Families need to step back amid pressure to do more
By Laura Sessions Stepp

May 16 - It has become many a parent's mantra, a near-unanimous whine of the affluent who multitask on either coast: We are too busy. We aggressively pursue all the activities we think will bring us and our families happiness. Empowered by cell phones and Palm Pilots, we can drive our daughter to a travel-team soccer match two hours away, reassure our boss we will meet our 6 p.m. deadline and confirm our doctor's appointment, all at once. So why aren't we satisfied?

TWO NEW BOOKS suggest why. In the midst of all this running, their authors say, we haven't stopped long enough to figure out what things are truly important to us and how we can enjoy more of those things. As Katrina Kenison writes in "Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry" (Warner Books), "When we race through life we miss it."
Ominously, we may be shortchanging, even damaging, our children as we run, according to Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, authors of "Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?" (St. Martin's Press). "By the age of 18, 20 percent [of children] have suffered a major depression," they write. "Close to 9 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed with anxiety disorders. ... Should our goal be preparing our kids to get into the college of their choice or to live the life of their choice?"

Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist, and Wise, a journalist, are neighbors in Stamford, Conn., a wealthy suburb of Manhattan. They hatched the idea of a book after chatting one day about some of the parents they knew who were going to extremes in an attempt to raise perfect children. "Hyper-Parenting" is filled with examples: The 8-month-old girl whose nanny was instructed to follow a step-by-step video promising to enrich a baby's intellect; the 7-year-old girl whose week was filled with piano lessons, gymnastics, religious school, choir practice, ballet and horseback riding; the 13-year-old boy whose parents took him to a psychiatrist saying that he was too laid-back and needed to be more aggressive in order to succeed.
HEARTS AND MINDS Hyper-Parenting" traces the reasons why, in the authors' view, the current generation of parents is so driven. One reason is that we can afford to be. "We are the most well-off, most well-educated generation ever," says Rosenfeld, 54 and father of three. Past generations had enough to do providing food, adequate housing and decent schools. Fortunate parents today do not worry so much about physical resources so they've turned their attention to what used to be the domain of children themselves: their hearts and minds.
As well-informed as many of these parents are, they question their ability to parent well, according to Rosenfeld. This makes them even more hyper. "We don't trust ourselves, partly because there are all these experts telling us we can't," he says during an interview. Parents also feel competitive with other parents. "Who can hear the soft voice of reason in the midst of a stampede?" he asks.

Kenison's book provides that soft voice of reason. A former book editor in Manhattan, Kenison, 41, left the publishing world to work at home in a suburb of Boston when her first child, Henry, was born. She was moved to start writing "Mitten Strings for God" at her parents' home in Florida, while reading "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life" by Thomas Moore.
In that book, Moore suggests that finding joy in life begins by recollecting carefree feelings of childhood. Kenison, who lived in a small New England town for much of her youth, realized that she could do that easily enough. But what kind of memories would her two young sons have when they were in their forties?

MAKING SMALL SHIFTS Cutting back meant turning down invitations to parties and forgoing elaborate decorations on Easter eggs.

As she jotted down her thoughts over the next year - in between car pools, recitals and business trips - Kenison came to believe that change was possible by making "small shifts in thinking and behavior rather than full-scale self-improvement."
"Mitten Strings" suggests what some of those shifts might be, based on changes that she and her husband, Steve Lewers, a former publishing executive, have made. Among the first, obviously, is paring down the family schedule. For Kenison, that meant her boys didn't start playing organized baseball until this year when Henry turned 10. Henry and Jack, Henry's younger brother, made up their own teams in the back yard instead, inviting Lewers to play with them.
Cutting back also meant turning down invitations to parties, including an end-of-the-year party at Henry's school, when Kenison sensed that the boys needed more free time. And it meant forgoing elaborate decorations on Easter eggs when grocery store dye kits would suffice.

BUILDING IN SPACE The hues of any given day, Kenison writes, are made up of 'a lip-smacking goodnight "guppy kiss," ... a spoonful of maple syrup on snow... a conversation with a tiny speckled salamander ... "
Building space into the daily planner forced her boys to find ways to spend time by themselves. Kenison believes both are more self-reliant as a result. It also allowed her to relax so that she might savor what she calls dailiness, the moments "that arise unbidden in the course of any day - small, evanescent, scarcely worth noticing except for the fact that I am being offered, just for a second, a glimpse into another's soul." The hues of any given day, she writes, are made up of "a lip-smacking goodnight 'guppy kiss,' ... a spoonful of maple syrup on snow, served to me in bed ... a conversation with a tiny speckled salamander ... "
"Some days seem to offer their own quality of space and ease," she continues. "Other times I have to switch gears midway through - postponing the errands, canceling a play date, ordering pizza for dinner, skipping an evening meeting - so that I can pull my children out of the swift current of a day and guide them into a calm pool instead."

