Category: Parent Talk
The following link poses some very probing questions.
As a parent whose daughter is nearly full-feathered and readying to leave the nest, I've asked myself as a father how well I've done, and the real tests I realize are yet to come.
Here's the article.
I didn't have time to read the whole article, but what I did read gave me points to ponder.
Although I am not and will never be a mother, I believe this article makes some valid points. People don't seem to understand how important it is to experience stress, challenges, loss, grief, and refusal, among many other things. These experiences help us develop into people who can handle the day-to-day variety of life experiences. If a person becomes an adult and misses out on some of those important experiences, it is earth-shattering when mom or dad isn't there to help them through or save their ass. When you learn to skate, you have to learn to fall in order to properly learn to prevent yourself from falling, and to learn what happens when you fall and how to deal with it. If no one ever let you fall as a child, I think the injury, so to speak, is worse when you're an adult. The best teacher is experience, and sometimes, we need to lose some games, get burned, scraped up, turned down, broken-hearted, yelled at, or given a bad grade and some harsh criticism. Those things make certain events stand out in our minds and teach us hard, but valuable lessons that we need to learn so that we can do better, avoid a situation, or approach a situation from a different angle.
I have ranted about this on another thread, but it is unbelievable how much people of authority are trying to protect children. This is creating an extreme that will not benefit anyone in the long-run. These people are taking things into their own hands, so much so that children will not be able to, or will have an extremely difficult time doing so. If someone always ties your shoe, how the hell are you supposed to learn? If someone always fights or breaks up your battles for you, how are you supposed to learn to wrap it up yourself?
I think two failures happen here, though the doctor or whatever she is, is more agile when talking about the self-esteem issue.
The tying the shoes is a really really good point, pointing at self here. Know why that happens sometimes? Because mom (or in this case dad) just wasn't thinking, very caught up in "Let's get rollin'," and so you go and tie the kid's shoe because it's faster. Not an excuse, but it's true.
Another similar problem, and this goes as well for the overactive disciplinarians: The parents of today are too busy comparing notes and competing on whose parenting is better. A mother doesn't want her daughter to fall for peer pressure, yet she herself may fall for enormous peer pressure to fit in with some fundamentalist or new-ager, / doesn't matter which: to prove that she can parent.
And for us men, there's a whole social constraint about demonstrating we're not the deadbeats all the women are talking about, we're the civilized improved model (ha) that does more housework, takes a more active role in the child's life, and pays more attention. Even to the point of taking the extra effort to remember the names of all the daughter's friends. In short, we men of my generation have taken it upon ourselves, consciously and unconsciously perhaps, to try and not do all the things the young women of our youth complained about their fathers.
So even if you think the no-competition foolery is just the work of academic froot loops, and have never cracked a self-help book except to start a fire with it, you can still end up with the situation they're talking about. A dad trying harder than ever to do it all, a dispossessed and displaced mama who is trying to prove her parenting abilities to others who are equally trying to prove theirs, and kids who probably think we're a bunch of weirdos sometimes. It's been said the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Don't know if that's true, but good intentions shure paved a road to a generation of chicken-brained turkey turds, for the most part.
Oh, and for the record, I am seriously glad my parents did not post about my poopy pants on Facebook. Every single time I see new parents do that, I can't help but wonder what their son is gonna do about that someday.
SoS, you made some great points about learning to fail. I don't think parents should go out of their way to expect their children to fail, going so far as to make it happen, but allowing them to experience frustration and scraping their knees and not being perfect at something would go a long way toward having more productive, adjusted members of society.
Leo, THANK YOU about the kid's poopy pants on facebook! It drives me absolutely up the wall when parents discuss potty habits of their children publicly, whether on Facebook or in a restaurant; I made a comment to that effect once back when I used to be on facebook, and the most common commnt was something to the effect of "well, you will understand when YOU have children and you'll be doing it too." Um.... no.....?
Kate
oh this is an excellent topic leo. i have a friend whose son is going to wind up a total failure in life. well unless he wakes up and smells the coffee this is what will happen. he is an eagle scout, which he got under less than honorable means if i say so, an excellent athlete in soccer and baseball, and a straight a student. his mom and dad had every moment of his young life planned. when he got to college, he flunked out because when he had all that time without supervision he didn't know what to do with himself. no one was nagging him to go to class so he didn't go to class. no one went and yelled at people if he was treated unfairly. no one cared when or what he did. so he watched tv played video games and failed.
My kids are not perfect. I believed from the momend they were boarn when my ob said "cutting this cord is the first step on the road to letting go.' that it was my job and my husband agreed that kids needed to learn independence and that the beast way to do that is with consequential learning. As you said i didn't go out of the way to delibberately let them make mistakes, but i didn't wrap them in cotton wol either. i don't know how many times i said "if you feel strongly about whatever go talk to someone who can do something about it."
Also kids don't get the opportunity to make decisions. i remember taking my kids grocery shopping. i'd say One time there were spaghettios on sale. I said these ones without meat are five for five bucks. these other ones with the meatballs are 1:39. which should i get? YOu need a lunch every day at the sitters. If you pick wrong the days you don't get these you'll have cheese sandwiches. so they discussed it and got the sale item.