Two speed parenting: The really great Divide

I watched the brilliant Australian film Blessed this week. If you haven’t seen it, it is by the writer of the hit movie Lantana, and stars Frances O’Connor, Miranda Otto and Deborah Lee Furness. Blessed is not an easy film to watch – it is  a confronting and at times, disturbing tale of mothers and children, love and loss and finding your way home. The difficulties of being a parent and the damage done to children by what happens at home is central to the story. But there still is that redeeming sense that, even when misguided or negligent, these mothers love their children very much.

Two days after viewing this film, I received my regular child and women’s health medical updates by email. They are  a summary of the latest research findings both in Australia and overseas and I find them very interesting to scan and drill down when a topic of interest appears. (You can subscribe for free at Talk Medical). The latest child’s newsletter included the findings that junk food is being served to babies by the majority of Australian parents, before they are one year of age. In a recent Perth study of 587 parents, some parents had already served fruit juice, ice cream and cake to their babies by the time they were 4 weeks of age and over 78% had eaten hot chips, 91% biscuits and cakes and 68% ice cream before their first birthday. This is despite the World Health Organisation recommending breast milk exclusively until babies are 6 months old and then healthy vegetable, cereal and fruit meals gradually added to their diet.

According to medical research by the CSIRO, children’s diet patterns in the first 2 years are almost identical to what you see when the child is 8, as tastes for salt, sugar and fat are formed very early. Therefore it should not seem surprising that they also found that 20% of Australian toddlers are now overweight or obese.

In direct contrast to this research, the Sydney Morning Herald had a feature story on Saturday entitled ” The parenting project” which asserted that today’s “parents may be going too far in their ambition to give their child the perfect upbringing” (Stevenson, Sept 18).  This article highlighted that more educated parents spend greater amounts of time with their children, than those less educated, and unlike their baby boomer parents, both Mums and Dad’s are very child and family focussed. They happily spend large amounts of their spare time and money running after their children as they participate in sport, music and other extra curricular activities.

Clearly, like our two speed economy (high speed for mining, low speed for tourism and housing construction) parents sit on a very long continuum. At one end, the overly concerned, too anxious or nervous parents, seeking to do everything by the book and hold their children’s hands though out the entire childhood process and at the other end the permissive, arguably negligent parent who set no boundaries with respect to diet, TV and video viewing, gaming and computer use and access to alcohol and drugs.  Most parents don’t sit at either extremes but there are quite a few inhabiting those spectrums.

As children become teenagers the differences in parenting is even more apparent. In some homes, there is complicit acceptance of teenagers early participation in drinking and sex and even experimentation with drugs, with the attitude that “if it is done in the home, at least they will be safe”. What these parents don’t seem to get is that if it is being done at home with a quasi blessing by Mum and Dad, then it is more than likely to be happening elsewhere as well. And it completely ignores all the research about healthy brain development, alcohol and drug dependency and the need for parents to set clear rules and boundaries, not just seek to be popular and “cool”.

After the cancellation of Justin Bieber’s appearance at the now infamous Sydney Harbourside concert for Ch 7′s Sunrise programme, one of the reported concerns were the number of young girls (12-14 yr olds) who were dropped off, by their parents, in the middle of the night, with no planned supervision. It was also reported that of the few parents who did hang around, they were mostly narcissistic Mum’s who were even more into the whole “Bieber” scene than their daughters.

Were styles, values and methods of parenting ever so different across the broader Australian community as they are now? Is this divide now about as wide as it can get?