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Identifying Over-Parenting and How to Overcome It

Many of people, especially women are guilty of over-parenting. You hear it over and over again; you are protecting him too much. It even goes so far that some moms are called mother hen, the hen that is hovering over her young ones to protect them from any predators. Don’t get it wrong here, up to a certain degree, over-parenting is not bad, but there is a point, when too much is just plain too much. So first of all, how can you identify if you are over-parenting and then, how can you overcome it?

Identifying over-parenting in you is one of the hardest things to do. From your standpoint it is not over-parenting, but rather a form of loving and caring, something that you think is the best thing to give to your child in the world. So how can you figure out if you are overly affective to your child?

In the first few months of a child’s life there are only a few forms that you might be over-parenting. This form is generally over-comforting. It is true that you cannot spoil a newborn baby by picking the baby up and cuddling, but there are other things that you might be doing too much of. Parents are not quite tuned into baby’s cries and therefore many first time parents think that when the baby cries the baby is hungry. This is a phenomenon called by many specialists as the water hose phenomenon. The baby gets constantly filled with liquids because we are not quite sure what to do. The baby cannot tell us if he is tired or hot or if something bothers him. Other ways of over-parenting in the first year of life is running to the crib whenever you hear the first peep in the baby monitor, rocking and feeding the baby to sleep. Of course, the baby will drift off into sleep ever so gently, but many parents set the stage for ongoing sleep problems.

When your children are getting older there is a form of over-parenting called over-protecting. This stage often occurs when the children are in their toddler and teenager years. Toddlers need rough-play, climbing and tumbling experiences to build their balance and skills for the future. Of course parents need to keep them safe, but the occasional fall, bruise or skinned knee is just normal. Parents should not interfere with this stage in a toddler development. Later on in the teenager stage, children practice being adults by making friends, making decisions and starting to take risks. Parents need to facilitate these stages; they need to be able to let go. The more you try to protect them, the more they might rebel.

Over the years of parenting, parents need to learn to step back, back off, but some parents are not able to, they are overly involved in their children’s lives. If parents always take action when their child is not succeeding in school, sports or family events, they actually do the opposite of helping their child. They take away the opportunity to experience important events and developmental milestones in life. When the child is thirty, Mommy cannot prevent him from failing anymore and this small experience might ruin the rest of the child’s life because the child never experienced how to deal with failure.

To overcome over-parenting, there actually are only a few things you have to do. First of all, back off, let the child fall, if there is only a scratch or a bruise involved, let the toddler climb and run, let the teenager make decisions and fail. Children need to learn these life essential skills.

Second of all, look at what other parents do-- what they let their children do and how they treat similar age children? Of course there are extremes on both sides of parenting, but the mainstream does exist. Go to playgroups, go to playgrounds with your toddler, and talk to other teenage parents in your child’s class about their parenting philosophies. You do not need to adopt everything or like everything, but slowly, step by step, back off and give your children room to develop.