Toxic Parenting Researcher: The No. 1 Thing I Never Do with My Kids

“How’d your test go?” Those should never be the first words when your child walks through the door, award-winning journalist and parenting researcher Jennifer Breheny Wallace told CNBC.

U.S. teens are experiencing more stress than ever, and it’s hurting their mental health.

Wallace interviewed multiple psychologists and 6,500 parents for her book Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It. What she discovered through the research caused her to change the way she parents.

“When my kids come in the door, instead of asking them, ‘How’d you do on the Spanish quiz?’ — which I used to do before I wrote the book — I now ask them, ‘What did you have for lunch?’” says Wallace. “I lead with lunch. I talk about things that have nothing to do with their achievements.”

How to talk to your children without stressing them out

Wallace, who attended Harvard as an undergrad, talked with psychologists about ways parents inadvertently hurt their children by focusing on achievement.

Psychologists warned that parents can spread their own anxiety to their children, through a process called emotional contagion.

Hyperfocusing on grades and achievement can send a toxic message to your children, that “their value is contingent on their performance,” she notes.

Too often achievement culture becomes toxic, with damaging results: “When our sense of self is tangled up in our achievements, we can’t separate ourselves — our inherent worth — from our external achievements or external failures.”

Let your kids lead the topic of conversation

When it comes to a big test, Wallace holds her tongue, letting her kids bring up the subject if they so choose.

“Guess what? My kids are going to tell me. It’s on their minds,” she says. “They don’t have to think that I’ve been worrying all day about one Spanish quiz. Instead, they should be getting the messaging from me that I care about them as a whole person.”

Limit conversations about performance

Praising your child’s effort is much more constructive than lauding them for a high grade. Or better yet, limit conversations about performance entirely.

As the parent of a college senior, she has taken the advice of psychologists she interviewed to heart, choosing to limit potential stressful conversations with her children to “one hour over the weekend.”

“If [my son] wants to bring it up, that’s fine,” says Wallace. “But from my perspective, as a parent, I wait and I hold my thoughts until the weekend …. I want to enjoy my child’s last year living at home and I don’t want it clogged up with stressful conversations about college.”

Read the full article here.

 

Huddleston Jr., Tom. “Harvard-trained toxic parenting researcher: Here’s the No. 1 thing I never do with my kids.” CNBC.com, 6 Oct 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/06/parenting-researcher-jennifer-b-wallace-what-i-never-do-with-my-kids.html.