While children are less active than ever, they do not, ironically, get enough rest, or so say doctors.
Children, it seems, are too busy with school assignments and extracurricular activities to go to bed at a good hour, or when they do actually get to bed, they are on their cellphone or computer, or playing video games.
This chronic fatigue may be associated with the rise of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescription drug use among children.
Insufficient sleep is one reason why children, say researchers, are more likely to be diagnosed with the disorder.
“It is now easier to administer a pill prescribed by a board-certified physician, than to firmly instruct a child and impose consequences for bad behaviour,” says Stephen Camarata, a professor of hearing and speech sciences and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The professor believes parents are asking too much of children too soon.
“We’re treating them like little hard drives. But this idea of pushing children to the absolute max of their developmental norm doesn’t give them time to reason and problem-solve. It actually undermines self-confidence and fluid reasoning, or the ability to think,” says prof Camarata.
Schools too, he says, have been focusing more on academic achievement than socialisation.
Since the 1980s, as other nations pulled ahead of the US in scholastic performance, the primary objective of educators has become literacy and numeracy.
“That’s partly why a ‘culture of disrespect’ has sprouted in North America. As children have become less attached to and influenced by the adults in their lives, same-age peers have come to matter more to them,” says Canadian developmental psychologist Dr Gordon Neufeld.
Parents who are authoritative, say researchers, have better outcomes and it’s a larger effect than the effect of race, ethnicity, household income or IQ.
With stakes so high, authoritative parenting would seem imperative. But there is a psychological hurdle that people will have to overcome first.
How to respect the child but also be the decider of the family.
Part of this challenge as parents, it would seem to me is that we do not want to fail!
I mean we certainly do not want our children to fail in their personal development, or in school or with their social lives, which in turn would then mean we do not want to fail in our upbringing.
Isn’t this why we always evaluate the way we speak to our children, or what we allow them to do and not do, or what activities to take up etc?
“Parenting is awfully frustrating and often a lonely place, especially when a child misbehaves,” says Dr Neufeld.
In those moments, he recommends parents reassure children that their relationship is not broken.
“When parents realise that they are their children’s best bet, it challenges them to their own maturity. It gives them the confidence that they know what is good for their children and that they should stand up to them – this is, in fact, an act of love required of parents. They become, in effect, the grown-ups their children need,” says Dr Neufeld.
It is also true to say that we as parents must have a higher tolerance for things not going well and although I can admit that at times that is extremely difficult to do I am trying!
But as psychologists say ‘how we as parents recover from our own occasional mistake, outburst, loss of patience or bad call may say more to a child than how they are in happy times.’
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