| Author | Message | ||
     nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1632 Registered: 2-2001 |
Interesting article from Psychology Today. I think most middle-class parents can find something in here they can relate to. However, I don't think, as some posters have tried to make the case, that the current music issue is a case of overprotective parents (but let's leave those disscusions to the multiple music threads, OK? :-)). I also think it should be pointed out that this is a phenomena mostly for families with the means to afford these neurosis. As some of the psychologist who is quoted in the article say: "There are kids who are worth worrying about--kids in poverty, stresses Anderegg. "We focus so much on our own children," says Elkind, "It's time to begin caring about all children." " A Nation of Wimps Psychology Today Magazine Nov/Dec 2004 By: Hara Estroff Marano Summary: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers. Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path...at three miles an hour. On his tricycle. Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And...wait a minute...those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies--and especially their daddies--are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves. Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children. Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational "accommodations" he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written--and obviously costly--one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. "She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious--the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old "couldn't see the big picture." That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT. 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." Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation. "Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement." No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps. The Fragility Factor College, it seems, is where the fragility factor is now making its greatest mark. It's where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. It takes a variety of forms, including anxiety and depression--which are increasingly regarded as two faces of the same coin--binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection. The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that, says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "it is interfering with the core mission of the university." The severity of student mental health problems has been rising since 1988, according to an annual survey of counseling center directors. Through 1996, the most common problems raised by students were relationship issues. That is developmentally appropriate, reports Sherry Benton, assistant director of counseling at Kansas State University. But in 1996, anxiety overtook relationship concerns and has remained the major problem. The University of Michigan Depression Center, the nation's first, estimates that 15 percent of college students nationwide are suffering from that disorder alone. Relationship problems haven't gone away; their nature has dramatically shifted and the severity escalated. Colleges report ever more cases of obsessive pursuit, otherwise known as stalking, leading to violence, even death. Anorexia or bulimia in florid or subclinical form now afflict 40 percent of women at some time in their college career. Eleven weeks into a semester, reports psychologist Russ Federman, head of counseling at the University of Virginia, "all appointment slots are filled. But the students don't stop coming." Drinking, too, has changed. Once a means of social lubrication, it has acquired a darker, more desperate nature. Campuses nationwide are reporting record increases in binge drinking over the past decade, with students often stuporous in class, if they get there at all. Psychologist Paul E. Joffe, chair of the suicide prevention team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contends that at bottom binge-drinking is a quest for authenticity and intensity of experience. It gives young people something all their own to talk about, and sharing stories about the path to passing out is a primary purpose. It's an inverted world in which drinking to oblivion is the way to feel connected and alive. "There is a ritual every university administrator has come to fear," reports John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. "Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm's way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy." Heavy drinking has also become the quickest and easiest way to gain acceptance, says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, professor at Indiana University Southeast and founder of its Shyness Research Institute. "Much of collegiate social activity is centered on alcohol consumption because it's an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills," he says. "Plus it provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong." Welcome to the Hothouse Talk to a college president or administrator and you're almost certainly bound to hear tales of the parents who call at 2 a.m. to protest Branden's C in economics because it's going to damage his shot at grad school. Shortly after psychologist Robert Epstein announced to his university students that he expected them to work hard and would hold them to high standards, he heard from a parent--on official judicial stationery--asking how he could dare mistreat the young. Epstein, former editor in chief of Psychology Today, eventually filed a complaint with the California commission on judicial misconduct, and the judge was censured for abusing his office--but not before he created havoc in the psychology department at the University of California San Diego. Enter: grade inflation. When he took over as president of Harvard in July 2001, Lawrence Summers publicly ridiculed the value of honors after discovering that 94 percent of the college's seniors were graduating with them. Safer to lower the bar than raise the discomfort level. Grade inflation is the institutional response to parental anxiety about school demands on children, contends social historian Peter Stearns of George Mason University. As such, it is a pure index of emotional overinvestment in a child's success. And it rests on a notion of juvenile frailty--"the assumption that children are easily bruised and need explicit uplift," Stearns argues in his book, Anxious Parenting: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. Parental protectionism may reach its most comic excesses in college, but