Why spending more time on your needs, rather than your children’s, can make you a better parent

by Louis Weinstock

​I'm sure you’ve already read many articles about how our young people are becoming ever more narcissistic. ‘Generation Me’, as psychologist Jean Twenge calls it, are apparently more entitled and more obsessed than ever with image than previous generations. And there is some good research to back up this claim.

The word ‘narcissist’ comes from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus. He was a handsome boy who fell in love with his own reflection and got sent to the underworld. The lesser known side-kick of this story is the nymph Echo, who falls in love with Narcissus but has no voice of her own and can only repeat what Narcissus says. If our children are growing up more narcissistic, then it is we parents who are becoming like Echo, losing our own voice and losing touch with our own needs.

As parents, if we can spend a little more time on our own needs, rather than our children’s, it makes us better parents. What a paradoxical thought! Hear me out. In researching my book - How The World Is Making Our Children Mad, And What To Do About It - I interviewed David Lancy, an anthropologist of childhood. He told me of other cultures where parents do not focus on their children in the same way we tend to in the West. For example, in rural Liberia, Kpelle mothers carry their babies on their back most of the day while they work and socialise but they hardly pay them any attention. Meanwhile, children in Fiji from as young as four are expected to bow very low and avoid eye contact when passing an adult and may get a clip round the ear if they don’t show enough respect. In contrast, Lancy calls modern Western cultures ‘neontocracies’, where we plough so much of our time, energy and resources into our children, leaving parents as Echo and the elderly getting a particularly rough deal (off to the care home for you).    

When I learned from Lancy about the different type of attention some children got in other cultures, the almost obsessive energy and attention we pour into our children in the modern Western world suddenly seemed strange, laughable even. Hearing about these other ways of parenting, I felt as if someone had taken my heavy sack of parental guilt, laid it down by the side of the road and said to me: ‘It’s OK, Louis. You can focus on you without feeling guilty.’

Now, it’s really important to say that the mothers I learned about in other cultures did not completely ignore their children. They were still responsive to them, fed them on demand and kept them in close physical contact (‘skinship’). But, importantly, their lives didn’t bend to the every whim of their children. This is not to say that some of the popular parenting models in the West, such as attachment parenting, have got it all wrong. If we want our children to develop a secure attachment, we need to be warm and responsive. But there is a clear risk that in spending so much energy on our children, we are creating an expectation that the world revolves around them, when in fact, the world is not designed to perfectly meet our children’s every need.

When we raise children who have too much of a sense of being special, at some point their sense of specialness comes into contact with the real world. In my primary school, I was really good at swimming. I easily won the breaststroke races. I thought I was the bomb – Michael Phelps in disguise. But then I went to a much bigger secondary school and there was a boy who was miles better than me. B*****d. For a while, that really dented my pride. In my practice, I often see children who’ve developed quite bad mental health issues after the transition to secondary school. They aren’t prepared for becoming a smaller fish in a bigger pond.

Now, let’s extend this reality to a very big pond – the world of social media. Here, a child comes into contact with billions of other potentially ‘special’ people. And this contact reveals a    fundamental and painful truth: 99.9 per cent of the time there is no special treatment awaiting them.

A self-image based too much on specialness is fundamentally fragile. We need to prepare our children for a world where the spotlight simply won’t be on them all the time. And even when it is, spotlights can burn and blind; pop stars are up to seven times more likely than the general public to commit suicide.

And there is a more obvious point here. When parents don’t take care of themselves, they burn out, losing the energy required to be a good parents. An article in the Atlantic, called ‘The Perils of Attachment Parenting’, put it like this: ‘When parents begin a pattern of meeting their child’s every need at the expense of their own, it sticks. It’s hard to pop out of that mindset when your six-year-old wants another cup of milk even though you’ve just sat down for dinner or when your 10-year-old is eager to add yet another activity to his schedule that would require you to drive across town at rush hour.’     

If you want your children to grow a capacity for care and compassion for themselves and others, first you must fill up your own cup. This is self- compassion – when we treat ourselves the same way we would treat a beloved friend. This may sound obvious. But how consistently do you do it? I am here to give you extra permission and encouragement.

Buddha once said that you could search the whole world and not find anyone more deserving of your love and compassion than yourself. Let that sink in for a moment. A 2020 review of self-compassion for parents showed that it consistently reduces depression, anxiety and stress in parents. A recent study of over 900 Dutch families showed that parents with less self-blame had teenagers with fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety.

It is not always as easy as just deciding to focus more on our own needs. Sometimes, parents have grown up in environments when focusing on other people’s needs was the way they kept safe. But with practice, anyone can learn to break these patterns. Just choose one small way today that you can take better care of your own needs, and keep building from there, one small self-caring step at a time, loving nursing Echo’s voice back.