Intensive parenting: What's wrong with it from a Stoic perspective?

Helping our kids "succeed" shouldn't be focused on positioning them to rack up achievements. Intensive parenting sends the wrong message to our kids about what we value.

It’s a tough time to be a parent or caregiver. As we try to protect our children from so many dangerous ills—gun violence, bias and racism, toxic school environments, cyberbullying, the ripple effects of the pandemic, and more—the debate continues to rage about how to prepare our children for life in this imperfect world. Do we follow the path of “intensive” parenting, or do we question it? How do we really help our children “succeed”?

A few months back, an article in The Atlantic raised the topic of intensive parenting yet again, with the headline reading: “Stop pretending that intensive parenting doesn’t work,” and the subhead, “It’s expensive and time-consuming. But the data prove that kids benefit.”

The author, Nate G. Hilger—who mentions in the first paragraph that he and his wife had their first child 2 years ago—goes on to assert that even parents who say they are against “intensive parenting” do it, too, pointing to the behavior of some parents who have publicly advocated other, non-intensive methods (such as "free-range parenting”). Hilger, a data scientist and economist, writes that he “dove into the research” to show intensive parenting does work, especially to position our kids to get high-paid jobs later in life.

Note: It is not the goal of helping our kids succeed in their work or lives I’m arguing with, but the method of getting there!

So what IS intensive parenting, and what’s either good or bad about it at a basic level? And how does it differ from Stoic parenting?

First things first. I’ll tell you what I think intensive parenting is not. I don’t think parenting to keep our kids healthy, fed, and safe is “intensive” parenting. Regarding the author’s introduction to the “Stop pretending” article, where he describes his toddler child who can hardly use a fork, I wanted to share that as a parent of two kids who used to be toddlers, I can tell you that a two-year-old requires heavily involved caregiving just to stay alive. Anyone who has been a babysitter let alone a primary caregiver knows how much attention and work goes into ensuring that small children don’t severely hurt themselves and are fed, changed, bathed, clothed, put to sleep, etc. I don’t call that intensive parenting. It’s older kids who elicit the intensive approach we’re concerned about here.

Second, in my opinion, intensive parenting shouldn’t be defined as trying to create a generally good learning environment or setting for kids with public resources and readily available tools at your disposal. For example, trying to get your soon-to-be kindergartener kid into a higher performing local public school by moving across town, or entering a school lottery in your district, is not intensive parenting in my book. It’s doing the best you can to maximize the shared educational resources available to you. It’s rational and it doesn’t place huge pressure on kids.

Intensive parenting, as I see it, doesn’t kick in until kids are old enough to start racking up “achievements.” That age is debatable. A mom recently mentioned to me preschool “enrichment” classes with specific goals… so this could start as early as at 3 years old.

That’s when it gets hairy: From my observations, intensive parenting, as pursued by Americans with a degree of wealth and time to invest, puts an enormous and undue pressure on our children to rack up a list of achievements from elementary school onwards.

It is the pressure and the expectation to achieve, and it is the way of reducing our children’s only value as humans to their resume of outward achievements that are bad about intensive parenting—and these things are causing our kids to suffer, rather than thrive. That’s why I try to practice Stoic parentings as a counter point. Where I live in California, it’s going against the grain to adopt this approach.

Intensive parenting arises when parents or caregivers expect children to do more, to achieve more, to BE more, so that they can “get ahead” of other kids and become “more successful.” It primarily happens when parents start lining things up and creating expectations in order to make that happen.

I have observed this as a mother with kids in a competitive public school district in Silicon Valley. For the most part, from what I’ve observed, this intensive approach is practiced by parents who have achieved a certain level of education or wealth themselves, who want that to be continued (or improved upon) by their children.

If you want some anecdotal evidence of intensive parenting, I have plenty. Around here, some parents apply to private elementary, middle, or high schools for niche interests or for extreme academic performance (especially those seen as “feeder schools” for Ivy league-level colleges). They start kids in the “right” extracurricular activities at a young age (3 or 4 years old) that, if pursued diligently and with lots of time and money investment, could lead to national recognition or awards. Families send kids to focused summer programs at private university campuses or hire costly coaches to train their kids to do even better at a variety of skills. They line up middle or high school internships at companies (typically unpaid), or arrange for high schoolers to do research with academic faculty. They focus on national or international competitions and championships, medals, and honors.

One holy grail I heard about from a private college counselor in Silicon Valley: An effort to get local or even national media for truly “outstanding” students’ achievements.

Obviously, some of these are extreme cases that aren’t representative of most of the population. But these are the “standards” being set by the people who have the most resources in our society, the ones with the greatest chance to pave the way for their kids’ success. That means we all have to pay attention to what’s happening with the most pronounced cases of intensive parenting, in addition to the everyday pressures set on all students who aspire to compete in our society, and their parents.

