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Polly Anna Parenting
Posted by Raven on July 22nd, 2006
The parents of the current generation of kids have done them a huge diservice. Part of the job of raising children is to help them become strong, independent and active members of society. It’s not to spoil the kids so bad they cannot fend for themselves. I don’t blame the kids although they are extremely annoying and seflish with a mindset full of self entitlement.
At the moment, this is a generation that lacks the common sense to stay off deadly train tracks or campus rivers when they’re icy. A generation that can’t seem to make decisions without texting home, and whose helicopter parents — so named for their hovering ways — have actually begun negotiating salaries with job recruiters on their kids’ behalf.
Not this parent. Not at all. My daughters will do their own thing on their own terms. Without their Mom or Dad getting involved. Advice will be given when asked. They will be able to make their own choices and live with the consequences. My job is to make sure they see all choices and make good sound judgement.
Faced with the most-chaperoned, play-dated generation in memory, as the Globe’s Marcella Bombardieri found, colleges are rolling out increasingly elaborate orientation programs. Having long taken for granted a basic set of life skills, schools are having to spell out such dos and don’ts as Boston University’s: Don’t try to cross the icy Charles River in winter.
It’s worse than this. Many kids don’t know how to write a check. Or balance their checkbooks. Many don’t even have checking accounts…Others cannot boil water to cook an egg. Nevermind go food shopping- I know kids who PAY others to do this for them. Pathetic. And there are a lot of kids in college who don’t know how to do their own damn laundry and expect others to do it for them.
Of course, catering to Millennials also means answering to their parents. A University of South Carolina official tells of a mother asking that her photo appear on her child’s student ID card. “Because anytime there is a problem, I’m going to be dealing with it.”
Not this Mom. No way. All my daughters attend college and I will not run in to take care of every problem or issue that arises for them. Doing so teaches them how to be dependant and lazy. And it also shows them they need not take any responsibilty for their own destiny. The very things a parent should be teaching their kids…
The news isn’t all bad. The baby-on-board generation has benefited from a dramatic shift toward child safety and parental nurturing. In response, they are also making some smart decisions: Smoking, suicide, and teen pregnancy and abortion are all down. In their outlook they are the anti-Gen-Xers: They tend to be law-abiders who believe in institutions, whether their family or the government. All in all, it’s a relentlessly upbeat crowd, say Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book, “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”
Very true. But what good are the positives when we have a generation of spoiled brats who cannot stand up and think for themselves? What good is being upbeat when they cannot see the ever increasing evils of this world? Like it or not, this planet we live on is full of negatives and in order to make change, todays kids must learn to see this and recognize it for what it is.
But it’s easy to be optimistic when you’ve never been allowed to fail, when every kid at a swim meet has to win something, and making children feel good becomes as important as ensuring that they do well. It’s easy to have a can-do spirit when you’ve been insulated from the ordinary risks of childhood. As Howe put it, “This isn’t a generation of kids who went wandering in backyards and empty lots and thought of things to play. All their activity was prepared for them.”
Some activities need to be planned. But PLAY is not one of them, and it’s something every child needs to have time for. Without the help of the grown ups. Playing is really important for kids- they learn alot. They become creative; they learn how to interact with others. Kids need to experience boredom too. Why? It gets their minds thinking of other things to DO. Let kids play in mud and sand; let them climb trees and go out into the woods to explore. Let them get into little spats with the neighbors kids and don’t intervene! Kids have an amazing ability to work things out on their own. Besides who can stand a whiney little brat who constantly runs to Mommy, demanding she intervene with these little sqabbles?
And that’s the problem: Life is not a supervised activity. If those in this group are to fill their grandparents’ shoes, they can’t continue to be coddled at an age when their grandparents were fighting wars. D-day didn’t come with a handbook. Parents, and colleges for that matter, would do well to do less catering and let their very old kids finally become adults.
Excellent advice. I hope it’s not too late for the older college kids…who do think they are entitled to so much yet do not think they have to work hard for anything. Do away with the handbooks and start relying on common sense and the end goal of raising healthy, independant thinkers who CAN do anything they set their minds to.
July 22nd, 2006 at 11:22 pm
“My job is to make sure they see all choices and make good sound judgement.”
