Americans like a biggie-sized life. We’re goal-oriented with an inbred can-do attitude. These are all good traits when kept in balance. For the last several years, researchers and school principles have argued that parenting is out of control. This week’s TIME magazine picks up the trail of the story: Can These Parents Be Saved: The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting.

via DamnCoolPics.blogspot.comThe terms are all similar: hyper-parenting, over-parenting, helicopter parenting.

In the case of helicopter parenting, experts don’t agree on its bad effects. Over-parenting and hyper-parenting are defined as totally organizing every minute of your child’s life, doing his/her homework, confronting teachers who don’t automatically give an A and generally putting children under enormous pressure to be perfect and successful, even at age five.

Helicopter parenting involves being available to mentor and act as a child’s guide when needed. Determining when helicopter parenting becomes hyper-parenting or over-parenting is too often left to the parents judgement.

Think of the sound of a helicopter. It’s hardly calming to one’s nerves and hovers always overhead.

Clearly children need guidance and support systems. But we have no evidence that kids are performing better in the basic skills of life, as a result of the relentless pressures that modern parents put on them to be the best at everything.

TIME takes up the neurotic reality of modern parenting, and it’s a good read, full of anecdotal stories about parents gone wild. While I’ve consulted on this concept of hyper-parenting, my focus has usually been the fallout on mom herself and marital intimacy, including the absent health benefits of good sex.

On behalf of women, I push back on this need for parental perfection, trying to make women understand that there’s more loss than gains in the equation.

Fickr’s via divosa It’s wrong to suggest that America’s parents aren’t spending enough time with their children, which in no way negates the First Lady’s emphasis on family and motherhood. The problem is that American women, especially mothers, are very tough on themselves always believing that they must do better at everything.

Not only does this reality causes serious problems for women’s health — overeating and disinterest in sex, to name two problems — ‘helicopter parents’ or ‘hyper-parents’ as they are called, aren’t doing their kids any favors. We’re raising a nation of risk-averse children who believe they are the center of the universe and totally unable to compete in the global marketplace.

I’ve been told that today’s parents actually think they should go on job interviews with their children, and I don’t mean age 16 working at McDonald’s (which is also wrong.) I don’t know what I would do if a parent showed up with a grown, college-educated child for an interview with me.

Before we send any more messages that American parents must spend yet more time with their children, in highly-structured events, let me review some data with you, sourced from the book “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life”.

Today’s Kids Have More Time With Parents Than 40 Years Ago

Despite the surge of women into America’s work force, mothers are spending at least as much time with their children today as they did 40 years ago. The amount of child care and housework performed by fathers has also sharply increased.

Contrary to popular myth, today’s parents spend more time with kids than they did in 1965, when 60 percent of all children lived in families with a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mother.

- For married mothers, the time spent on child care activities increased to an average of 12.9 hours a week in 2000, from 10.6 hours in 1965.

- For married fathers, the time spent on child care more than doubled to 6.5 hours a week, from 2.6 hours.

_ Single mothers reported in thousands of diaries, spending 11.8 hours a week on child care, up from 7.6 hours in 1965.

As the hours of paid work went up for mothers, their hours of housework declined, in an almost one-for-one trade. These facts have been updated and haven’t changed significantly. Most certainly, parents aren’t spending less time with their kids.

These statistics are remarkably similar to time-use data conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

In 2006, researchers estimated that the workweek for an average mother was 71 hours, almost equally divided between paid and unpaid work (remember to factor in part-time workers), compared with a workweek averaging 52 horus for mothers who are not employed outside the home.

On average, employed mothers get somewhat less sleep and watch less television than mothers who are not employed, and they also spend less time with their husbands.

We might think that as American families have shrunk in size and parents are more affluent (until the Recession), that moms in particular would have more time.

In fact, today’s parents are prompted to make greater investments in their children, feeling pressured to rear a “perfect child”. Experts conjecture about the reasons for hyper-parenting but the fact that professional women are older when they become mothers suggests that they move from the workplace to parenting, making parenting a job for MBAs.

Given the reality that parents can’t create a day longer than 24 hours, what’s gone from this hyper-parenting equation: time for themselves for sleeping, sexual activity or reading a book. It’s mom and dad who suffer, but also the future of parenting.

Americans aren’t totally thrilled with this loss of self that comes with hyper-parenting and consider the raising of kids a grueling experience. Parents report increasing levels of financial burdens, onerous responsibilities, emotional stress, and strains on marital happiness.

Researchers consistently confirm that marriages with no kids are happier. Please don’t shoot me. I’m only the messenger here.

Surprisingly, the cri de coeur is loudest among the most privileged. For upscale parents, it seems, every step of parenthood, from getting pregnant to choosing the right childbirth method to getting the kids into a nursery school to managing entry into college is fraught with difficulty.

Gen X Revenge

I find quite a lot of hostility between the Gex X women and Boomers on the subject of parenting, and we must acknowledge that in accusing the Boomer women of being bad mothers, it’s the Gen X women who have perpetuated this perfect parenting myth.

Saying that they were robbed of a good childhood by selfish Boomer moms, the Gen X moms invented hyper-parenting.

It’s true that 68 percent of Gen X (born about 1964 to 1981) women say that having a child is an experience that every woman should have, compared to just 45 percent of baby boom women in 1979. (The State of Our Unions 2006 via Rutgers University National Marriage Project).

Reality is that larger numbers of couples are choosing to remain childless, a fact that has demographers, conservatives and religious leaders plenty worried about the future. Unlike countries like Japan or Italy, America doesn’t have a negative birth rate, largely due to immigration.

However, there’s growing concern that parenting isn’t an automatic extension of marriage and that certain segments of American life will have consistently fewer children in the future.

A win for kids against over-parenting could also be a win for parents themselves and America’s quality of life in general. Reduce the stress of parenting and the hope is that the idea will become more appealing to all.

How do we deal with helicopter parenting? Think “la dolce vita”: playing, arts and crafts, doing nothing. The word is SLOW. There is no evidence that hyper-parenting makes for happier, more successful children. Quite the opposite.

photo via ali khurshidThe experts say SLOW DOWN and SIMPLIFY.

The following article has been a top Anne of Carversville read since I wrote it this summer. While the focus is a Cultural Creative idea of Slow Living, it includes Slow Parenting and also features the author quoted in TIME’s article Can These Parents Be Saved: The Growing Backlash Against Over-Parenting.

Carl Honoré is a Canadian journalist whose two books, “In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,’’ and “Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children From the Culture of Hyper-Parenting,’’ have made him a quaisi-spokesperson for all things ‘slow’. See Book links.

Carl Honoré is also featured giving a TED Talk. If you’ve not introduced yourself to TED, it’s a fabulous learning environment. Enjoy! Anne

Slow Living Parenting is a trendCultural Creatives Constitute the Core of the Slow Living Movement