Pushed too far

If you are sceptical about extending sympathy to children who enjoy ski holidays, attend schools costing £5,000 a term and are fed on organic alfalfa from the day they are weaned, then the following statistics from Levine may surprise you. Children from affluent homes (those with an income of more than £63,000 a year) are three times more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than the average teenager. This puts them at greater risk of drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm. Since 1950 — during which time living standards have improved immeasurably for children — the number of adolescent suicides has quadrupled.

Levine was spurred to look into this phenomenon when, at her clinic in California, she treated a 15-year-old girl who was bright and personable but highly pressured by her adoring, affluent parents. Levine asked her to pull back her long-sleeved T-shirt and saw that, on her left forearm, the girl had carved “EMPTY” with a razor. Ostensibly her life was full; emotionally she was a vacuum. The girl was representative of many others on Levine’s client list — her appointment book over the previous year had been increasingly filled with advantaged yet saddened teenagers who seemed to lack any real capacity for pleasure. She began to talk to colleagues around the country; they were noticing the same thing — children complaining of the same feelings of emptiness. It seemed that the most privileged teenagers in the US were suffering unprecedented levels of mental illness and emotional distress.

Rather than assuming, as most of us do, that money and status safeguard children’s emotional health, Levine says she was forced to consider the opposite, that “some aspects of affluence and parental involvement might be contributing to the unhappiness and fragility of my privileged patients”.

One needn’t look very far in Britain to see similar obsessive behaviour from parents when it comes to a child’s school or performance. We’ve all heard stories of parents suddenly becoming avid churchgoers to get their child into a good faith school, lying about their address to get into a certain catchment area, staying up late to do their children’s coursework. At weekends, the children of helicopter parents — those who hover over every aspect of their children’s lives — never lie in until midday: they are marshalled between sports events, music tuition and various other “improving” activities, with little chance to do what children often like best: daydreaming and doing nothing. But this, by the way, is often when they learn who they really are, what they really want and when they are at their most creative.

Linda Blair, a psychologist who writes for Psychologies magazine, says: “If there is one sentence I would say parents should always remember it is this: Permit boredom. Kids need to be bored sometimes.” She says such parents are often looking for meaning and fulfilment through their children. “But [they] are looking in the wrong places. It’s not outside, it’s inside. It’s not driving your kids to endless organised activities; it’s having a laugh around the dinner table together. If you don’t give your child proper love, time and attention it won’t matter which school they are at.”

Indeed, Levine says that if you ask most parents what they want for their children, they will reply: “To be happy.” They should know, then, that various research shows that there is zero correlation — and she repeats the word zero — between the school you attend and how happy you are in your life. “There is a kind of collective panic,” she says. “If children don’t go to the right school, play the right sport, play the right position at that sport, they are somehow doomed. It’s crazy. There is tremendous anxiety about parenting status in the community. It’s not because they are bad parents, but they are unbearably anxious parents.

“Why is it the most affluent kids [suffering from depression?]. Because performance is so highly valued. Many children experience their parents’ love as conditional on performance. That’s where kids fall apart. If you are not loved for who you are, at the very best you are angry.”

While helicopter parents might think that they are helping and protecting their child by doing their homework, intervening to challenge a bad exam result or writing CVs for them, they are actually depriving them of something fundamental to healthy child development: to experiment with different things, sometimes fail and develop a repertoire of responses to challenge.

As Elizabeth Meakins, a London-based psychotherapist, says: “People who have too much done for them suffer a kind of theft.” She believes that the problem is especially prevalent in London, where finding “good schools” is more of a preoccupation, but adds that it has increased everywhere. “People have become fixated on the product, not the process.” Why? “Everything is so much more public now. Parental anxieties are whipped up. In the 1940s and 1950s you probably weren’t quite so aware of how the rest of the country was doing, whereas now we know everything. I have had parents come to me late for an appointment who say ‘Sorry, I was doing geography coursework’.”

It is a mistake, she says, to assume that children who are “tutored to the hilt”, carted off after school to lessons in Kumon maths or French, end up happy, confident people. Though years down the line they might be high achievers in their jobs, inside they are intractably insecure, worried that they will some day be “found out” because they feel that their achievements were not really their own, they were never “trusted” to do it themselves. Meakins sees many of them as adult clients and says: “There is often confusion over where the parents’ identity ended and their own self-expression began.” Sometimes this manifests itself as eating disorders or self-harm, sometimes as self-doubt and poor self-esteem.

