The Bonsai Child, The Bonsai Student

During the term break I took some time to read Judith Locke’s The Bonsai Child, and The Bonsai Student. Both books are written to help parents navigate parenting and avoid inadvertently adopting practices that limit rather than extend their child’s potential, hence the reference to bonsai in both titles.

Early in both works, Dr Locke refers to the work and research of Diana Baumrind, Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin, on parenting styles, and the key factors that determine parenting styles. Their works argue that parental responsiveness, the tendency to be loving and responsive to their child’s needs, and parental demandingness, the tendency to use rules and consequences to demand responsible and age-appropriate behaviour, are the key factors which shape parenting.

And the best approach to parenting? “The best approach is a combination of high responsiveness and high demandingness. It has been shown by lots of research to be the ideal parenting method. It tends to be associated with improved wellbeing, resilience, sense of security and popularity in children.”

Parenting is an act of humility. No matter how much we know, we can’t know it all and we won’t always get it right. However, as Locke writes, “If you are a loving parent with reasonable expectations of your child’s behaviour, you will typically be getting it right”.

A key contention of Locke’s work is that we have moved into an era of ‘overparenting’, in other words, we have seen what is good, and then amped it up to the point where it isn’t helpful. In other words, it is possible to have too much of the good stuff. Some of us, as parents, may have moved beyond the good of high responsiveness and high demandingness to an approach of extreme responsiveness and extreme demandingness.In other words, you can have too much of a good thing, which shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who have reached for the next Tim Tam or put too much salt on our hot chips.

But what does extreme responsiveness mean? It means remaining child-centred beyond a child’s early life, as opposed to the child being simply part of the family. It means providing an extraordinary childhood of abundance (every child gets that toy so they never have to share). It means overfocusing on a child’s emotions which can, in turn lead to emotional hypersensitivity. It means always believing your child rather than understanding that not everything that they say will be true. It means befriending your child in a way that can stymie their development and independence over time, to say nothing of the ability to act as a parent.

And what about extreme demandingness? It means parents can put inordinate pressure on making children happy and successful which results in pressure on the child to be happy and successful. It manifests in the child feeling burdened by parental pressure to do well at school, to be popular, to be happy. These expectations become extreme when they outstrip a child’s capacity to deliver. This extreme demandingness moves beyond “do your best” to “be the best”. It is not helpful.

But what about low responsiveness, or low demandingness? It is, thankfully, relatively rare to have a parent with low responsiveness. Most parents do respond lovingly to their child’s needs. There are, however, parents who, from this position of high responsiveness, think that having low demands will be more helpful for their child, especially if that child faces difficulties in life, at school or in friendships.

As Locke puts it, this low demandingness manifests such that “Parents who demand too little of their child can prevent them becoming ready to do the tough things in life to get the good things in life. Parents’ actions to resolve their child’s issues mean the child doesn’t develop their own skills in facing issues, accepting the situation, or resolving their difficulties… Today many parents subscribe to the idea that they can give their child an ideal childhood through high parental effort and sacrifice…In doing this, some parents try so hard to ensure their child’s success and happiness that they limit their child’s potential to develop into confident, independent adults. This approach has resulted in the phenomenon I call the bonsai child.”

Schools are well placed, owing to their large sample size of parents and students, to provide a point of reference for parents if they are not sure whether they are demanding too much or too little of their children. We share the same goals and we continue to value working with parents and students so that those young people in our school, your children, our students, can develop the resilience, self-regulation, resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility that they need to go on to lead successful, engaging and fulfilling relationships and lives.