What would you change for the sake of your kids?

It's easy to say you'd do anything for your kids. It's much harder to give up things you believe.

Mont Saint-Michel, an abbey in France. Credit: Jim Dalrymple II

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One of the things that keeps me up at night is whether or not my kids will be able to lead happy and successful lives. I suspect that’s true of most parents, and probably always has been.

But I was thinking about this recently while reading a piece from physician and child psychologist Leonard Sax about the spread of gentle parenting. Sax is critical of gentle parenting, writing that the “gentle parent never uses punishments of any kind,” doesn’t do basic tasks such as toilet training, and generally capitulates to whatever kids want. He includes some colorful anecdotes, such as one instance in which a six-year-old came to his office but whose mom wouldn’t order her to open her mouth for an examination, instead saying “her body her choice.”

But what really jumped out to me is that Sax notes how researchers have found a different parenting style, called “authoritative parenting,” to be more effective. Sax — also an author of several books on parenting — describes authoritative parenting as “not too hard or too soft.” He also links to a paper that defines authoritative parenting as a style that mixes a high degree of control over kids with a high degree of responsiveness to their needs¹. This contrasts to other parenting styles, such as authoritarian (high control, low responsiveness) or permissive parenting (low control, high responsiveness).

Sax’s piece resonated with me because I’ve always felt like authoritative parenting makes intuitive sense, even if I didn’t always know what it’s called, and because my encounters with gentle parenting have left me unimpressed.

But then I remembered a line from Kevin Maguire’s blog The New Fatherhood. Maguire seems to be a practitioner of gentle parenting — which is fine, to each their own — but despite following a different parenting style than the one I believe in, I think he makes a really useful point about this philosophy: “Whether or not you subscribe to its methodology […] you’re probably more gentle than your own parent was. Times have changed, and dads have (mostly) changed with them.” And I think he’s right. Like it or not, we’re all sort of gentle parents now, which is both good and bad. I would love to teach my kids how to swim by tossing them into the deep end — literally, yes, but also figuratively — but due to both social pressure and my own soft heartedness I don’t².

So here I am with a gap. The evidence I find most compelling tells me to be an authoritative parent. But in practice, I barely am. And this raises a question that I continue to wrestle with: How fundamentally am I willing to change my behavior in order to maximize my kids’ happiness and success?

I think for a lot of us parents, the obvious answer is that we’ll do whatever it takes. Many of us work long hours to provide for kids, base our housing decisions on their needs, devote any extra time and money to their extracurriculars, and so on. Parents today do a lot for their kids. But how many of us, when confronted with new evidence, make a hard pivot in a new direction, for example adopting an entirely new parenting style? I suspect it’s very few of us³.

But maybe we should.

That might be a hard pill to swallow. But I bring up the idea of pivoting in the face of evidence because I actually want to talk about some even harder pills to swallow (at least for me).

One of them is religion.

As has been widely covered in recent years, Americans are moving away from organized religion. My own spiritual journey has been somewhat winding, but is probably fairly typical for a college-educated elder millennial; I grew up religious, but have become much less orthodox in adulthood.

And yet, researchers have actually found that religious participation has a positive effect on kids. For instance, in 2018, a study from two Harvard epidemiologists found that “frequent religious participation in adolescence” was associated with “greater subsequent psychological well-being, character strengths, and lower risks of mental illness and several health behaviors.”

The study also found that religious teens were less likely to take drugs, were more forgiving, and — critically in this era of mental health crises — were less likely to be depressed. Also critically, the study connected “service attendance” to these positive outcomes — which is to say simply being spiritual or having metaphysical beliefs is not enough.

I would certainly like my kids to avoid depression as much as possible, and to not engage in other behaviors such as drug use. So, what should I do? Obviously, plenty. But the research makes a pretty compelling case that among other things, I’d do well to give my kids a religious upbringing — even if that’s not exactly what a lot of us millennial parents would like to hear.

Then there’s politics.

Earlier this year, there was a flurry of coverage about deteriorating mental health among teenagers. I wrote about this at the time and argued that fixating on catastrophes isn’t healthy⁴.

