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The hands-off parent who keeps a more respectful distance from their child’s life can induce a deep longing in the child for the kind of recognition he believes can be won only through the never-ending accumulation of achievements. The child who feels she can’t win, that her best efforts at rugby or chess or cheerleading will only draw her parent’s niggling criticism, will also be afflicted by a permanent itch to do better.
Yet the child whose parent assures him that every doodle or gold star is a landmark achievement may also come to feel himself under constant pressure to live up to the achievements of his early years. Whichever way you approach parenting, you may end up stoking your children’s desperate need to please and create a lifelong difficulty in distinguishing their own desires from your aspirations for them.
This may sound like the formula for blaming the parents that many people view as the essence of psychoanalysis. But you could also regard it as a humane acknowledgment of how hard it is to get parenting right. The sweet spot between over-involvement and under-involvement in our children’s lives is maddeningly elusive.— Josh Cohen
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