The pool often sucks them deep into one activity, such as reading "Charlotte's Web" several times instead of running through a summer book list.
During one such interlude, Kenison decided to crochet mitten strings for her boys' mittens - those threads that hold two mittens together, making them harder to lose. Jack cuddled up with her, finger-knitting a ball of blue yarn. It was moment of pure peace, she says, and provided the title of her book as well. Holding out one very long piece of yarn, Jack said, "I'm knitting a mitten string for God."

JUST LIVING 'If there's a single thing parents could do to protect their children, it would be to turn off the TV.'
- KATRINA KENISON

Kenison's family is not tempted to switch on the television during these quiet moments because for several years, the TV has remained off. In an interview, Kenison is emphatic about the benefits: "If there's a single thing parents could do to protect their children, it would be to turn off the TV," she says.
Her sons don't even think about it anymore, she writes in her book, relating a story about Henry's friend Jake who, on a visit, asked to watch television. He was astonished to be told no.
"No TV? How do you live?" he asked Henry.
"We just live," Henry replied.
Kenison and family also regularly eliminate all artificial noise in their home: tapes, compact discs, radios, and alarm clocks, in addition to television. With even a couple of machines whirring, "How easily the decibel levels rise!" she writes. "When adults and children have to compete with a sound track, everyone ends up shouting." That's not to say she doesn't listen to her Grateful Dead CD when baking a birthday cake. But every time she moves to flip on a switch she asks herself, "Do I want to exchange quiet for sound?"
Kenison's recipe for happiness calls for a healthy dose of self-control initially. But sometimes, Kenison says, parents must surrender control.

FINDING CHILD'S RHYTHM
One area in which they have trouble doing this is their children's intellectual growth, Kenison, Rosenfeld and Wise all say. Parents find it difficult to honor the pace at which their kids' minds grow. "They push and press on," Rosenfeld and Wise write. "If a preschooler knows her ABCs, shouldn't we get her to start reading? Once she masters simple words like C-A-T and R-U-N, why not step up to a basic book? And if she can handle that, well, maybe we should find an accelerated school for gifted children that ... "

Kenison tells a story on herself to illustrate the same point. Son Jack came to her with Dr. Seuss's "Fox in Socks," and announced that he could read the entire book. He then demonstrated his skills, haltingly. When he finished, a delighted Kenison exclaimed, "Now we can take you to the library to get you a couple of other books!" To which Jack responded, "No, I think I'm going to need to read 'Fox in Socks' for a few more months before going on."
Identifying a child's natural rhythm comes more easily when a parent is relaxed, these authors believe. Going on regular dates with a spouse, practicing yoga, meeting a buddy for tennis, are gifts to the family as well as to one's self.

WHOSE STANDARDS? 'Only when we stop long enough to figure out what we really care about ... can we create lives that are authentic expressions of our inner selves.'
- KATRINA KENISON

Mothers have a particularly difficult time carving out these hours for themselves, Kenison believes. "If there is an open minute in our day, we think there are five people we need to call. It's OK to be alone and not call," she says.
Kenison addresses her essays to mothers partly because she believes it is a mother's special vocation to "take care of the invisible" in a family: reading the same book three times to a child, giving a husband a back rub or explaining to two angry children how family members are expected to talk to each other. This is how she sees her role in her family.
Fulfilling that role doesn't always come easily, she admits. Many nights, after her boys are in bed, she sneaks back into her office. She also acknowledges that when her wires get wound tightly, her children sometimes suffer. In a remarkably honest chapter called Discipline, she recalls a school-day morning when Jack came downstairs late for breakfast after everyone else was finished. He refused to sit down or eat and in a moment of anger, she took up a spoon of oatmeal and held it at his mouth. He let out a scream; she placed one hand under his chin, another on top of his head and and clapped his mouth shut. He bit his cheek, drawing blood.
Her behavior didn't come out of nowhere. She faced a day that was packed full, as well as a night meeting and an important interview the following day. "On another day I might have led him out of his dawdling and whining before it had a chance to escalate," she writes.
Jack is the same child who once asked his mom, "Is it any fun being a parent?"
Good question, these three authors would say.
"At some point, we may begin to ask ourselves: Just whose standards am I living by, anyway?" Kenison concludes. "An advertiser's? A neighbor's? A parent's? A corporation's? A culture's? Only when we stop long enough to figure out what we really care about, and begin to make our choices accordingly, can we create lives that are authentic expressions of our inner selves."

© 2000 The Washington Post Company