it doesn't begin there. Primary schools and high schools are arguably just as guilty of grade inflation. But if you're searching for someone to blame, consider Dr. Seuss. "Parents have told their kids from day one that there's no end to what they are capable of doing," says Virginia's Portmann. "They read them the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You'll Go! and create bumper stickers telling the world their child is an honor student. American parents today expect their children to be perfect--the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can't get the children to prove it on their own, they'll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are." What they're really doing, he stresses, is "showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit." And subjecting them to intense scrutiny. "I wish my parents had some hobby other than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child's day, eager to solve every problem for their child--and believe that's good parenting. "If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world." Arrivederci, Playtime In the hothouse that child raising has become, play is all but dead. Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees. "So many toys now are designed by and for adults," says Tufts' Elkind. When kids do engage in their own kind of play, parents become alarmed. Anderegg points to kids exercising time-honored curiosity by playing doctor. "It's normal for children to have curiosity about other children's genitals," he says. "But when they do, most parents I know are totally freaked out. They wonder what's wrong." Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they've never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. "They've been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who's won and what's fair. Kids are losing leadership skills." A lot has been written about the commercialization of children's play, but not the side effects, says Elkind. "Children aren't getting any benefits out of play as they once did." From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it's in play that cognitive agility really develops. Studies of children and adults around the world demonstrate that social engagement actually improves intellectual skills. It fosters decision-making, memory and thinking, speed of mental processing. This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, the human mind is believed to have evolved to deal with social problems. The Eternal Umbilicus It's bad enough that today's children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are overmonitored and oversheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college--or perhaps especially at college--students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: "Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?" "Kids are constantly talking to parents," laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they're not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. "They're not calling their parents to say, 'I really went wild last Friday at the frat house and now I might have chlamydia. Should I go to the student health center?'" 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. Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'" Some psychologists think we have yet to recognize the full impact of the cell phone on child development, because its use is so new. Although there are far too many variables to establish clear causes and effects, Indiana's Carducci believes that reliance on cell phones undermines the young by destroying the ability to plan ahead. "The first thing students do when they walk out the door of my classroom is flip open the cell phone. Ninety-five percent of the conversations go like this: 'I just got out of class; I'll see you in the library in five minutes.' Absent the phone, you'd have to make arrangements ahead of time; you'd have to think ahead." Herein lies another possible pathway to depression. The ability to plan resides in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive branch of the brain. The PFC is a critical part of the self-regulation system, and it's deeply implicated in depression, a disorder increasingly seen as caused or maintained by unregulated thought patterns--lack of intellectual rigor, if you will. Cognitive therapy owes its very effectiveness to the systematic application of critical thinking to emotional reactions. Further, it's in the setting of goals and progress in working toward them, however mundane they are, that positive feelings are generated. From such everyday activity, resistance to depression is born. What's more, cell phones--along with the instant availability of cash and almost any consumer good your heart desires-- promote fragility by weakening self-regulation. "You get used to things happening right away," says Carducci. You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendship and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail--perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression. From Scrutiny to Anxiety...and Beyond The 1990s witnessed a landmark reversal in the traditional patterns of psychopathology. While rates of depression rise with advancing age among people over 40, they're now increasing fastest among children, striking more children at younger and younger ages. In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous. As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression. While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children--directly observed by conducting interviews in the home--brought out the worst in them. A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression. There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life's day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies. "Children need to be gently encouraged to take risks and learn that nothing terrible happens," says Michael Liebowitz, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and head of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. "They need gradual exposure to find that the world is not dangerous. Having overprotective parents is a risk factor for anxiety disorders because children do not have opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world." They never learn to dampen the pathways from perception to alarm reaction. Hothouse parenting undermines children in other ways, too, says Anderegg. Being examined all the time makes children extremely self-conscious. As a result they get less communicative; scrutiny teaches them to bury their real feelings deeply. And most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to be