
Helicopter, Free-range, Mollycoddle, Lawnmower….
The parenting styles experienced by Generation Z (our current crop of teenagers) all share a common thread – a lean towards over-parenting.
To unpack why we’ve pushed parenting so far in this direction, a peek back at history paints a pretty clear picture.
The 18th century is when the way parents parent changed.
“We went from a largely agricultural society to an industrial one. There started to be communal education of kids, so rather than being taught at home by their parents, children were a community asset,” author of Soft Teens David Gillespie told The Quicky.
Listen to the full chat with David Gillespie on The Quicky. Post continues after podcast.
“They had to learn certain capabilities like learning to read and write, so they’d be able to be useful in factories,” he continued.
The community started to care about the way children were being raised, and so began a trend of theorising about how best to do it.
Then came the 1920s, which saw the advent of the first parenting books.
As Mr Gillespie explained to Quicky host Claire Murphy, there was a child psychologist called J.B Watson who was making waves at the time.
“He used to experiment on a little boy called Albert. He taught Albert to fear things he shouldn’t – bunnies, feather dusters…he was trying to see if you could condition fear into children.” said Mr Gillespie.
He could. He did. Little Albert grew up into an adult that was still conditioned to fear those very things.