Thursday, December 09, 2004

Tough Luck, Boy, It's Your Own Damn Fault

When I was a child, growing up in a very religious household, with seven (7) brothers and sisters, my parents, who love all their children dearly, did not coddle us.  There was no excusing bad behavior, on my or my siblings’ part, by blaming social status or other external factors.  If I did a wrong, I had to step up to the plate and take ownership of it, my parents would not try and smooth it over.  My parents instilled responsibility in their children, not the stupid “Everyone plays” mentality so prevalent in society today, and which is just one of the factors leading individuals down the path of befuddledness.

Here’s an interesting piece, via Arts & Letters Daily, which looks into the dangers of coddling kids.  The piece was written by Hara Estroff Marano and was published in Psychology Today. It is titled “A Nation of Wimps." A couple of excerpts I particularly enjoyed.

"Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. “Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."

"The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, “they’re constantly referring to their parents for guidance,” reports Kramer. They’re not learning how to manage for themselves."

Posted by John Venlet on 12/09 at 05:50 AM
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