As the founder of Village Pediatrics, Dr. Nikki Gorman is used to soothing anxious parents.
In recent years though, she’s seen a rapid rise in another anxious group: her patients.
It’s no secret that anxiety and related issues are rampant in teenagers. There are many reasons — cellphones, social media, COVID — along with the “helicopter parenting” prevalent for a while now.
(Or — even worse — “snowplow parenting”: forging forward, ensuring no obstacles lie in a child’s path.)
“As pediatricians we focus on the end goal: raising healthy human beings, who thrive personally and give back to the community,” Dr. Nikki says.
Dr. Nikki Gorman
Recently, she and her staff have seen a trend: Younger parents are “starting to understand that the parenting my generation is guilty of is not good for anyone. Not for the kids, or the parents.”
Because “we’re all too accessible,” she says, “parents feel they always need to be there. But developmentally, we need to empower our kids, so they can learn to trust themselves, and trust their gut.”
There are limits, of course. “A 5-year-old brain is not mature enough to know how to cross the street.” But, Dr. Nikki says, empowering a child at that age will enable her, at 8, to cross by herself.
Even younger children — 2- and 3-year-olds — want power. The pediatrician advises giving it to them within reason: letting them choose what to wear, what fruit to eat.
“The more we’re in that mindset, the more we decrease anxiety,” she says. And that means parental, as well as child, anxiousness.
Not empowering children can come from the environment of a community like Westport. “When ‘success’ is defined as and focused on things like goals and education,” that sets up unrealistic expectations.
“No one is happy all the time,” Dr. Nikki notes. “But if you can feel good about yourself, your relationships, your role in the community when things are not going great — that’s good.
Kids can have fun in many ways.
“It’s a big job, worrying all the time about what’s going on in school, what team or league your child is playing, and all the rest. We’ve lost the ability to step back and ask, ‘What’s the goal here?'”
The goal, she suggests, is not to ensure that all obstacles are plowed en route to a college athletic scholarship, professional sports career — or any other spectacularly high achievement, in any career.
It should be to enable youngsters to grow, thrive, and feel good about themselves in a variety of ways.
“When one parent heads off on the weekend to a 10-year-old tournament on Long Island, and the other takes the other kid to Washington = what happened to Sundays together?” Dr. Nikki asks.
“What about family meals?”
Her fantasy, she says, is for children to be able to play middle school sports — with their friends, in a community-wide effort.
“Kids don’t want to be strapped in a car for 2 hours after a game,” she says, repeating what she hears and observes.
“There’s nothing wrong with stepping back.”
Children “want to please their parents, their teachers, their community,” she says. “They take their messages from us.” Too often, the message they hear is that they please us only by performing at the highest level for us.
A child’s dream — or the parents’?
I told Dr. Nikki that Jimmy Izzo — a 1983 Staples High School graduate, and longtime Westporter — says that one of the reasons he closed his Crossroads Hardware store was because Saturday customers had largely disappeared. Every weekend they were somewhere else, on kid-related activities or trips.
She nodded. “Kids now miss out on going to the hardware store with their father, asking what this or that is for. And then going back to help around the house.”
But, she adds, she and her Village Pediatrics colleagues are seeing a new trend.
Their “very active” weekly group of parents of babies “clearly understand what’s going on.”
Post-pandemic, she says, parents are spending more time at home — and doing more things there with their children.
“The number of fathers in our parenting groups is mind-blowing,” Dr. Nikki says. “They come to exams, too. They want to be involved. They want to hear with the experts are saying.”
Stuck at home during the lockdown, “young parents learned they need to work as a team — to manage jobs, home, the family. Fathers saw how hard that is. They realize that both parents are important to kids’ mental health. That was the greatest thing to come out of COVID.”
So, Dr. Nikki says: “It’s okay to take things down a notch. Before you sign them up for an activity, have a conversation with your child. It’s great to expose them to different things, but limit it.
“Let them go back to playing outside. Don’t overschedule kids. Respect sleep.”
And — above all — keep the snowplow where it belongs: in the garage.
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Brenner says, “His data is so sound, his research is so compelling, and his solutions are so completely doable that even skeptics among us would be convinced.
