The hottest parenting article of the moment, “How To Land Your Kid In Therapy”, is in the July-August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, written by therapist and mother, Lori Gottlieb. The article, which has set the mommy blogs abuzz, and is sold out on newsstands, suggests that the current crop of parents are giving our kids too many choices, way too much praise and constant encouragement like “good job” for putting on their shirt, without balancing it with any criticism, even when deserved. We are, Gottlieb opines, guilty of being so attuned to their every need that we are actually raising a generation of unhappy twenty-somethings. In short, we’re screwing up our kids. Our kids are are so unhappy for reasons they don’t even know, it is driving them to Gottlieb’s office for therapy.

The article certainly makes some interesting observations, but I don’t endorse the solutions to this crisis of well-intentioned parental overabundance and obsession with our kids happiness bemoaned by the experts in the article. Have I done some of the things Gottlieb frowns upon? Of course! I’ve caught my baby before he fell off the slide. I’ve said “good job” when it wasn’t really. By giving our kids constant praise in the hopes they will never experience anxiety or failure, we are dooming them to anxiety and therapy, says Gottlieb. 

Not too long ago, I attended a lecture by one of the parenting gurus quoted in the article, bestselling writer, Dr. Wendy Mogul, author of “The Blessings Of A B Minus”. At the event which was held at The Center For Early Education, an elite Los Angeles private elementary school, Dr. Mogul advocated strongly for less parental micromanagement of our kids’ every move, their every choice and their every action. Her point was the same one she makes in the article, that “parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment.”

During the lecture, filled with 400 well-heeled parents, Dr. Mogul actually suggested that we let our elementary school age kids walk home alone. You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody, not one of us in that room—especially me-- is going to be that parent who will risk our child being kidnapped on the streets of LA, seen that night on American’s Most Wanted pleading for their return. That’s where Dr. Mogul lost me. Her observations about over-involved parents and over-scheduled kids are perfectly accurate. Her solutions to the problem, however, are not necessarily ones I endorse.

Few of the parents in the lecture room that evening seemed willing to embrace Dr. Mogul’s notion that there are blessings to be found when your kid brings home a B-minus.  Parents nodded politely, pretending to agree with her remarks. After the event, one of my friends said to me, “there isn’t one of us in that room who’d be happy if our kid brought home a B-minus.” She’s right. During Dr. Mogul’s lecture a parent, a colon-rectal surgeon, stood up and said he has a lot of trouble with medical residents (recent medical school graduates) who are not used to making mistakes. This, he said, is a new phenomenon. When these residents make a mistake or can’t do something correctly the first time—like insert a tube into a patient’s ass for a colonoscopy, they flip out.

In the upscale Los Angeles private school world I inhabit and write about, I see the type of parenting criticized (and slyly mocked) by the experts in the article. I see the kids who refuse to continue playing on a sports team because they aren’t the best athlete. I see parents bribing kids with food and toys to go out on the field to join their teammates in a soccer game. I’ve seen the kid who clings to the tree in an effort to avoid football practice. I was hit with a full water bottle, thrown by a kid, who was aiming at his mom but hit me by mistake. Apologize? Never.

Some of this parenting stuff needs to be more instinctual. I try to trust my instincts and when I don’t have a good sense about how to handle something, I ask for help. The idea of giving my kids the option of Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, as Gottlieb says she regrettably did, has never even crossed my mind. That’s my choice, not my kids'. The choices I give my kids may—or may not—have to do with what’s for dinner or where they want to go to summer camp. The parents who apologize to their 5 year-old for putting the “wrong” flavor of juice box in their snack, are going to raise a spoiled kid. Will this kid end up in Gottlieb’s office? Who knows.

Gottlieb is seeing patients who had wonderful parents. Her patients’ parents told them they were “amazing” constantly, they made sure these kids had infinite choices in life, they loved them and wanted them to be happy. So, what’s the problem? The fact that they’re showing up in therapy saying they are unhappy, despite having it all (from outward appearances) results from the emptiness created by the type of parenting Gottlieb rejects.

Overindulgent, hyper-vigilant parenting may the problem, but the solution isn’t nearly as simplistic as the experts would like us to believe. ‘Helicopter Parenting’ results from living in a complex, competitive, scary world filled with bad people, a failing economy, wars, terrorism, ultra-competitive higher education and racism. Hovering over their kids is what parents-- who have the time and money-- do to protect them from failures, big and small, as they navigate through school and into adulthood. Clearly this isn’t a low-income or working class problem.

Of course, many parental attempts to protect their children are comical and counterproductive. Asking the preschool to stop using a red pen because it’s too negative for a young child to see red correction marks on the page, as one parent cited in the article did, is ludicrous. Calling the school to protect your child from bulling is not. It’s called parenting. Just good, old fashioned parenting. It doesn’t have a trendy name like “free range parenting” or “attachment parenting” it’s just what a mother’s instincts tell me to do when my child is in trouble. I don’t need an expert to tell me whether I should call the school or not. I already know.