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What's your parenting style?
Stop what you're doing immediately and read about the results of a ground-breaking, life-changing parenting study released by the California Parenting Institute last week, which found that every style of parenting inevitably causes children to grow into profoundly unhappy adults:
"Our research suggests that while overprotective parenting ultimately produces adults unprepared to contend with life's difficulties, highly permissive parenting leads to feelings of bitterness and isolation throughout adulthood," lead researcher Daniel Porter said. "And, interestingly, we found that anything between those two extremes is equally damaging, always resulting in an adult who suffers from some debilitating combination of unpreparedness and isolation. Despite great variance in parenting styles across populations, the end product is always the same: a profoundly flawed and joyless human being." The study did find, however, that adults often achieve temporary happiness when they have children of their own to perpetuate the cycle of human misery.
Sorry - I couldn't resist. And I can't stop laughing. I found this gem in the ‘News in Brief' section of satirical news site The Onion and oh, how I love it.
But the best part is that people actually took the study seriously. According to Time magazine's website, The Onion's story - which was entitled ‘Study Finds Every Style of Parenting Produces Disturbed, Miserable Adults' - even led one dear woman to phone up the CPI (a real organisation but which had nothing to do with the spoof study) to ask for a copy of the research, saying that she was writing a book and that the findings backed up some of her own assertions. Nope, still can't stop laughing.
I think the satirical story is pure genius. I love the way it pokes fun at the very concept of a parenting style - I lost all sense of style when motherhood made me swap heels for slippers and city shorts for elasticated maternity waistbands. Some seven years later I still haven't recovered my personal sense of style, and frankly any remnant of style I do possess isn't being frittered on the way I rear my kids. As someone who makes her living writing about parenting there is very little I haven't seen or heard when it comes to the so-called wisdom of self-appointed parenting gurus - yet every single parent I know is less adhering to a carefully-defined parenting ‘style' and more flying by the seat of their pants and hoping for the best and minimal long-term damage. I reckon this study, no matter how farcical it was supposed to be, is one of the most accurate and insightful bits of parenting wisdom I have ever read.
Which, incidentally, might be why I must announce that I won't be blogging for In The Powder Room as Working At Home anymore - maybe the powers that be have sussed that I might not actually be the best authority to write about juggling kids with your career after all?! But from now on you'll find me in Home Time ... see you there!
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Comments (3)
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Sun Nov 6, 2011 - 3:49 pm
Ha, Brilliant. Off to have a browse at The Onion, head line which caught my eye is "Cute 8-Year-Old Starting To Realize How Much Better She Is Than Ugly Girls"... :DReply -
1 reply, Last reply by Heidi_Scrimgeour on Sat Nov 12, 2011 at 10:52 pm
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