Good luck! IMHO NOBODY makes good sound judgement until they’ve had the opportunity to burn the crap out of their fingers on a freshly baked cinnamon roll a few times, even though they KNOW that molten sugar is freakin’ hot.
Self included.
July 23rd, 2006 at 4:32 am
Oh do I ever hat this current generation of nothing but spoiled brats. One thing that wasnt touched on was the fact that parents arnt allowed to punish their kids the way our parents punished us I.E. a nice red glow on their fanny.
Its now considered abuse to spank a child. “it makes the child even more rebelious”. Well timeouts arnt working. And belive me, Ive seen it. The fact that we have a show called Nanny 911 is all the proof we need to see that it exists. But of course they use JUST timeouts, which works at first but then the child realizes he/she gets off easy.
July 23rd, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Thoughts On A Sunday
I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. I figured I’d be long dead and buried by now. But somehow I have survived to the…
July 24th, 2006 at 4:04 am
I can’t figure out whose kids your talking about, who are so annoying, spoiled and selfish. My kids definitely don’t fit this picture–nor most of the other teenagers I know. My 18-year-old daughter recently plumbed in our home’s water pump, almost entirely by herself. And spent the past year seeking scholarships and financial aid to start engineering school in the fall–all without help from parents.
Any kid who doesn’t know to stay off train tracks or frozen lakes and rivers, or who doesn’t know how to write a check or balance a checkbook, is obviously a child who had no parent who was sufficiently interested in them to teach them or tell them these things. Lack of knowledge in these areas indicates a neglected child, rather than a spoiled child. The same is true of children who are going off to college without basic life skills. Someone has neglected them–neglected to teach them how to read a map, talk to an insurance agent, do their own wash, or cook a simple meal. If a parent berates their child for not knowing how to do these things, it seems to me that it is the parent who is spoiled and feels a sense of entitlement. Clearly, such a parent has failed to teach their children such skills–and, equally clearly, such a parent must feel that it was someone else’s responsibility to do so.
Of course you don’t teach children such skills by over-protecting them. They learn these things when a parent takes the time to teach them–the parent who goes through the tax-preparation software with them, who shows them how to reconcile their checking account, who encourages them to find their way around using maps (and mapquest), who lets their child drive while explaining driving skills in detail (with much warning and nagging), and who explains the mysteries and dangers of laundry, train tracks, and ice in all its forms.
Who did you think was going to teach your child these things? The schools? The nanny? Apparently you don’t believe you have a responsibility for this.
One of the respondents seems to feel that children should be spanked for not knowing the things it is the parents’ responsibility to teach them.
And–as for learning to think for themselves–few parents encourage this. It is probably far more accurate to say that parents, the educational system, and the society are all intent on discouraging independent thought and decision-making. The main purpose behind the very structured lives so many children lead is to prevent them from exercising independence or independent judgment.
And it’s mostly the children of the rich whose young lives are all supervised activities, whose play is structured, whose freedom for creative play, independent learning and study, and creative adventure is curtailed. The idea is to so control their life experience that they can never form independent ideas and judgments, and to keep them infantile, dependent, and helpless, the better to control them. The failure to teach such children life skills would seem to me to have the same objective.
Clearly, if you had really wanted your children to be independent, you would have taught them the necessary skills.
Children need far more training in life skills today than they did in previous generations anyway. Almost every adult skill is more difficult to master than it was in previous generations–driving a car is a good example, but almost everything young people need to know how to do these days requires a far more complex set of skills.
July 24th, 2006 at 7:32 am
To solve the problem you have to fight the state to take back control of your own children. The schoolastic traditions also work against you. God forbid they face the stress of exams where there is the possibility they might fail. When this happened to our generation we learnt that it was not the end of the world but try harder next time.
July 26th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
You and I differ greatly where GWB is concerned. He is the lunatic. BUT….You couldn’t be more Right about my generation and about the need for better parenting. In my opinion It’s the lack of good parenting going on today that is causing our kids to fall behind in school and then later in life. I know, I am one of those kids whose parents spoiled and hovered over them and now I am the one having to learn how to live life-as a good productive member of society.