Carrie Wendel-Hummell, a researcher at the University of Kansas, concluded that postpartum depression in mothers and fathers isn’t only about stretch marks on her body or the emotional burden of caring for a new baby. She suggests the pressures to be a perfect parent are affecting the mental health of parents.
Consider the pressures today’s parent faces to be perfect:
- We see Facebook pictures of seemingly perfect families who just returned from a perfect vacation. Everyone’s smiling.
- We compare our lives more than ever to the “Jones’” next door who just bought their kids the latest iPhone, PS4 and tablet.
- Mommy bloggers are ubiquitous, consistently pushing readers to perfect their parenting skills and give their kids an advantage in life.
- We hold “Disney-like” ideals of what a family is supposed to operate like, where mom is always beautiful, dad is Prince Charming, etc.
- We’ve now believe that our kids are the “report card” everyone examines to measure the kind of people we are.
Wendel-Hummell studied the health disorders that come with the prenatal phase of a mother’s life. During this time, parents must pay particular attention to their mental health. In Wendel-Hummell’s study, she conducted interviews with new mothers and fathers, most of them from Kansas and Missouri. Their incomes varied from low to middle class, and each candidate reported having issues with a variety of the following symptoms: postpartum depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis and bi-polar disorder.
Middle-class parents were more likely to put huge quantities of pressure on themselves to attain a level of perfect parenthood. “Middle-class mothers often try to do everything to balance work and home life, and fathers increasingly to do the same,” Wendel-Hummell said. “This pressure can exacerbate mental health conditions. If everything is not perfect, they feel like failures — and mothers tend to internalize that guilt.” The pressure from society on middle-class parents seems to be too much for the parents’ mental health. As I address tens of thousands of parents and teachers each year, it seems many feel inadequate. Some just plain feel like losers as they see their children falter.
Why we can’t face failure
I just released a book entitled, Twelve Huge Mistakes Parents Can Avoid. My goal was not to take moms and dads further on their guilt trip. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The book is about removing the barriers to healthy family experiences. In it, I promote high but healthy expectations for both parents and kids.
Each of the 12 failures tends to fall into one of four categories:
- We risk too little.
- We rescue too quickly.
- We rave too easily.
- We reward too frequently.
If you stop to think about it, we parents make these mistakes because we don’t want to fail, nor do we want our kids to fail. So we refuse to let it happen. When our kids perform poorly, we praise them anyway. When they forget something, we rescue them. When they finish an average assignment, we rave like they’ve just won a gold medal, assuming it will build self-esteem. This does not produce a healthy adult.
Why are we so afraid of failure?
May I be blunt for a moment? We have our own issues as parents and teachers. It’s our emotional baggage that’s become the greatest cause of our young people faltering as they enter adulthood. They’re unready because we actually failed to get them ready. And we failed, ironically, working so hard to prevent failure. We are fragile adults, getting offended if anyone (including their teacher) criticizes them. In reality, they likely need some constructive criticism. We are insecure, interpreting our child’s poor grade as our own failure to parent well.
In reality, they likely failed because they were lazy and didn’t apply themselves enough. We are enraged when our kid’s sports team loses, because we are projecting our own lives and losses on them. In reality, the kid just wants a Slurpee when the game’s over. He doesn’t care nearly as much as you do about who wins.