This will piss off a lot of parents...

This rather long post is going to piss off a lot of people, especially over-indulgent parents, educators and experts in child care.

"Are You Raising a Douchebag" is the title of an interesting Details magazine article written by David Hochman. The article takes aim at those parents who are providing their kids with far more than the basic necessities of life and are also trying to be their kids' "best friends".

Here's a paragraph:

"We create parenting blogs that transform our preschoolers into fetishized celebrities. We subscribe to magazines that suggest buying a 5-year-old a $400 Marc Jacobs cashmere hoodie. We think it's cute when our kids learn to text message (until we realize POS means "parent over shoulder") and quietly rejoice when they can tell which Ramone is Dee Dee and which one is Joey."

The article offers the idea that over-indulging kids is a bad idea and that our society has gone too far in that direction. I agree wholeheartedly.

Do a search on "helicopter parents" and you come up with thousands of articles that blast the concept further, including an eye-opener from Canadian Business to Business magazine from 2006. The article reveals that parents are, well, here are the pertinent paragraphs:

"Managers are getting phone calls from parents asking them to hire their 20-something kids. Candidates are stalling on job offers to consult with their parents. Parents are calling hiring managers to negotiate pay packages."

"Over-involved parents meddle in college registration and interfering with students' dealings with professors, administrators and roommates. Students who get frustrated or confused during registration have been known to interrupt their advisers to whip out a cell phone, speed-dial their parents and hand the phone to the adviser, saying, "Here, talk to my mom.""
(www.super-solutions.com/helicopterparents_boomerangkids.asp)

I have personally seen the latter happen at the UPS store that I worked at this summer when a parent helped their twenty-something kid fill out a registration form prior to shipping it out.

These are but two of the many articles that tackle a growing problem: twenty-somethings, teenagers and kids who feel that they are entitled to everything that they ask for.

Where do we put the blame, if there is any to be put?

I blame the legions of so-called experts who, over the past 35 years, have seen fit to interfere with thousands of generations of parental wisdom to prevent parents from doing what they once did best: instill in their kids a sense of moral and ethical values.

I blame the endless ranks of pediatricians, child psychologists and child psychiatrists who routinely diagnose medical and psychiatric/psychological problems where they really don't exist. If a child isn't playing according to the un-writtend "corporate norm for play", that's perfectly all right. If a child isn't socializing like his/her type 'A' personality peers, that's OK. If a child isn't able to learn at the same rate as fellow students, that's OK, too.

I blame the education systems that use the recommendations of these experts to change the shool systems of North America (meaning the US and Canada) into social promotion and self-esteem academies. They ignore basic education in favour of a multitude of "feel good" coursework so as not to hurt their 'precious snowflakes'' chances at being happy. (See this month's Skeptical Inquirer article on our obsession with happiness for a good take on that subject.)

In many school districts, children are not allowed to fail any course or grade so as not to hurt their self-esteem or lag behind their peers. More importantly to the schools, it boosts their graduation rates beyond what they should really be. Since many school boards get funding based on these numbers, is it any wonder that education often panders more to the kids than to anyone else?

When otherwise normal teenagers cannot hand-write their name on a bank form, then we are in deep trouble. An Alberta MLA witnessed this happen just this past year.

I blame the politicians for over-legislating family law so much so that kids are now able to sue their parents over such trivial things as curfews. They have also hampered law enforcement officers by removing real punishments for kids who are violent or repeat offenders.

I blame the social agencies that constantly hamper their own best intentions by over-regulating their workers in the interests of avoiding lawsuits.

I blame media that en-nobles gangsters through old-school rap, movies, TV and other forms of entertainment that tends to glorify criminal behaviour.

I blame the kids who hold these thugs and criminals in high esteem.

Above all, I blame ourselves for holding onto this ideal that our kid's lives are supposed to be more comfortable and happier than our own childhoods were. While that may be something to wish for, we have to let our kids make that happen for themselves. We cannot hold their hands and keep them kids forever. Sooner or later they must grow up.

It is largely my generation of 50-somethings that has enabled this over the past 25 to 30 years, ever since they became parents.

What are we teaching kids if we let them pass courses without them ever doing any real work to pass them?

What are we teaching our kids about right and wrong if the consequences for committing crimes are non-existent (I am speaking primarily of Canadian legislation that slaps kids on the wrist for committing crimes)? Or if we cannot set boundaries for them or discipline them when they are very young?

What are we doing when we allow kids to make decisions for the household on a regular basis?

We are setting our society up for failure.

Failure to understand the ethics and values that has made our society perhaps the most free and educated in the world. Failure to show kids that parents will not always be there. Failure to let our kids grow up as mature, responsible citizens.

Children are learning from these examples that there are few boundaries in life that they cannot overcome merely because of who they are. They get an overpowering sense of entitlement far beyond what they have earned or truly deserve.

This goes beyond what people would call common sense into the realm of madness.

Quite a while ago I read an article where a parent asked why she felt uncomfortable when her 4 year old was awarded a certificate for sitting on the carpet in pre-school class. The kid was being rewarded for doing what is common sense: to behave properly. It seemed to expose all of the faults of over-induglent parents, educators and modern society in a nutshell.

Here were teachers trying to instill self-esteem by over-rewarding kids with something that is meaningless. Given a dozen of these pieces of paper over the course of a month and the effects are reduced as the rewards pile up. Over the course of the average child's education, the perhaps hundreds or thousands of stickers, stars, trophies, citations and certificates will mean nothing to the kids.

You cannot impose self-esteem on children from without. The self-esteem comes from accomplishing things on your own.

You cannot educate children by avoiding the consequences of failure to do the work and passing them regardless of what they have accomplished. As an aside, it also encourages lazy or incompetent teachers by skewing graduation results.

You cannot legislate morality. It comes from the ability of parents to set reasonable boundaries on their kids and discipling them from a young age according to the general norms of society.

So how do we fix this?

By returning education back to the basics of what is needed to succeed as an adult, not education for the sake of getting students to the next grade or to make them "feel good" about themselves. Education is about furthering education today, not about equipping children to survive a somehwat hostile or indifferent world when they are adults.

By educating children about "respecting others, respecting themselves and respecting learning" as Barry Schwartz put it in February 2009. Parents can do this by being respectful of these things themselves.

By letting parents, not child-rearing "experts" determine reasonable discipline methods and boundaries for their kids.

By calling the shots when you are a parent and trusting your instincts. For countless generations, parents have used their instincts to raise their kids without the need for expert advice.

This over-reliance on experts is nonsense that merely keeps those experts in business. We only need experts in cases where things are either too extreme to handle or too ambiguous to understand. Most behaviours and events in a child's life are neither. Are you listening, you parents of ADD/Autistic kids?

Being a parent today means being overwhelmed by countless experts telling you how to be what should come naturally.

Being a parent today means giving up your rights and letting these same strangers tell you how, what, and why you do things for your kids.

So call the shots, set boundaries that are reasonable for the age of your kids and let them know that failure to get something or to learn something doesn't mean the end of the world, but is an opportunity to learn and grow up.