Amy Webb
recently got more attention for her parenting practice than most of us usually
want. Webb is a columnist on the online
magazine Slate. In her recent article, she shares one of the
strategies she employs to raise her child.
The name of the article says it all: “I Measure Every Single Thing My
Child Does, And I track it on spreadsheets. Really - every single thing. Even
every poop. And it makes me a better parent.”
And she
seems to be serious about it. According
to the article, she is a numbers person who analyzes data for a living. So when she learned that she was pregnant,
she started tracking things like food intake, weight gain, and activity
level. After her child was born and
started losing weight, she began collecting data on her baby. One thing led to another, and now she tracks
just about everything her child (now a toddler) does.
As you
might guess, this kind of practice has not been well received by many people –
starting with her child’s pediatrician.
The vast majority of online responses to the article were very
negative. But Webb thinks that by
attending to her daughter this closely and tracking how she responds in every
situation, she is in a better position to determine what will help her child
grow and develop.
Is she
wrong? This parenting strategy is
clearly unconventional. (Pause for those
who marvel at the enormity of this understatement.) Perhaps the Webbs can manage to keep records
of their daughter’s every move and still be the kind of parents she needs. I’ve been around long enough to know that
some things that I would have thought were impossible can actually work, even
things that run counter to all the research data. I hope for the Webb family that this is true.
Recent
research on helicopter parenting doesn’t bode well for children of
over-involved parents. A cursory review
of recent articles reveals that as these children become adults, they can be
less satisfied, less autonomous, less competent and less successful in relationships
than their peers.
This
approach is not for me. I’m not good
with such details. I am sure most of us
would find Webb’s strategy burdensome, impersonal, and antiseptic. Where is the joy? Where are the time-honored traditions? Where is the magic? Of course, part of her point is that it’s not
magic, it’s cause and effect. And to a
certain extent she is probably right about that. We almost certainly don’t know enough about
such cause-and-effect relationships, but someday we may. It’s possible that if this happens, Webb may
seem more like a pioneer than a helicopter mom on steroids.
There’s so
much we don’t know about this situation.
Webb’s article doesn’t tell us what makes her daughter laugh or cry, or
what they do for fun on Saturday afternoons, or what drives the parents up a
wall. I’d like to be a fly on their wall; maybe Webb’s interactions
with her daughter aren’t that different from what we see with most parents and
children. I heard her on the radio, and
she sounds like a mother who loves her daughter; that’s a good starting point.
I hope
Webb’s daughter learns that her parents love her and are always in her
corner. I hope her parents play with
her, sing her songs at bedtime, and dry her tears when she cries. I hope she learns that there are rules that
must be followed, that at times she must control her behavior, and that she
can’t always have everything she wants.
I hope they teach her to share, and to be a humble winner and a gracious
loser. I hope she develops the
self-confidence that comes from life’s successes and failures, and from
learning that she can have an impact on her world. I hope she learns that all children deserve
the same opportunities. If these things
happen, then I think her parents did their job – spreadsheets or no
spreadsheets.
