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Even if as a child, neither of your parents are actively engaged with you throughout the day - if they have created a healthy and controlled, calm and construct

Even if as a child, neither of your parents are actively engaged with you throughout the day - if they have created a healthy and controlled, calm and constructive environment with positive influences in the parts of the home accessible to you, and leave you to explore that environment, they are performing an important parental duty. What your article focuses on is time actively spent engaged with the child. I would argue that there is a pressure for today's working parents to concentrate their parental influence in what little window of time their conscious children are actually in their vicinity. This results in what ostensibly appears to be more time spent parenting, viewed through the lens of the article. Active engagement with children is a small fraction of the role a parent plays. If you focus on measuring this as some kind of metric representing quantity of parenting, you're missing the majority of what actually matters. What I often see is parents these days trying to be pals with their kids. That's not parenting, and frequently they are at a total loss of how to actually discipline their children when things go awry because they've positioned themselves so poorly as some kind of peer. When your kids spend most of their time in environments outside of your control, then the little time you all share together is spent with a strong bias towards being fun and happy together like buddies because the window of opportunity to actively maintain that relationship is so abbreviated, you're not doing much parenting.

astura 8y ago
>What I often see is parents these days trying to be pals with their kids. That's not parenting, and frequently they are at a total loss of how to actually discipline their children when things go awry because they've positioned themselves so poorly as some kind of peer. I agree, and I agree that's a huge issue, but it has absolutely ZERO to do with "mom and dad, if they're even in the same household, often both work full-time jobs." Trying to be buddies/peers with your kids is a generational thing, not a working parent thing. The rate of stay at home mothers has been on the rise since the 90s anyway. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-d... >When your kids spend most of their time in environments outside of your control, then the little time you all share together is spent with a strong bias towards being fun and happy together like buddies because the window of opportunity to actively maintain that relationship is so abbreviated, you're not doing much parenting. Oh, come on, that's total and complete nonsense. The people I know who try to be buddies with their kids the most are stay at home parents. Most of the stay at home parents I know become obsessed with pleasing their children. Then the working parent comes home to bratty children and it destroys the marriage. That's just my experience, but its true that parents whose household duties are performed by only one person are much more likely to divorce. Of course, it should be no surprise that the sheer quantity of time you spend with your children doesn't matter, quality trumps quantity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/making-time-for-kids-study-says-quality-trumps-quantity/2015/03/28/10813192-d378-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/making-time-for-kids-st... https://qz.com/717960/the-toxic-myth-that-working-moms-fail-their-kids-is-fueled-by-decades-old-bad-science/ https://qz.com/717960/the-toxic-myth-that-working-moms-fail-... Lets not forget that children do better as adults when their moms work https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/kids-benefit-from-having-a-working-mom https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/kids-benefit-from-having-a-workin... http://www.businessinsider.com/benefits-working-moms-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/benefits-working-moms-2011-7 Not only that, but its extremely disingenuous to say that environments that are physically away from you "out of your control." Of course that isn't true, you have a huge amount of control over the places you bring your children. You can't control 100% of what happens when you are physically present with your children anyways. If you're going around trying to micromanage your kids lives you've already failed.

astura 8y ago

>What I often see is parents these days trying to be pals with their kids. That's not parenting, and frequently they are at a total loss of how to actually discipline their children when things go awry because they've positioned themselves so poorly as some kind of peer. I agree, and I agree that's a huge issue, but it has absolutely ZERO to do with "mom and dad, if they're even in the same household, often both work full-time jobs." Trying to be buddies/peers with your kids is a generational thing, not a working parent thing. The rate of stay at home mothers has been on the rise since the 90s anyway. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-d... >When your kids spend most of their time in environments outside of your control, then the little time you all share together is spent with a strong bias towards being fun and happy together like buddies because the window of opportunity to actively maintain that relationship is so abbreviated, you're not doing much parenting. Oh, come on, that's total and complete nonsense. The people I know who try to be buddies with their kids the most are stay at home parents. Most of the stay at home parents I know become obsessed with pleasing their children. Then the working parent comes home to bratty children and it destroys the marriage. That's just my experience, but its true that parents whose household duties are performed by only one person are much more likely to divorce. Of course, it should be no surprise that the sheer quantity of time you spend with your children doesn't matter, quality trumps quantity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/making-time-for-kids-study-says-quality-trumps-quantity/2015/03/28/10813192-d378-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/making-time-for-kids-st... https://qz.com/717960/the-toxic-myth-that-working-moms-fail-their-kids-is-fueled-by-decades-old-bad-science/ https://qz.com/717960/the-toxic-myth-that-working-moms-fail-... Lets not forget that children do better as adults when their moms work https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/kids-benefit-from-having-a-working-mom https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/kids-benefit-from-having-a-workin... http://www.businessinsider.com/benefits-working-moms-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/benefits-working-moms-2011-7 Not only that, but its extremely disingenuous to say that environments that are physically away from you "out of your control." Of course that isn't true, you have a huge amount of control over the places you bring your children. You can't control 100% of what happens when you are physically present with your children anyways. If you're going around trying to micromanage your kids lives you've already failed.