Parents & peer pressure

How much are you influenced by what ‘others’ tell you about your parenting skills?

Redbook magazine’s Joslyn Gray has dealt with parental peer pressure for a decade. She says that she comes off as too lenient to some parents and, to others, she seems much too strict. She is called a helicopter parent bec-ause she goes to the playground with her kids, but considered incautious because she lets them walk to school.

CBS News’ Susie Suh says she feels the pressure when it comes to toys. If you don’t buy them the thing everyone else is getting, you’re mean, but if you give in, you can be accused of spoiling them. Jenn Carp of Living My Big Dream says that parental peer pressure is hard to tolerate. Parenting is coloured by guilt after all. She worries about all the things she can’t provide her children, from the latest electronic gadgets to braces for every child. She points out that her parents didn’t feel bad about not being able to get her and her sisters braces. They felt that providing clothing, food, shelter and some of the toys they wanted was their job.

Carp does her best to remind herself that parenthood “is about being, not buying”. She prides herself on the life lessons she’s taught her kids and is confident that they will be able to take care of themselves one day.

Gray points out that every parent is unique, that we bring what we’ve learned from our own childhood — our personal views, our own insecurities — to the parenting game. After all, there is no manual for perfect parenting. There are some things we know intellectually but, in moments of stress, we do what we learned from our parents. Parenting is about doing your best with what you have and hopefully improving with every generation. Gray tells her children that they must understand that every parent lives by different values and rules, that each household has different rules that must be obeyed.

While it’s hard, we must all try to not judge other parents, and we shouldn’t feel that we have to defend or justify what we do to others.

Consider yourself experts when it comes to your own children: you know what works for your family. We must forgive ourselves for being human and imperfect and sticking to our beliefs — providing more stability for our kids than being wishy-washy and acting according to societal pressures.

Jennifer Gish of The Times Union Blog says that helicopter parents — hovering over their children’s every move — are so common today because of soc-ietal expectations that this is the right and responsible thing to do. Gish points out that as we control all and solve all of our kids’ problems, we disempower them. In addition, we’re caving to par-ental peer pressure as we sign them up for every activity that other parents do; this doesn’t teach kids to avoid peer pressure themselves.

Peer pressure isn’t just a worry through adolescence. Dr Rhona Berens of Parent Alliance reports that obesity can be contagious among friends: if your friends are obese, you are up to 171 per cent more likely to become obese yourself. This is 130 per cent less than the effect your spouse or siblings have on you, concerning obesity. Fitness and divorce also seem to spread among social networks.

Dr James Fowler, leader of the obesity study, explains that it is our friends who determine social behaviour and acceptance, much more than our family.

Berens sees that friendships affect parenting and spousal relationships too. She says that division of labour, for instance, is one of the biggest stressors on spousal relationships, and that an equal division of labour occurs most often when couples have friends that work at an equal division of responsibility in their households.

The website Net Mums conducted a study of parental peer pressure, surveying 4,750 parents. They start out their report by recognising that many parents have unrealistic expectations of themselves, and often feel as if everyone else is coping much better than themselves. This kind of thinking can damage your self-esteem as a parent. Guilt and low self-esteem can affect the very foundation of your family.

Net Mums points out that looking to others is normal human behaviour, that we do need to function in the group(s) we belong to: it’s an instinct that has contributed to our survival. But today, the choices we have are so varied, it’s much harder to identify the right way to do things.

Seventy-five per cent of the mothers in this study compared themselves with friends that are mothers, and over half of them compared themselves to other family members. Interestingly enough, when parents rated themselves as doing well, they rated their friends’ parenting skills highly too.

A third of the moms said that they found themselves skewing the truth about how they deal with some parenting issues, especially on financial management and how they were coping with parental pressures in general; 23 per cent of the mothers said that dep-ression affected their parenting ability. Mental health problems were more common among stay-at-home moms and those that were unemployed; 31 per cent of these mothers combated depression, while only 20 per cent of working moms reported mental health barriers to their parenting.

When it comes to finances, however, moms in families with lower annual incomes were less likely to compare themselves to others, while those in higher income brackets were more likely to compare their parenting to other moms. Even so, financial pressures definitely affected lower income parents’ rating of their ability more than the well-off; lower income families were also likelier to report depression and relationship issues. Wealthier families reported having less time to spend with their children.

Johnson raises her two sons differently now, realising that understanding who they are, and celebrating that, is more important than moulding them 
to some vague societal standards. She supports each of her children in engaging in the activities that most make them happy, and this has given her more happiness and self-esteem as a parent as well as more resilience to parental peer pressure.