Parenting isn’t about the parent (Case study 2): The zen of ’za

As your daughter gets older, an increasing amount of socialization will obviously come from outside your home. Many of these interactions will elicit positive responses, some neutral and a few downright unacceptable. In this multi-article conversation (see sidebar), I’ll be writing about the unacceptable because sometimes, parents are the worst part of parenting.

 

Pizza lunches are a quick and easy way to raise money for a school. With students chipping in a buck a slice, it’s simple to coordinate. Kids love it. Caretakers love the easy clean up. Parents love having to prepare one fewer lunch during the week for their child. And the school loves it as it makes a ton of money over the course of the year. That is unless it doesn’t happen.

A group of parents at my daughter’s school felt that pizzas didn’t provide enough dietary nutrition for their own children. So instead of opting out and packing a lunch as an alternative or to supplement the slice with homemade goodness, this group decided to rail against the effort and convinced the school not hold the weekly event altogether. These parents also felt that pizzas were a distraction and they didn’t want their child to be pressured into something or be left out of it either.  Depending on your perspective, there are arguments on both sides and the parent group was polarized. After months of unproductive discussions, the compromise was to change the weekly pizza lunch to once every four or six weeks. Everyone was unhappy, especially the kids.

Are some parents really making sound decisions for their children or are they making personal decisions through their children? It’s better to teach children the fine art between allowing others to follow their own path (which will be different from their own) and preventing others from following their own path (because they are different from their own).

I’m all for safety of children. That is why her school has strict standards for allergen controls. I’m all for improving the dietary health of all children. That is why her school has a healthy fresh fruit and snack program, morning and afternoon, free to all the kids. But I believe some in this parent community are playing tug of war over a fine line. This eternal balancing act between the good for the many versus the good for the one has, for some parents, become personal. And this is the focus of this article. Are some parents really making sound decisions for their children or are they making personal decisions through their children?

Kids need protection from things they don’t know and we make decisions on their behalf all the time. But overdoing it, especially for older children, will result in them being unprepared for normal and acceptance risks in the real world. These youngsters will not know how to response to problems because their parents have preemptively removed many of the choices and distractions from their kid’s view. At best, these children’s progress will be delayed; at worst, they could find themselves immobilized by real hazards.

Humans are social animals. We all live in tribes, communities, cities and other collective.  Living in the West, I totally advocate for personal choice. But that expression cannot be at the expense of the collective good. It’s better to teach children the fine art between allowing others to follow their own path (which will be different from their own) and preventing others from following their own path (because they are different from their own). A parent denying the choice of pizza may do more psychological harm to their child than can ever be made up by dietary benefit. It teaches a child that in asserting her will (it’s really the parent’s will), others will need to yield and the opportunity to teach self-control and compromise is lost. In the long run, psychologists agree that with repeated occurrences, parents can wind up raising a person with narcissistic personality.

At the end of the day, it’s just a slice of pizza. In fact, as pizzas are usually made and eaten within the hour–it’s actually a good source of fresh proteins, carbs and fats. And it comes in all sorts of vegan and non-gluten varieties. Kids eat worse things. To add humor to this topic, I’ve never heard of a nation-wide pizza recall. But I have heard of recalls for fruits and vegetables due to E. coli contamination. Funny that!