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Parents should ignore their children more often
The case for ‘mindful underparenting’.
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Children learn not only from direct instruction but also from watching and modelling what other people around them do.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Darby Saxbe
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I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents – they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging – but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.
Parents in contemporary industrialised societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the centre of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time. We feel guilty when we have to drag our children along with us to take care of boring adult business.
