Interesting post from Jan, linking the tendency to ignore the needs 
of babies (for fear of spoiling) to the tendency to hover 
protectively over even adult children, and I think your suggestion, 
Jan, that it's all 'about' the parent makes sense.

I speculate that the phenomenon of parents who are unable/unwilling 
to meet the needs of their tiny babies for comfort (or who do meet 
them, and feel they are doing something bad)  is also related to  the 
need for *control* and the unwillingness to 'surrender' to the *lack* 
of control, the *lack* of predicability, inherent in a newborn.

I too have frequent, distressed encounters with parents of babies a 
few days old, who are confounded and confuddled by their newborn's 
inablity to 'settle' and sleep for several hours in a crib, and it 
appears to be news to them that this is normal and healthy.

They think that ignoring the baby's needs will make them more 
'manageable' and in fact, this is correct - if you ignore a baby's 
needs he will stop expressing them (the need doesn't go away, of 
course).

Then as the child gets older, control shows itself in a difficulty in 
letting go - involvement with education becomes an entanglement with 
teachers and the school, and my university teacher friends tell me 
about parents who complain about the academic demands made on their 
19 and 20 year olds, and even the marks on assignments. I'd love to 
know if these helicopter parents were the same ones who ignored their 
babies' cries when they were newborns.

(I often speak to mothers whose own mothers seem to be powerful - who 
try to control their parenting, in a way that when my children were 
small I could never have tolerated from my own mother. I don't think 
the over-bearing grandparent is necessarily a new thing, though. )

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK

-- 
http://www.heatherwelford.co.uk

http://heatherwelford.posterous.com

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