Woman's Hour - Parenting: Snowplough Parents

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

We’ve heard of the helicopter mum. Now here comes the snowplough. That’s the term used to describe an overprotective parent who clears anything in their path in order to ensure their child’s success. But what does this behaviour do to a child? Jenni is joined by Rebecca Glover, Principal of Surbiton High School who has created a TedX Talk ‘Do Snowplough parents remove true grit?’ and Dr Angharad Rudkin, a child psychologist.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to today's podcast for parents. Now we've all heard of the helicopter parent, the one who constantly hovers over the children to make sure they're doing the right thing at all times. Well, there's a new name for a slightly different kind of attentive mother or father. The snowplough makes it his or her business to make sure all obstacles are cleared from the path of their child to make sure nothing blocks their route to a successful future. Well, what impact does that kind of constant attention have on the child? Dr. Angharad Rudkin is a child psychologist. Rebecca Glover is the principal of Surbiton High School whose TEDx talk is called Do Snowplough Parents Remove

True Grit? Rebecca, as a teacher, what examples of the snowplough parent have you come across? Yes, good morning. There are a number of examples that I've experienced over my 30 years. More recently, I suppose, the introduction of a homework app in schools allows pupils, but more importantly here, parents to be able to see homeworks as they are set by the teacher in any school day. And we more recently had a year nine parent came to see me to say that the app was actually distracting her from her working day because she was finding herself starting her daughter's homeworks as they appeared and were set during the day and she was researching historical data and creating graphs and she'd even built a volcano cake for her daughter's geography project

before her daughter had even come home from school so we're finding that many parents are doing their children's homeworks for them. But hasn't that always happened and and that's just a parent trying to be helpful? I think parents have always supported their children in their homework but I think we have moved to a culture where parents are so afraid of their children failing or not getting the top marks that they are intervening to a much larger extent than they have done in the past, to the extent that they are completing their children's homeworks. And if not completing, they're checking their homeworks.

And you can see as a teacher when a parent has actually added a comma or an exclamation mark or put speech marks into a piece of English. So certainly it's happening to a greater extent than it ever has done in the past. And what impact does it have on the child? When a parent behaves like this, they must think, oh, that's great, mum's done all the research. Yes, they can think that's great. But actually what they're not building up is resilience. So resilience, we know for a fact, they're not building up is resilience. So resilience,

we know for a fact, can only be built up through experience. You can't teach it. You can't read about it. And if you don't go through tricky times as a child, you never find out that, A, things are never as bad as you think they might be. B, that you can cope with them, but also C, that you can take responsibility not only for your own mistakes, so I will learn from my mistakes, but also genuinely celebrating your own success. If your mum's made the volcano cake and that gets, you know, a great gold star at school, you can sit there with a smile on your face as an eight-year-old child, but you might think, actually, that wasn't my success and that's not me and I don't think I could have done that myself. So actually, yes, it's helpful in the short term for a child to think, brilliant, parents will do that.

But in the longer term, there are some really, really significant difficulties that may emerge if your parent has snow plowed the way through. Rebecca, I know you've been rather impressed by an aspect of Japanese education. Why? Yes. So in Japan, it would appear that they put their children into what is known as the learning pit almost 50% of the time and research of maths shows that actually if you make something very difficult for a child and put them into the learning pit so that they can experience failure through learning, actually they build up that resilience to be able to tackle problems when they are very difficult. So in Japan, they will set them maths questions or English questions where they have to work individually or as a group to solve problems that are very, very difficult to solve. So they get used to finding things hard and they get used to building up that immunity, if you like, to failure.

And interestingly, that's seen only 1% of the time in English classrooms and in American classrooms. And I think that's because we are culturally trained to jump in and support our children and show them the way so we don't allow them the same opportunities to struggle. Does that feel a little bit brutal to you, Angharad, that you stick them in a room and give them things that are too difficult for them to do? Well, I think even by asking that question, it shows, doesn't it, how far away we've moved from allowing our children to experience the full richness of life, that we are so not wanting them to feel distress or disappointment, that we just protect them from all of those things. And I think of parenting as almost like growing a plant,

that all you can do is provide optimal conditions. For a plant, you'll need water, sunlight, good soil. As a parent, you provide the optimal context of warmth, love, security, a lovely strong pair of arms to hug them when they're having a difficult time. But beyond that, they've got to live their own life. You cannot grow the plant. You cannot create your child's life. You've got to let them unfold naturally. But you know, Rebecca, as exams and testing, testing, testing has become so much a feature of the education system, it's hardly surprising that some parents think they have to snowplough,

they have to provide a tutor to help with exams what basically is wrong with that? I think you're absolutely right I think our education system with its reliance on getting good grades has certainly fuelled the opportunity for parents to become snowplough parents. I don't think there's a great deal wrong with parents supporting their children because that's absolutely what a good parent should do is support their children to learn and to grow but we're finding in schools that the first thing that a child will fail at is their driving test because we're not allowing them sufficient opportunities to fail and therefore they're not building that resilience so that when they do fail later in life they're failing it's a disastrous fail as opposed to having those small failures as they move through from childhood to becoming an adult.

And what sort of experiences have children come to you with? My mum and dad expect too much. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'll get parents, for example, especially around GCSE and A-level time they'll get in touch with me in extreme circumstances wanting an ADHD diagnosis so they can get medication for their child because they've heard it helps them to concentrate more and this is what everybody else is doing but more often than not it will just be a very big gap between what parents want for their child and what a child wants so a child might want to learn to play the guitar and the parents saying you need to play violin because that's what's going to get you into university. So all

along it's about helping parents to understand what is it that their child wants as opposed to what do they want as parents. But also parenting involves having your child distressed at times. We cannot protect them from feeling distressed and by doing that very thing they end up being adults who have no ability to tolerate disappointment, sadness, worry. So how should an involved parent behave, Rebecca? So what we're advocating is trampoline parenting. So allowing your child... There are all kinds of new terms, aren't there, for these things.

So trampoline parents, what do they do jump up and down so allowing your child opportunities to fail but being there to jump high but to fail but supporting them as they fall back down to the ground in much the same way as you jump on a trampoline so providing opportunities to experience many different things but being there to support them if they do fail and that goes for parents and schools as well. So providing opportunities in schools and at home for parents and children to have those small failures so that they build up that resistance and that ability when they move out into adult life to have that grit

and resilience to face adult life. And how do you make the trampolining pair? I mean, absolutely. Maybe be a snow shovel rather than a snow plough. You know, you can take away a little bit, as we all want to, to sort of ease the way for our children, but don't take away all of the bumps in the road because they need those bumps in the road to learn how to live. I was talking to Dr Angharad Rudkin and Rebecca

Glover. And of course, we'd like to hear from you. If you're parents and you'd like us to discuss something, just get in touch. You can email us or you can tweet. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.