Parents, go home!(PARTING THOUGHTS) (parental support and separation anxiety) (Critical essay)

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.

IN THE 1970s, MY BROTHERS played soccer. For the rest of the family, this involved dropping them off and picking them up at the sports fields. On occasion, families attended the games, which were organized loosely and, apparently, tremendous fun. If someone had suggested to my mother that she ought to stay and watch every practice, what would she have done with the other three or four or five of us, depending upon the year? No one assumed parents should be at practices. By the late 1980s, the other gymnastic morns were mildly scandalized at my habit of dropping off my daughter at practice and heading home to do chores. Two decades later, the notion that parents and siblings do not belong at every practice is a revolutionary and upsetting proposition. I would encourage parents to reconsider their commitment to being present for every practice, whatever the sport, for several very important reasons.

Children must be free to make mistakes in order to improve. A child under the watchful eye of an encouraging and critical parent, who will do extracurricular coaching all the way home, unless talking into a cell phone, is not free to test his or her limits, take risks, and enjoy the camaraderie of teammates. Besides, youngsters should not believe that everything they do is worthy of a parent's undivided attention. Elevating each moment to a performance deserving of an audience objectifies the child in one sense and, in another, feeds an innate, infantile egotism. This fosters the growth of a narcissism that may become paralyzing shyness or insatiable attention-seeking. Just go home, and let your child mess up, succeed spectacularly, goof off, be benched, and otherwise enjoy practice without being subjected to your endless scrutiny.

Parents and children are not one and the same. The process of differentiation, in which the child becomes increasingly independent and self-sufficient, begins early. Healthy two-year-olds manifest this as "No!" Toddlers know enough to resist being someone's puppet. It is unclear how a small child willing to assert individuality to comical levels (many of us have pulled blue-lipped kids out of a pool while they wailed, "B-b-b-b-b-but I'm n-n-n-not c-c-c-c-c-c-c-cold!"), evolves into an adult whose separation anxiety is so great that he or she cannot bear to mn to the grocery store while little Brooklyn does laps around the soccer field with her teammates. Besides feeding the egotism of the child, this kind of clinging...