But the much bigger takeaway among researchers and media figures was that mental health has declined much more sharply among liberal teens than it has among conservative teens. A number of people, including The Coddling of the American Mind author Jon Haidt and several left-of-center journalists, interpreted these findings as evidence that today’s progressive messaging teaches teens to have a passive and catastrophic mindset that foments depression.

But whatever the cause, the reality is that conservative teens are actually doing better than liberal teens when it comes to mental health. And you can probably guess where I’m going with this: If there are two groups of teens, I definitely want my kids to be a part of the one that’s less depressed⁵. And that group happens to be politically conservative⁶.

These findings also go hand-in-hand with Sax’s observations that an over-the-top flavor of gentle parenting is “almost always” practiced by parents who are “politically left-of-center.”

So I ask again, how far does one go in an effort to maximize kids’ success and happiness? Do you reorient your politics? Or your religious orientation? Or your parenting philosophy? Or any number of other core beliefs?

I’m not here to tell other people to be religious or conservative or whatever. Rather, these are questions I grapple with myself because in each case there’s a gap between how I’m living my life and what the researchers⁷ I find most persuasive are telling me will be best for my kids. And I think the question of whether to pivot in the face of this type of evidence is among the hardest part of parenting. By comparison, things like choosing to work longer hours to pay for my kids extracurriculars, or moving into a better school district, or whatever else parents do are fairly easy choices. They don't require me to fundamentally change who I am.

But when I think about what I’d do to help my kids, it occurs to me that perhaps I should be willing to pivot — even when pivoting might be uncomfortable.

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Who Are the Children of the Traditional American Dream?

“Where families live matters for chances of achieving the American Dream because of  geographic differences in the availability of good-paying jobs on the one hand, and affordable housing, on the other. It also matters because of variations from place to place in the availability of public schools that satisfy parental desires for high academic standards, student safety and discipline, teacher competence, and administration responsiveness. Proximity to grandparents or other relatives who may be able to help by providing child care while both parents work is also a factor. In fact, 23% of children living in large cities were in American Dream families, compared to 38% of those in large suburbs and 43% of those in towns and rural areas on the fringes of major metropolitan areas. When the related factors listed above were taken into account, the differences were reduced to 17% in large cities versus 24% in large suburbs and 28% in fringe towns and rural areas. Children in large suburbs had 1.55 times greater odds of being in an American Dream family than those in large cities, while those in fringe towns and rural areas had 1.83 times better odds.^”

1. Key quote: “Various studies show that authoritative parenting is the best and the most effective parenting style to be applied universally to support optimal children’s development.”

2. Perhaps someone will argue that this swimming metaphor is not a good one for authoritative parenting. But look, you don’t let the kid drown, you fish them out. High control, high responsiveness.

3. Most parents I know (and perhaps me too) seem to seek out parenting advice that confirms their existing preconceptions and then offers practical advice within the bounds of that intellectual framework. I have never known a permissive parent — and I think most gentle parents tend to fall into that category — that has pivoted to a more authoritative style.

4. I didn’t focus on the politics at the time because I want this blog to be nonpartisan. I’m not a particularly partisan person, and I think the ideas about family I’m talking about don’t need to be politicized.

5. There’s also a slightly less provocative way to look at this mental health data. Liberal girls’ mental health began nosediving around 2012, so one could make the argument that having a pre-2012 left-of-center orientation might lead to better outcomes. But I think someone occupying such a place on the political spectrum today would actually be called a moderate, or even a conservative, given how much attitudes have shifted.

6. I know, there is a chicken-and-egg issue going on here: Does having better mental health make teens conservative? Does being conservative cause better mental health? Certainly there are debates to be had about causation, but Haidt at least does seem to think there’s evidence that a progressive intellectual framework is contributing to the poor mental health of progressive teens.

7. I know there is a wealth of research out there, and I have occasionally been in conversations that I’d describe as a sort of academic Bible bashing, where everyone just tries to cite more studies than the last person. I find such conversations to be unproductive. But if you know of research that directly contradicts the studies I’m citing here (which of course are just a sampling of such research) feel free to shoot it my way.