Parents: Channel Your Anxiety Positively And Help Your Children Enjoy Greater Success as They Head B
Parents’ anxiety is peaking today because of the hypercompetition in our children's world. Parents don’t want to pressure their kids – but what will happen to Ashley if you don’t start her in Soccer for Toddlers? Later, as report cards, standardized tests, tryouts, playoffs, auditions and social cliques fill their child's world, parents' anxiety intensifies.
[USPRwire, Wed Sep 03 2008] The older kids get, the more competition they face, whether in sports, academics, or the arts. Hovering in the background is the race for admission to a top-tier college.
Panicky parents can deal with the torrential emotions stirred up by our competitive society better if they possess scientific knowledge about their children's growing years, leading child researcher Wendy Grolnick and educational and parenting journalist Kathy Seal offer. They are the co-authors of Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids: Dealing with Competition While Raising a Successful Child (Prometheus Books, 2008). “Even the most stressed-out parents can become better informed and learn to channel their competitive anxiety into positive parenting,” they say. “Evolution may have given parents a genetic predisposition toward a protective anxiety whenever their children face today's heightened competition, but parents can learn to avoid pushing and pressuring, and they can turn their fear instead into calm guidance.” To begin, they help parents stack the odds in favor of their children by showing them how to stay highly involved with their kids, while encouraging their autonomy. That in turn will allow the child's intrinsic motivation to flourish, leading to high achievement.
Grolnick and Seal distill the results of thirty years of research in child psychology to focus on three essential feelings—autonomy, competence, and connectedness—that parents can foster in their children to maximize the child's chances of success and minimize family conflict.
They explain that granting kids autonomy lets them feel that they can solve their own problems and are responsible for their own actions. At the same time, providing structure gives kids the guidelines, information, limits, and consequences that they need to act in the world, instilling them with a feeling of competence. Finally, support from adults in the form of time and other resources provides children with a necessary feeling of connection and helps them internalize the ideas and values of their caring parents. Grolnick and Seal conclude, “It is possible to avoid the burn-out—in both parents and children—that afflicts so many in our highly competitive society, while raising children who thrive and excel. Calming the stress in your family will make this the best school year possible for your children and for you.”
Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids:
Dealing with Competition While Raising a Successful Child
By Wendy S. Grolnick and Kathy Seal
ISBN 978-1-59102- 566-5
Paperback: $17.95 (6 x 9)
February 19, 2008
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