Parenting

Parents raise their children as best as they can. Yet, they can rarely be sure whether their parenting had positive influence on their children.

Parenting

Parents raise their children as best as they can. Yet, they can rarely be sure whether their parenting had positive influence on their children.
Parents expend vast resources in emotion, time, and money to raise their children as best as they can. Sometimes, they even prioritise their children’s needs above their own. Today’s parents are bombarded by boundless parenting advice, which is too often contradictory and scientifically unsubstantiated. Even worse, children’s traits – from being overweight to struggling in school struggles to mental health problems – are increasingly attributed to the parenting that they experienced. This charge pertains in particular to mothers, known as “mother blame”.
Not surprisingly, more parents than ever before report mental and physical exhaustion and feel scrutinised and judged for their parenting. Today’s parenting happens in a world that is more and more volatile and uncertain. For example, Gen Z – the generation this project studies, who were born between 1995 and 2012 and will be parents to Gen Beta, to be born between 2025 and 2039 – is likely the first generation not to economically surpass their own parents. Thus, the risk of “parent burnout” calls for robust empirical evidence on parents’ influence on their children’s development, as well as on the limitations of this influence. At the Hungry Mind Lab, we respond to this call to support parents effectively and help improve parent-child relationships.