Neuroticism and Parenting

I ran across an interesting article on Facebook yesterday. According to Distractify, 'Neurotic People Make the Best Pet Parents'. This title caught my attention because as a needy individual, I wanted to know if I qualify as a "Best Pet Parent" and also because we'd just covered neuroticism in one of my classes and it didn't sound like a good thing.

The official definition is this:

Neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology characterized by anxiety, fear, moodiness, worry, envy, frustration, jealousy, and loneliness.

This made me wonder if "neurotic" is one of those terms we tend to throw around without really knowing the exact definition. For example, we might say "she's completely neurotic" but actually mean "she's bat shit crazy with a special bent you don't find in normal crazy."



One of the images that came up when I Googled Neurotic

My conclusion is that I don't think we're completely misusing it. I think when we call someone neurotic we're kind of getting at the gist of the person's problems without actually naming any of them.

According to the article though, a neurotic pet parent is this:

"An online survey of more than 1,000 people found that while "helicopter parenting" isn't great for human children, clinginess and overprotection might actually be good for rearing dogs and cats."

 I guess if helicopter parenting is spurred on because of fear, anxiety or worry, then yep, that's neurotic. But here's the thing - I've never considered myself to be a "helicopter" type person.

I'm not insisting that my dog get all A's in puppy obedience. This is mainly because we didn't go to puppy obedience, but even if we had, I wouldn't have strived to be the best in the class. And sometimes, when I put her outside while I'm watching TV, I forget she's out there. Oops. So, yeah, total fail as a helicopter parent.

The article goes on to say:

Participants who expressed the greatest affection also scored high on the conscientious and neurotic scale. "This finding suggests that the qualities that make for overbearing parents might work better for our domesticated canine and feline companions, who tend to require lifelong parenting," explains Futurity.

Needless to say, this article got me to wondering, am I am neurotic? So I took an online quiz to find out. Cause it's 2015 and that's what we do.

Turns out that yes, yes I am neurotic. Feels like I shouldn't be surprised by this revelation.

Anyway, guess I'm good pet parent in spite of my failure at clinginess and overprotection. I think. Wait, where I was I going with all this? And has anyone seen the dog?