(Sidenote here: I believe much of this effort is driven by the arcane college admissions process in the US. This is NOT the same in other countries, where students don’t compete in an obscure and arcane system of “holistic review” of their achievements for admittance to “top tier” colleges and for the potential for merit or athletic scholarships. For example, last year I spoke to some parents and recent grads from Italy, who assured me this is NOT the case in their systems, where public university education admittance is determined by exams and is heavily subsidized by their taxes.)

Questions we should ask ourselves when we feel sucked into intensive parenting are fairly straightforward: What do my kids actually like to do? What motivates them specifically? How could we encourage kids to set goals that they are excited about, and have chosen for themselves?

Sure, some kids are truly driven to do extraordinary work that could get media attention. I’m thinking of a person like Greta Thunberg. She made a choice to commit to work for a cause at a very young age, with her parents’ support. But you can bet it wasn’t her mom or dad talking her into doing it to “look good” on college applications or to land a high-paying job later.

There’s a massive elephant in this room. The problem isn’t preparing kids to grow up and become financial independent adults with decent jobs—a very reasonable goal. (See my previous post on “workism”!)

The problem really comes with making our kids believe that the only thing that matter to us, as their parents or caregivers or families, is their list of achievements. And that that’s what makes us proud of them, and happy with them.

According to kids I’ve talked to recently, up to half the kids in our public high school here in Silicon Valley feel that their parents primarily care about what they achieve.

These are the students who come out of their math class crying “my parents will kill me if I didn’t get an A on that test” and posting on social media about their dads who won’t let them go outdoors until they ace their next SAT practice test—and better make sure it’s a perfect score.

Lots of these students are riven with anxiety and fear of failure. Some suffer depression; some have tried to hurt themselves, and some have succeeded.

Social media makes them hyper aware that there’s always a better or more high achieving student out there, and most likely that student is making TikTok videos about her success that rub it in your face. No wonder kids struggle with this; it’s a distressing thing to be confronted with.

So let’s ask ourselves: How do we value our kids, and how do we show that to them? And even better: How do they, our children, find what creates meaning and value in their lives?

Because once they get off the roller coaster of achievement after they are done with school, it’s going to be a tough road ahead, when things aren’t always measured by an award or a grade or a tournament. Real life, adult life, is much, much murkier, filled with lots of gray areas and difficult choices and tradeoffs and compromises.

For me and my husband, one of our biggest goals with our kids was to encourage them to actually like learning things for the sake of learning itself. Even if you’ll never be “good at it” or show any achievement or reward as a result. Heck, I’m not a great pianist, but I play simplified classical pieces from my advanced-beginner and intermediate piano books, and I still love it. I don’t have to be the best. Likewise, my husband loves chess, and plays five-minute chess constantly online. But is he a recognized champion? No, not for lack of watching numerous chess videos in his free time.

Along these lines, I am fortunate that my kids do achieve things, really cool things—but it’s the things THEY want to do, things that they signed up for of their own volition… not stuff their parents told them they should do or needed to do to get ahead and to gain our approval. No one is hovering over them goading them to get top place in anything. If they want to try for it out of their own competitive instincts, go for it. If they’d like to go for an ambitious path in school, and learn as much as they can about a subject, great. I encourage it, if it’s something they care about. But it’s not what really matters about them, as people.

What’s toxic is the message that kids only matter and are only valuable as people if they achieve, win, and are perfect.

At the end of the day, my Stoic parenting approach says this: Now that they are teens, THEY must choose how to flourish. And they must question their own impressions.

And they need to do this in the face of a ton of information that they are receiving about how competitive and cutthroat the world is. They need to figure out what motivates them to learn and to do as well as they can, and to determine what they want out of life. They must figure out creates meaning and value and, dare I say it, fun, at least some of the time.

At the end of the day, I hope above all that my children will display all four key Stoic virtues as much as possible: Wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. That, more than any kind of Potemkin-village-style resume of awards or clubs or wins, is what will take them through life to a future that with the greatest chance for flourishing and satisfaction, even in the face of an often unfair and difficult world.

And second, after the virtues, what I care about is that they will help other people, and not solely focus on themselves and their own achievements. This is the second part of Stoicism and all the virtue-oriented ancient philosophies. The idea is that humans are pro-social, and becoming a better human being can be achieved not only by improving ourselves, but by using our own energies to do good for others. (After all, if you become really skilled at something, you could use it for good—helping folks—or for bad—oppressing them or harming them. We can all think of examples!)

Put in other words: As a Stoic parent, I have to fight against focusing on a set of outward accomplishments, which reflect what society expects of us and how people tend to judge us… but instead about the character we and our children have built along the way, and our efforts to live a good life.

It’s OK to play the game of competition and getting into universities and seeking out jobs, and we need to do so on some level—surely, our Stoic mentors such as Marcus Aurelius accomplished a lot of great things in the public sphere in his day—but successfully navigating that game is not what actually gives us our self-worth as human beings. Stoicism focuses on a good life, not a good resume.

That’s why I want my kids to know I value them for their good intentions and the energy they put into flourishing in their wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline… Not for extracurricular awards or prestigious accolades. Perhaps this approach is going against the grain, but that’s a long-standing philosophical tradition, too.