óscar, a 10-year-old boy who during some camps told him that his parents’ happiness depended on him. “For years he had seen that every time he scored a goal or got good grades his parents were happy, so he had come to the conclusion that his happiness depended on what he did,” he says.
And he explains that this weighs on the children’s backs and many, when they reach adolescence, “can’t handle it, they stop playing football or studying, they have disruptive behavior and break the house of cards and that perfect plan that their parents had, They don’t understand what happened to that perfect child for whom they had worked so hard.
Ubieto points out that the current generation of parents is very marked by the effect of science on parenting and by the idea that everything depends on them. “They think that they have a decisive influence on their children, so they feel very judged and if the five-year-old child does not read, they already think that they are doing something wrong or that they have a disorder.”
Added to this, according to the psychoanalyst, are immersed in the culture of achievement, that children have to be increasingly successful and perform better, that if they play the violin or play tennis they have to do it like a professional and how much sooner better. “That is a form of helplessness: demanding performance from children, that they not waste time, is erasing childhood, what time it has to explore, to understand, to progress… and not to seek achievements,” he says. Ubieto.
And it draws attention to how, at the same time that they are required to do many activities exceptionally, they are overprotected in other basic issues for their development and autonomy. “From frenzy to vertigo, the result is exhausted parents and anxious children,” he says.
And he encourages parents to take off the pressure and not feel so transcendent: “They are important, but children are influenced by other adults and they also decide things for themselves; The proof is that brothers raised with the same guidelines follow very different itineraries.”
Gutiérrez, for his part, recommends that fathers and mothers stop wanting perfect children to love the son or daughter they have, without basing everything on their achievements. “You can start by telling them I don’t want a tenth child, I prefer you; The role of fathers and mothers is to love him despite everything and train him for life, and life is not perfection; perfection entails tension,” says the expert in emotional competencies.
