Are Parents Doing Too Much For Our Kids?
Much has been made of Joseph Epstein’s recent essay, in which he described our current culture as a “Kindergarchy” - a culture in which kids are kings (and queens), and adults are their subjects, slaves and servants. He argues that we are turning into a nation of helicopter parents, and that we would be better off teaching our kids to be much more self-reliant. We have talked before about ideas for kids to make money, and earning an income of their own is one of the fastest ways for kids to learn responsibility and develop a sense of their own competence.
It is not in the best interests of the children, this being too over-protective. As Jenny Ford points out in her blog post on the topic, these college kids who still get wake-up phone calls from their parents every morning aren’t likely to accomplish much in life - it;s generally considered to be a prerequisite for most of life’s achievements for able-bodied young men and women to have at the very least mastered the art of getting out of bed without outside assistance.
Epstein is a college professor, and he encounters the precious products of this pampered uber-parenting on a daily basis. His observation? They are unable to complete the simplest of tasks without having an unending stream of unconditionally positive and encouraging praise and affirmation. Take the spotlight of adult rapture off them, and they sink into indolence. We have been being too over-protective, and the chickens are coming home to roost.
The tragedy of our time is that with all the material progress we have accomplished, is now possible to protect children from the “school of hard knocks”, aka “the real world”, until they are well into their twenties. Unfortunately, this is simply being too over-protective.
It may seem to be a good and loving thing to protect your children from the pain of direct and immediate feedback from the real world. And it would be - if you never expect them to have to live in it.
In the real world, people fall short. When they discover that their best efforts simply are not good enough, they have to work to expand their capabilities - build more muscle, learn more multiplication tables, practice more verb conjugations, learn more names of muscles, increase their level of charm and personal charisma, and so on. They have to make their best efforts better.
Trying, failing, and trying again are experiences which simply must occur during a child’s lifetime, in order to build the physical, mental, and emotional stamina that living in the real world requires. We seem to accept this requirement when it comes to physical skills - we allow our kids to fall over as they learn to walk, to ride a bike, and to dance or figure skate.
However, we seem to have a collective mental block when it comes to the parallel “falling over” of mastering mental and emotional tasks. Disappointment, sadness, frustration, anger, confusion, and even temporary despair are important learning experiences. Shielding kids from those emotions is being too over-protective.
The real world is very unyielding. If the money isn’t in the bank account, you can’t eat. A lifetime of being bailed out by the Bank Of Parent may result in a child whose body grows up, but whose sense of personal responsibility remain stunted and vestigial. Such people are a drain on the system for their entire lives, and can never accomplish any true material success - what is worse, they never have the comforting emotional sense of knowing they are independent captains of their own destiny.
These lessons are much more painful when learned in one’s 40s and the sums involved are tens of thousands, then when learned as a child using nickels and dimes. When it comes to kids making money, it is infinitely better to cut them off from the parental teat at an early age than to carry them long after they should have been earning money for themselves. There are many ways for kids to make money available, so if you have kids, let them know the Bank of Parent is shutting its doors, bite the bullet, and let them learn how the real world works.
