Thanks for posting the link. The article was quite interesting --- especially given that it's almost nine years old. Certainly, things are not better almost a decade later. Ouch.
And subjecting them to intense scrutiny. "I wish my parents had some hobby other than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child's day, eager to solve every problem for their child—and believe that's good parenting. "If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."
I think that many parents today believe they're obligated to hover --- it's as though not being constantly attentive to their children is somehow being a bad parent. I agree with the article that this kind of attention is actually bad for the child and inhibits healthy development.
I wonder how people think their kids will suddenly be able to cope on their own when they go to college or otherwise move out if they haven't had a lot of practice at solving their own problems and making their own decisions first. And this process has to start during the preschool years.