experimental and playful. "If every drawing is going to end up on your parents' refrigerator, you're not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes," says Anderegg. Parental hovering is why so many teenagers are so ironic, he notes. It's a kind of detachment, "a way of hiding in plain sight. They just don't want to be exposed to any more scrutiny." Parents are always so concerned about children having high self-esteem, he adds. "But when you cheat on their behalf to get them ahead of other children"--by pursuing accommodations and recommendations--"you just completely corrode their sense of self. They feel 'I couldn't do this on my own.' It robs them of their own sense of efficacy." A child comes to think, "if I need every advantage I can get, then perhaps there is really something wrong with me." A slam dunk for depression. Virginia's Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in--less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them. Read the rest here: http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20041112-000010.html | ||
| tulip Citizen Username: Braveheart Post Number: 1802 Registered: 3-2004 |
Oh, nan: Pardon my poking in, but thank you so much for this. Parents, special educators, others working with or around children really need to read this. It is so visible among today's elementary and middle school children. We really need to talk about "hothouse parents" and how they affect the developmental (coping) skills of their children. It's not that hothouse parents don't mean well. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1637 Registered: 2-2001 |
Tulip, I actually question some of the assumptions made in this article and I wonder about the evidence they are based on. I say that because when I first went to college in 1975, supposedly before everyone lost a grip, I saw a tremendous amount of binge drinking, sexual promiscuity, abuse and psychological distress and even insanity. I remember kids getting sucked into weird religious cults like the Moonies and ending up with just a toothbrush and a blanket and selling flowers on the street. That said, I think there is some cautionary tales in this article and some new economic stresses that we did not have in the 1970s. Back then you could decide to be an a slacker Art major and your parents would usually just cross their fingers and hope you would "meet some rich guy" and get married. Now that college costs about a hundred times more, and the job market is less predictable, they have more anxiety about outcomes. | ||
| Tom Reingold Supporter Username: Noglider Post Number: 4886 Registered: 1-2003  |
I often ask, "Why do we do X?" and cynically, the answer comes back to me, "because we can". And that applies to worrying. Someone recommended a book to me called something like "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers". We are programmed or evolved to flee and worry. Now that major worries are taken care of, we look for things to worry about. As for letting kids go through a few hard knocks, I remembered an analogy from the book "Liberated Parents, Liberated Children". The moth struggles to get out of its cocoon. We are tempted to be compassionate and cut the cocoon open so the moth can be free. But by doing so, we would deprive the moth the exercise he will need, and thus his wings will be weak, and he will die once freed. | ||
| Joel Janney Citizen Username: Joel_janney Post Number: 10 Registered: 6-2004 |
Maybe the negative consequences of overparenting are nature's way of trying to even out the advantages of being raised in an upper middle class home. | ||
| tulip Citizen Username: Braveheart Post Number: 1803 Registered: 3-2004 |
nan: There's an interesting bit of irony in today's overparenting, in my opinion. That is, today's parents of college students, and students, themselves, have justifiably more anxiety about outcomes and "relevance" of curriculum to real, marketable skills. It takes some experience with the real world, via trial and error, with the actual testing of different courses of study against the marketplace. We can't get to that "testing" of reality, and trial and error, if we overparent. It's the same as allowing a child to fall when taking his/her first steps, and it is every bit as difficult for parents to have enough restraint so as not to try to "make a lesson" out of everything. | ||
| notehead Supporter Username: Notehead Post Number: 1834 Registered: 5-2001  |
Nan: interesting and VERY relevant article. I feel like obsessive hyper-parenting is everywhere you look. As with politics, the middle ground seems to be disappearing -- or, perhaps, it's just that the middle ground is less interesting and so does not get mentioned. | ||
| Brett Weir Citizen Username: Brett_weir Post Number: 497 Registered: 4-2004 |
60 Minutes ran a great piece last night on this very topic. It highlighted one aspect that is my greatest fear about the newest generation- what will happen to them when they enter the workforce? Children today are so sheltered and protected that they will never accept the fact that they don't matter to others outside their families as much as they do within, or to themselves. They will leave college and go to work, where they will be expected to pay their dues, do menial chores, receive no reassurance or daily feedback, obey directions without asking "why?", show deference and respect to their superiors, and rise or fall based upon their own merits. Many will be unable to adjust. We are so afraid of scaring or upsetting our children that we fail to prepare them to deal with the Real World. They get trophies for everything just for "participating" instead of actual achievement based upon effort. We serve as managers and social secretaries for their personal lives instead of teaching them to function for themselves and interact with others. And we rarely discipline them; conversely, we tend to fight their battles for them instead of recognizing when they have acted poorly. We do them the disservice of shielding them from the adversities that will ultimately form their characters. Nan, excellent topic to share. My wife and I always wonder whether we are being too protective or too restrictive. It's good to see that others have the same worries. | ||
| sportsnut Citizen Username: Sportsnut Post Number: 1660 Registered: 10-2001 |
