As a food psychologist, I have spent my career working out how to get children to eat vegetables when they say they don’t want to and have boiled it down to three rules – be a good role model, control their environment and say the right things.
Parents now seem to have much more on their plates than just leftover vegetables. Last week, we heard about the “lost generation” of young adults (NEETS) who are neither in work nor education and how “social media is as bad as smoking” for young people, creating an addiction to scrolling and constant comparisons to unrealistic ideals.
In our rapidly changing world and challenging economy, parents now have to manage school absenteeism, endless screen time, mental health problems, poor self-esteem, children who never leave home, struggle to work and an inability to “just do it”.
In part, this is clearly due to so many factors beyond their control – from the pandemic to smartphones and now AI, and the rise in neurodiversity. But parents themselves have played a role in it, too. In the new culture of “gentle parenting”, they have become increasingly conflict-avoidant, fearful of causing trauma and taking the path of least resistance. Plus, parents want to be liked and even their child’s friend.
I remember being at a barbecue as a group of mothers listened supportively while our friend complained about a letter from the council about her son, who kept missing school. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked, “send him in when he says his tummy hurts.” We all made sympathetic noises, but silently said “yes”.
I also watched on for years as a friend’s son missed 70 per cent of secondary school due to a variety of random health conditions that left him without qualifications and out of the workforce. And I know of several young adults who have very little on their CV and will now struggle to compete with those who are younger and have done a lot more, but whose parents still pay for a car, holidays, their beer and sometimes even weed.
Parenting is hard, but as with vegetables, perhaps my three rules can also help with the bigger problems facing parents of today.
Be a good role model
If you are on your phone, they will be on theirs. If you double screen and are never properly present, this will become their norm too and if you give them screens in public just to get a bit of peace then it will become much harder to take them off them later on. So, be seen putting your phone away, be seen doing (and enjoying) your job, be seen being useful in the world and be seen getting up and getting out into the world. Children will always copy us and that way they will copy us doing what we want them to do.
Control their environment
It might not feel like it sometimes, but you are still the boss who pays the bills, has the car and does the shopping. So, control the home environment with clear rules from as early as you possibly can – no phones at the table, no computers in bedrooms, limit screen time and give them a safe space from which to study or apply for jobs.
Say the right things
We all have scripts in our heads about who we are and how we see the world and most of these come from our parents. So, if we say “school is boring”, “teachers are overpaid and useless” and “how dare they tell you off”, our children will think school is pointless and stop going in. If we moan about work and say “I hate my job”, “bring on the holidays” and “I can’t wait to retire”, they will think work is dull and never aspire to get any more from a job. And if we collude with them and say “let’s bunk off and go to the seaside” or “it’s so lovely having you at home with me, I get bored on my own”, don’t be surprised when they are still there in years to come.
We need to fill our children’s heads with positive scripts. Saying “Did you have fun at school?”, “Was it nice seeing your friends?” or “I feel like I’ve really achieved something today” can all emphasise the softer benefits of both education and work, making it much more likely that they will get up and go in even when they don’t feel like it. And don’t overplay the narrative that it is all so much harder now due to Covid, mental health and so on. These things might be true, but there’s a strong chance that this narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and, as a result, it does indeed all become a lot harder than it ever needed to be, just because we expect it to be.
Mostly, I find these three rules work – head-to-head confrontations are rarely needed if parents set the scene for a child who wants to go to school, wants to work and simply wants to engage in the world.
But sometimes tough parenting is needed. Sometimes there will be crunch points that need to be tackled. And that’s when we need to throw the need to be liked out the window and face the conflict now rather than later, when it will be even harder to manage. I will never be proud of shouting “My life is f**ing s**t” after struggling to get my kids into the car for the school run. But it’s far better to have a battle over getting a younger child to school before they are so behind with their schoolwork that the very idea of school makes them feel ashamed and their friends have got used to them not being there. It’s far easier to have a screen time argument when they still want to please you than when their teenage friends are so much more important than you. And it’s far better to push them into getting a job and paying at least some rent, when you pay for their phone, their clothes and hobbies and still have some bargaining power.
If you’re parenting adult children, and worry it’s too late for those battles, you should still have them – as now is always better than the future. Expect to be out of favour for a while until they can see the benefits of what you have been trying to do. And remember, most battles are not childhood trauma, just normal, healthy obstacles that need to be managed to make us and them more resilient in the future.
We can’t always be liked by our children, home can’t always be peaceful and conflict can’t always be avoided. But using these three rules can help set the scene for a child who aspires to do well and move away into their adult life.