Parents just can’t get a break nowadays. If we’re not doing enough, we’re doing too much. In this Psychology Today article, Nation of Wimps, psychologists blame hovering parents for the rise in childhood anxiety and depression. These experts also speculate that people are slower in achieving classic adulthood benchmarks–marriage and parenthood–because they rely on their parents too much and remain childlike for too long.

These psychologists must be trapped in a time warp. Society has changed. There’s more stress and pressure heaped on kids from areas other than school performance, e.g., divorce, violence in the home and outside of it. And the reverse explanation for people marrying and having children later could be because they are becoming more adultlike, not childlike. I believe many people are expected to have achieved career success and have a stable income before embarking on lifelong marriage and parenthood.

Cell phones apparently symbolize over-the-top parenting.

…cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do. They’ve never internalized any images of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years; all they’ve internalized is ‘call Mom or Dad.’

–David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College

In today’s society where the standard family has both parents working outside the home, cell phones help keep parents informed of their children’s whereabouts. I think it is the closest some of these kids will ever get to knowing what it’s like to have a parent at home who’s available whenever they need him/her.

Here’s another gem.

…cell phones–along with the instant availability of cash and almost any consumer good your heart desires–promote fragility by weakening self-regulation. “You get used to things happening right away,” says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, professor at Indiana University Southeast and founder of its Shyness Research Institute. “You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendship and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail–perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression.”

What does pizza have to do with relationships? Not being able to wait for the latest gadget does not translate to not being able to wait for something more important in life like love.

It’s hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now. How best do you prepare kids for that?

We focus so much on our own children. It’s time to begin caring about all children.

–Psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University

Being a professor at any of the prestigious universities named in the article doesn’t seem to guarantee that you’ll have wisdom.

Of course we don’t know what the future is like. But being good parents means that we are trying our best to prepare our children for any and all possibilities. And I would like to know if Professor Elkind cares as much about Stephen as I do. If parents don’t concentrate on their own children, who will?

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