We just had this conversation the other day. I see it at work here in Maplewood almost every day. I'm sure it is just as bad in other communities as well. I try hard not to succumb to this overparenting but find myself doing it at times. My parents think it has something to do with the fact that we all work long and hard to have the lives we do and that we over compensate by being over protective of our kids. I've seen an off-shoot of this while I was dealing with some problems we were having with my son. The off-shoot is the lack of objectivity when dealing with your own kids. Not everyone's child is an angel. Parents are very unwilling to believe that their child is capable of being "bad" - its incredible. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 1310 Registered: 12-2001 |
"Children today are so sheltered and protected that they will never accept the fact that they don't matter to others outside their families as much as they do within, or to themselves. " Haven't people said stuff like that since the Greeks? | ||
| Chris Prenovost Citizen Username: Chris_prenovost Post Number: 192 Registered: 7-2003 |
Nan: Excellent thread. Brett Weir: You hit the nail squarely on the head. Themp: This is different. Children have always received some degree of protection from their parents, but what many believe is happening today is pure overkill. | ||
| Bobkat Supporter Username: Bobk Post Number: 7116 Registered: 5-2001 |
Does anyone else see a connection between this thread and the culture wars where parents seem to be afraid that their kids might be made to feel uncomfortable? | ||
| Tom Reingold Supporter Username: Noglider Post Number: 4947 Registered: 1-2003 |
Yes, but I didn't know how to express it. I think people of minority religions have a real beef, but as you probably know, I don't support bans. | ||
| jjkatz Citizen Username: Jjkatz Post Number: 489 Registered: 12-2003  |
I saw something really funny at Huffman-Koos on Rt. 10 a year or so ago. A couple was in the store with their toddler, and the kid was having a toddler moment. He sat down and refused to stand up. The parents wanted to leave. The mother knelt down and started asking the boy, "why don't you tell Mommy why you don't want to stand up..." She was getting nowhere but she kept at it. Finally the father came along, swooped the boy up, told him, "It ain't all sunshine" and whisked him out the door. Modern parenting at its finest. | ||
| Bobkat Supporter Username: Bobk Post Number: 7117 Registered: 5-2001 |
Tom, yeah, I agree. | ||
| tulip Citizen Username: Braveheart Post Number: 1807 Registered: 3-2004 |
On December 24, my husband and I were having breakfast before shopping in Lambertville. Three brothers, their wives and many children were having breakfast in the same restaurant. The children ranged in age from infant, to maybe four years of age. These children were banging on the table, marching around the restaurant (followed also marching by their father) sitting at alternate tables, generally raising a ruckous. I joked about it with my husband, because they were so loud and so taking over the whole place. Another customer went up to a parent and said, "Do you think you can keep the noise level down a bit? My friend and I aren't used to this." Poor guy, it was hopeless. These thirty-something and late twenty-something parents were not about even to ASK their children to be quiet. When the restaurant took a bit longer than usual to bring the food, parents looked non-plussed, as it they had expected food earlier, given the ruckous, and all. Well, I thought it was funny/ludicrous, but not one attempt was made by any of the six parents present to monitor or limit the amount of mayhem being made by these children. The restaurant was small, by the way, and the noise was unavoidable. I don't know, when my little boys cried at a restaurant, either my husband or I carried them out of the room, talked, walked and told them, no matter how young they were, that they had to be quiet to go back in. It worked. Where are the limits? | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 1316 Registered: 12-2001 |
"Themp: This is different. Children have always received some degree of protection from their parents, but what many believe is happening today is pure overkill. " No, it's always different "this time". That's the most consistent of many consistent things. Don't sweat it. You are lucky enough not to be witnessing an epochal disaster in parenting. | ||
| nan Citizen Username: Nan Post Number: 1647 Registered: 2-2001 |
BobK & Tom, I almost did not post this because I thought people would immediately start trying to use it to justify criticizing those that support the music ban. I mentioned that in the intro. The reasons I don't think it applies in a specific way are 1) while I think this is an interesting article, I think there have always been good and bad parents and I'm not convinced that today's parents are any worse than in the past (and I think well off parents have always spoiled their kids--this is just expansion to the middle class), and 2) I think the music issue represents some deep issues about power and dominant culture that I don't think kids should be exposed to in a "hard knocks" kind of way. In short, I don't think the complex issues related to development of self-esteem are well represented in this article. I think the purpose of this article is to bash parents (some of whom could use a good slap upside the head) for going overboard. It does not provide specifics for what a good parent would be like. I don't think you can just assume that a good parent would be the complete opposite of the parents described in this article. | ||
| Tom Reingold Supporter Username: Noglider Post Number: 4949 Registered: 1-2003 |
Nan, very good points! I don't generally send my kids out for hard knocks, but I also feel that they can grow from them. I highly recommend all books by Faber and Mazlish. In their book, "Liberated Parents, Liberated Children" they tell a story of a lecturer who asks parents what they want for their children. Parents respond with things like "well adjusted" and "content." The lecturer points out that the Nazis were those. Rather, we need to teach our kids to be both strong and compassionate, above (perhaps) everything else. Strong means knowing that they will survive all sorts of strains and difficulties. But at the same time, I don't generally throw obstacles in my kids' ways. I trust that they will encounter their share of them. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 1318 Registered: 12-2001 |
I'm reading a good book now called "I Heard You Paint Houses" by Charles Brandt. True story of hitman Frank Shearan. When he was ten, during the depression, his father would bring him into bars and make him fight older kids for ten cent bets. When he lost, his old man would beat him. It made him very tough and stoical, but he ended up becoming a merciless hitman, so I'd say that was TOO tough. |
