My friend Julie sent me
this article. She thought I'd have fun with it on my blog. She is a teacher and has been seeing a lot of this lately...in all spheres of her life. Parents who hover over their children, fret about them, don't allow them to figure out things for themselves or allow them to learn from mistakes. So what is this all about? Are kids the new trophy? We have the trophy house, the trophy car, the trophy corner office,even the trophy wife. Now do we have the trophy children to add to our collection of accomplishments?
Is it the result of living in the information age? Are we picking up so many How to's in parenting from snippets on the Today show, or the plethora of parenting books and magazines that it makes us compulsively try to do everything recommended to raise the perfect kids? Is it a result of living in consumer driven society where we have bought into the "You deserve the best, to be pampered, to be special, to be the envy of everyone else" messages that are continually fed to us by various advertisements in all forms of media? Do we buy into these messages for our kids too?
Or is this parenting issue just a symptom of a much bigger societal problem? The article is entitled Are we raising a nation of wimps? And I would ask.. Have we become a nation of wimps?
The article goes on to describe what happens to "hothouse" children when they are first let out of the hothouse. At the beginning of college, (which by the way does not signal the end of parental intrusion) the article claims that this type of parenting leads to all kinds of problems, excessive drinking, anxiety and depression, relationship problems, eating disorders. All these problems have always been around but have grown tremendously on college campuses in recent years.
The article in my mind does not form a conclusive correlation between these problems and hovering, over involved parents although I don't deny that parenting on that level wouldn't cause anxiety.
But consider other recent impacts on the family, the arrival of the internet as part of our daily existence and along with it a host of electronics that change dramatically the way we do things, daycare at 6 weeks old, earlier and earlier preschool programs. Today, when a child starts kindergarten he's already had 2-3 years of school under his belt. Attachment theorists will claim that the parent/child bond is of upmost importance in the first 3 years of a child's life to lead to relational health in the future. Are kids losing that necessary time with the parent? Add to that the huge number of options for activities and pursuits, the fruits of a healthy booming economy, and you have families running in all directions to take advantage of it all. Stressful, yes. Better for kids to eat dinner together as a family than to improve their various soccer/karate/dancing/snowboarding/ukalali skills. (As I write this I am well aware of our own struggle to keep our family life balanced).
The under-involved, discontected, too busy family plays as big of a role in the emotional instability of children as the hovering parents.
But are we just emulating what we see around us? Most are trying to achieve a level of comfort in our lifestyle that requires little from us. We want our gadgets that do for us. We strive for a life of low pain /high pleasure. And we replace our perfectly good furniture when we get bored of it rather than when it no longer functions, or even becomes outdated for that matter. We want what we want, when we want it, now! And so we max out our credit cards or drop out of marriages when they become too much work and we model this behavior to our children. As a nation
we live in a hothouse. Bad things don't happen here, not often enough to jar us from complacency, anyway. I mean consider countries like Africa and the level disease and famine they face every single day. Or the Middle East, embroiled in a warzone. And when the inevitable disasters do hit, we find ourselves stunned and unprepared. Consider Katrina and 9-11. We recognize that we are weak and so we play the blame game because no one wants the heavy burden of responsibility. So the question I believe is not, are we raising a nation of wimps, but have we become a nation of wimps?
And to answer that we need to take a hard look at ourselves. For it is in changing who we are that we are able to model and teach our children to deal with hardship with strength, courage and patience (even if the hardship boils down to being stuck in traffic) to delay gratification, to embrace failure as one of life's' best teachers, to look out for others, and not just oneself. To make time to play, to make relationships a priority. If we give
these to our children as gifts we can move from becoming a nation of wimps to a nation of heroes.
BTW-There are many heroes in our country. They do seem to step to the forefront in times of distress. I applaud the many heroes of our country and believe that we need more and can raise up more just like them. We need them, not just to be there in a crisis but to build upon the emotional health and well being of our society.
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