Of course, a certain degree of involvement in your child’s studies and development is a good thing. Dr Peter Congdon, a British psychologist who specialises in working with intellectually gifted children, says research suggests that children who can read and write at 3 are ahead by adolescence, while dyslexics are up to standard. He also believes that the problem might have been exaggerated slightly: pushy, over -involved parents have been around for ever (when the US General Douglas MacArthur began his studies at West Point military academy in 1898 his mother moved to be right outside the academy’s gates so she could keep her eye on him). However, he agrees that too few parents manage to maintain a healthy balance, and push their offspring far too hard. He, too, believes that this is more common in London. “I heard recently from one psychiatrist who had treated four children in the same class for depression at a leading private school. You have to ask yourself, is the parent doing it for the child or as a status symbol for the parent? It is well known that the best preparation for growing up is to have lived fully as a child.”

In any case pushing them too much can backfire spectacularly. Once children get to university and are free of hovering parents, they don’t know how to manage themselves, mess around and often drop out of their courses. Congdon recalls a boy at his school who excelled at everything, encouraged by his ambitious father. He went to Oxford and failed.

In 1978, with remarkable prescience, Congdon wrote a guide for the parents of gifted children in which he said, among other things, that “accelerating mental development is sometimes bought at the expense of slowing down the pace of social and emotional growth. The result can be a lopsided and maladjusted individual. Do not overorganise or regiment a child’s life . . . Parents should not convey the impression that it is because of his/her ability that the child means so much to them. He should feel of value to his parents in his own right.”

And this incessant focus on preparing children to pass exams doesn’t always help them. Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, wrote recently in The Times that many schools focus on exam success to the detriment of wider education and “extracurricular enrichment”. He spoke of a Harley Street psychiatrist seeing five children at a hothouse London school. “They are suffering from depression, anorexia and a sense of worthlessness brought on by the feeling that they’re trying to fulfil the goals of others rather than their own,” he said.

As Levine says: “Performance is not real learning.” Yet many children experience childhood as nothing more than a preparation for a good university. Some carry the added burden of their parents’ unhappiness if they fail: “If I don’t pass maths, my mother will have a breakdown.” Meanwhile family life suffers, a far more devastating life event to a child than not getting into the London Oratory. “Parents spend whole weekends for months on end shuttling their children to athletic events, ignoring the fact that marriages suffer under the barrage of child-centred activities,” Levine says.

And what would be so terrible about having an “average” child? Didn’t average once have positive, reassuring connotations? “There is a bell curve,” says Levine. “Human beings tend to go back to the middle. Many parents don’t get the science of it, that most of us are average. We all have areas of skill and areas where we are below average. It’ s almost delusional to think otherwise.”

When children work primarily to please others it detracts from their real job of figuring out their authentic talents, skills and interests. “The reason that so many of my patients feel empty is because they lack the secure, reliable, welcoming internal structure that we call the ‘self’,” says Levine. “The boredom, the vagueness, the unhappiness, the reliance on others all point to children who have run into difficulty with the very foundation of psychological development.”

Yet while it is tempting — entertaining, even — to poke fun at such helicopter parents as narcissistic social climbers who use their children as extensions of their own egos, Levine does sympathise. Many of these parents are suffering from their own problems. Some affluent women have active social lives but few real friends. Many are highly intelligent but have given up good careers to raise their children. Rates of marital dissatisfaction are high, affected by the same forces that burden children: too much pressure and too little real intimacy.

Without a close friend to confide in, we are likely to turn to our children for solace. This leads to “enmeshment”, a collapse of the boundaries between parent and child. “I’d lay my PhD on the fact that you’ll find exactly the same high rates of depression among affluent mothers as you do in their kids,” says Levine. “Yet there is prejudice at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: it’s hard to have sympathy for mothers who have everything; you need vulnerability to make connections. But the upper-middle class places huge value on maintaining a front.”

At the end of May Contain Nuts, the helicopter mother undergoes a Damascene conversion, and recognises that the “posh” school is less interested in its pupils’ welfare than it is in maintaining its own elitist image, and that her daughter would receive a more rounded and healthy education at the local comprehensive. We probably shouldn’t, however, bank on that happening to many of our real-life helicopter parents any time soon.