The high expectations that many parents have about how to exercise their motherhood or fatherhood and about what their children should do lead to the physical and emotional exhaustion of the former and to worse behavior and more mental health problems in the latter. This is confirmed by Bernadette Melnyk and Kate Gawlik, researchers and professors at Ohio State University (USA) in a report published yesterday that measures the level of exhaustion of a sample of parents in the United States and how it impacts their model of parenting According to their research, 57% of parents say they are exhausted and the degree of exhaustion they report is strongly associated with internal and external expectations, whether they feel like a good parent, the judgment they perceive from others, the the time he spends playing with his children, his relationship with his partner and his demands on household chores.
Gawlick, who launched the research based on her experience as a working mother of four struggling with stress and burnout, says social media has a lot to do with “the high expectations we have for us as parents", because you see people who seem to have everything under control and time for them and their children to do countless activities and this comparison leads to feeling judged, to demanding more and to be exhausted. "And when parents are exhausted, they have more depression, anxiety and stress, and their children also have worse behaviors and less emotional well-being", pointed out Melnyk when presenting the work.
The psychoanalyst José Ramón Ubieto emphasizes that "a perfect father is the worst thing that can happen to you; it is a guarantee of a mental disorder, because you can never live up to it and this will cause you self-esteem problems and difficulties”.
"Being the perfect child is suffocating and being the perfect mom or dad causes a lot of stress, anxiety, and disappointment and guilt if you don't succeed," says Cristina Gutiérrez, researcher and creator of the La Granja emotional education method. And he explains that for more than a decade he has been detecting [and seeing how they intensify] these effects of the “perfect family syndrome” (parents who want the perfect house, the perfect body, the perfect teeth and the perfect child) in the tens of thousands of schoolchildren who participate in the camps and workshops it organizes every year.
"Today, the child is made a personal project, and parents want their fatherhood or motherhood to be 10, and they look for the best educational books, that the stories they choose are perfect, the best school, that the teachers and coaches are perfect... and they are building a house of cards with their plan of perfect parents that falls on the children, that what they want is for dad or mom to feel proud", he argues. He gives the example of Óscar, a 10-year-old boy who told him during some camps that his parents' happiness depended on him. "For years he had seen that every time he scored a goal or got good grades his parents were happy, so he had come to the conclusion that their happiness depended on what he did", he says. And he explains that this weighs on the children's backs and many, when they reach adolescence, "can't stand it, they leave football or their studies, they have disruptive behavior and make the house of cards collapse and this perfect plan that his parents had, who don't understand what's going on.
Ubieto points out that the current generation of parents is very marked by the effect of science on parenting and by the idea that everything depends on it. "They think they have a decisive influence on their children, so they feel very judged and, if the five-year-old child is not reading, they already think they are doing something wrong or that they have a disorder." In addition, according to the psychoanalyst, they are immersed in the culture of success, in the idea that children must be increasingly successful and perform more, that if they play the violin or play tennis they must do it like a professional and the sooner the better. "This is a form of helplessness: demanding performance from children, that they don't waste time, is erasing childhood, which has time to explore, to understand, to progress... and not to seek success", says Ubieto. And it draws attention to how, at the same time that exceptionalism is demanded of them, they are overprotected in other basic matters for their development and autonomy. "The frenzy turns to vertigo and the result is exhausted parents and anxious children," he says. And he encourages parents to take the pressure off themselves and not feel so transcendent: "They are important, but children are influenced by other adults and also decide things for themselves; the proof is that brothers raised with the same guidelines follow very different itineraries".
Gutiérrez, for his part, recommends that parents stop wanting perfect children to love the son or daughter who has touched them, without basing everything on their achievements. "They can start by telling them I don't want a child 10, I prefer you; the role of parents is to love him despite everything and train him for life, and life is not perfection", says the expert in emotional skills.
