Call It “Intentional Parenting”
Using a Developmental Lens to Look at Parenting Today
In the early days of a much-wanted pregnancy in the 1970s, I experienced cramping and bleeding and rushed to the hospital, where I was admitted and directed to a multi-bed ward filled with other women.
After what felt like an interminable wait, a doctor came to the door and shouted over the noise, “Who IS the incompetent cervix?”
I didn’t raise my hand because I’d never heard those words before but it turned out that I was the pregnant woman he was looking for. Subsequent exams revealed that my cervix was not at fault—that my pregnancy problems had another cause.
That story stays with me because it was a fitting introduction to parenthood. Here I was doing absolutely everything I could possibly do to have a healthy pregnancy, yet there was something about me that the medical profession was seeing as “incompetent.” Despite the sunny rhetoric about society valuing parents, I’ve found it can be a blame-game.
Over the years that I’ve been a parent and grandparent and have been studying these issues, there’ve been many words to describe parenting that feel similarly judgmental. Most recently, I respond that way to “intensive parenting,” a term that emerged in the late 1990s and has gained currency.
Have you heard of it? I asked my daughter and she hadn’t.
This term was introduced as the ideology of “intensive mothering” in a 1996 book by Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Mothering and is now seen as the most dominant form of parenting. In a comprehensive review of the research on parenthood and well-being over the past decade, sociologists Kei Nomaguchi and Melissa Milkie summarize its characteristics:
It is a child-centered approach, fueled by research on brain development, where parents strive to be sensitive and responsive to their children’s needs.
As such, it requires a great deal of parents’ time, their emotional and financial commitments, and their involvement.
The ideology also makes parents feel very personally, even solely responsible for their children’s well-being.
Parents feel so responsible because in in the U.S., there are few supports for them, as Melissa Milkie explains:
Rising economic inequalities and competition for good jobs also fuel parents’ concerns about safeguarding their children’s futures. Of course, they want their children to succeed in all aspects of life—to have interesting work, loving partners and happiness. But many of the social supports to make parenting easier in guiding children toward those lives—and to make their children’s pathways smoother as they grow into adulthood—are lacking in the U.S.
Discussions about the form of parenting, particularly its downsides, have been sparked by the recent release of the Surgeon General’s Advisory, Parents Under Pressure. This report shares the alarming 2023 findings from the American Psychological Association that 41% of parents report that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% report that their stress is completely overwhelming. That’s almost twice as high as other adults, 20% and 26%, respectively.
Although intensive parenting is an apt description of current trends in parenting, I feel strongly that we should use a different term to describe it. Those studying and those publicly commenting on parenthood today should recognize that parents are doing the hard work of raising the next generation without a lot of support and should think about what outside factors can make parents be and be seen as intentional rather than intensive. That, in fact, is the dominant theme today. Parents care so much.
We Need a Refocus
First, as I’ve said, intensive parenting can feel like a shaming/blaming term. That was my daughter’s first reaction. When words that are used for good reasons in academic circles come into popular parlance, they can have unintended consequences.
Second, the concept of intensive parenting includes aspects that are good for parents and kids and those that are not. On the good side, being warm and responsive and using everyday moments to spark children’s curiosity and learning are good for both. On the negative side, the societal pressure to feel as we have to be always on, always sparking learning moments, always involved, and fully responsible for everything that happens to our kids (parental determinism) isn’t good for either children or adults.
The third, main and most important reason I want to replace this term is that it neglects parental development. It would be like looking at infants who cry when strangers approach and criticizing them for being crybabies when stranger anxiety is a normal part of learning whom babies can and can’t trust. It would be like looking at toddlers asserting “no, no, no” and criticizing these young children for being defiant when saying no is a normal part of learning what they can and can’t control.
I discovered that parents also go through a normal process of learning and development when I wrote and published The Six Stages of Parenthood in the 1980s and I have seen the world through a parental development lens ever since. As they say, once you know something, you can’t unknow it.
Here are a few examples of how we can view the characteristics often described as intensive parenting in a new, developmental light and understand the tasks that emerge with each stage.
The Image-Making Stage (Expectant Parenthood)
We can criticize parents of young children for wanting to be perfect—as sometimes happens in discussions of intensive parenting among educators—but four decades ago, I found that expectant and new parents wanted to be perfect then too, however they defined perfection—whether it’s being different from their own parents or emulating them or others they admire.
During the time when we are expecting children, we try on images of the kind of parents we want to be. That’s the main task of this stage.
The Nurturing Stage (the Infant and Toddler Years)
Soon, the realities of life intrude, sometimes even before having children. Pregnancy or childbirth isn’t what parents expected; being a parent doesn’t fit that hazy image of throwing a ball in the backyard with kids; or one’s children may not be what parents expected either.
Here, the task—as it is throughout parenthood—is reconciling our ideal images with reality. This provides an opportunity to either live up to an expectation if it’s realistic or to change an expectation if it’s unrealistic. These are the moments when the most significant parental growth occurs!
During this stage, parents' expectations involve defining their new selves as the parent of this particular child, nurturing that child, and nurturing themselves by finding supportive people and avoiding those who are negative.
Implicit in the discussions of intensive parenting are concerns about forfeiting self-care for child-care, an issue I also heard a lot about four decades ago too.
Implicitly, we may also lean too heavily on the countless experts who surround us today, whether online, on podcasts, or in parenting courses. While circumstances have changed, I found that there were plenty of in-your-face, judgmental parent advisors four decades ago, be they pediatricians, relatives, or friends. Parents told me they would often walk in another direction, avoiding the "I'm-better-than-you-are" parents and their seemingly superior children. Today, it might mean turning off social media, while yesterday it was walking away, but the underlying task remains the same.
The Authority Stage (Toddler and Preschool Years)
As soon as children start saying “no, no, no,” parents have to learn how to respond, to figure out what kind of authority they want to be. Professionals then and now can be judgmental of parents as they take their first shaky steps in figuring this out, judgmental as parents inevitably make, then break some of their own rules or let their children momentarily rule the roost, judgmental as parents try to figure out their own style of discipline. This is a task every parent faces, then and now, and those of us who work with parents need to understand that parents are figuring out how to be the parent, just as children are figuring out what they can and can’t control.
The Interdependence Stage (Adolescent Years)
For the sake of brevity, I will skip the Interpretative Stage (Elementary School Years) to focus on a task that runs throughout parenthood but reaches its apex in adolescence: forming a new relationship with one's soon-to-be adult child. This involves determining the appropriate level of involvement in our children's lives.
Similar to the issue of discipline, our initial steps in this area may be faltering. Professionals may criticize parents who solve problems for their children rather than helping them develop the skills to solve problems themselves (a parenting style known as autonomy-supportive parenting). However, this is a natural part of parental development.
Moving from Intensive Parenting to Intentional Parenting
One of the hallmarks of parenting today is just how much parents care. I think we should focus more on that as well as what an incredible learning experience parenting is. Let’s also focus on the developmental tasks parents face and give them support. Perhaps that will help reduce the number of parents who feel so stressed out most days that they cannot function and as well as the number who feel their stress is completely overwhelming.
What do we call this new approach? I would suggest we call it “intentional parenting.” In our research, we’ve found that the best early childhood teachers/providers, like the best parents, are intentional about what they are doing. That means making lots of mistakes and learning from them, but as I first learned years ago and continue to see, parenthood gives us the opportunity to grow and learn more than almost any other experience in life.