Parent Induced Helplessness Syndrome

Today's post is more about helicopter parents, hyper parents and all the other types of parent induced helplessness that abounds today.

I call such things Parent Induced Helplessness Syndrome (PIHS, pronounced "piss").

Its a condition whereby children are so over-dependent on their parents, teachers or other adults to make even the simplest decisions that they are psychologically incapable of doing so, even when they become adults. And if they do make decisions, its often the wrong ones.

Here are some examples that everyone has heard of:

Kids who need their parents to canvass or sell on behalf of scouts/guides/brownies/campfire girls, etc. because they are too lazy or otherwise involved with the internet or organized activities to do it themselves.

Parents who do their kid's school projects or homework for them because they want them to get "good grades". This is self-explanatory.

Parents who schedule their kids' lives from the age of 6 months until they are 16 or 18 with constant involvement in sports, arts, music, dance and other structured activities so that they "will not miss out". Let them find out on their own what they are interested in, do not force these on them. No-one will ever mis out if they are not interested in the first place.

Parents who never let their kids run around outside with the neighborhood kids because "its too dangerous outside". The real facts are that your kids have around a .000001% chance of being snatched from your neighborhood and an 85% chance of them being abused by either a family friend of relative. Give your kids the benefit of the doubt when it comes to street smarts. Billions of kids have lived in their neighborhoods before yours have and never got snatched. Its only the rare ones who do.

Parents who accompany their kids to job interviews. If I were an employer and saw this, the kids would never get hired. I wouldn't even interview them, because their parents would answer all the questions and it shows no independence on the part of the kids.

Parents who accompany their kids to university and college orientations and the like. Like the job interviews, I would never let the kids into the schools until they showed initiative. I would always suspect that their parents were secretly doing their homework for them.

Parents who use cell phone GPS systems to track their kids movements 24/7. If you don't trust your kids, who do you trust?

Parents who refuse to set boundaries for their kids and yet never let them know right from wrong. Kids need boundaries and discipline to be shown what their physical and mental limits really are. That is the role of parents and educators. Kids are not in charge of the adult world for good reason; they can't handle it most of the time.

Parents who structure their every day around their kids' needs and activities so much that they (the parents) burn out. You do not need to spend all of your waking time with them to know where they are or what they are doing. You only need to trust them to do what is right for themselves.

Parents who force their kids to socialize at all costs, even if they really don't want to. Kids will socialize when and where they will. You cannot force introverts to become extroverts just as you cannot physically change their eye colour. They are who they are and forcing social skills on them is only going to warp them into something they are not going to be.

Parents who never have any time to educate their kids about morals and ethics, leaving these up to the ineffective school systems. Ethics and morals are taught by example, not by textbooks. If you are not demonstrating these to them every day by your own conduct and decisions, you are not doing your job as a parent.

Parents who lavish too much attention on their kids, caving in to their every need, no matter how outrageous. If you are not the parent, then who is? Are they in charge of your bank accounts?

Parents who want to be their kids' "best friend" instead of being the authority figure. Best friends do not impose discipline or boundaries like parents have to. Best friends let each other do what they want, when they want, no matter what the consequences are, even if it means jail time, physical injury or death.

Parents who let their kids call them by their first names (as well as other adults). This is a serious lack of respect being shown. Like wanting to be your kids' best friend, you are telling them that they are equals in responsibility and maturity. But that won't be the case until they grow up (if they ever can).

Parents who let professionals interfere with their natural rights as providers of discipline, order and safety in their kids' lives. The many doctors and other experts in child care do not see how they are interfering with the natural course of events. They see dollar signs when parents come to them with problems, not children doing what comes naturally to them.; testing boundaries.

Parents who never use reasonable force to discipline their kids. All criminal codes allow for parents to use reasonable force when disciplining their kids. That means they can be spanked or slapped on the wrist when young enough to know that what they are doing is not good for them. They can be given curfews or denied privileges when older. Other species of mammals always use such measures to keep their young from harm's way or to teach them the social order. People have been doing this for countless generations, so why did we stop?

Parents who buy their kids' affection with gifts all the time and for no reason. Not only does this give them a sense of entitlement far out of proportion to who they really are and what they deserve, but it doesn't teach them the value of money. They do not "need" anything more than the basic necessities of life. iPods, iPads, cell phones and other luxury gadgets are never going to be necessities, ever. The same goes for designer clothes, designer shoes, bikes and other items that cost a lot of money and are trendy.

Parents who have no boundaries or discipline themselves. Kids generally mimic what they see their parents do, if they can. Career criminals often have career criminal kids. The same goes for the generations on welfare.

Its probably not fair to single out parents in this mess all the time, but who do kids usually spend most of the time with, other than peer groups and teachers? Their families and parents.

Purely and simply, everyone knows some kids whose lives are messed up in one or more of the above ways and the current generation of twenty-somethings and teens and tweens know no other way of being. Many of them are from affluent middle or upper class families with a few from lower class families.

The constant trait among them all is an unwillingness to understand that they are not the "precious snowflakes" their parents have made them out to be and the world does not and has never owed them a living.

Nope, what the last 30 years of liberal parenting has done is create what I call Parent Induced Helplessness Syndrome, where every major and many minor decisions made by kids have to made by their parents or with so much parental involvement that they are really not making the decisions at all. It is increasingly apparent that few of these "precious snowflakes" have the critical thinking skills or decision making abilities to do much on their own. And when they do, its usually the wrong things with the wrong results.

Parent Induced Helplessness Syndrome (PIHS pronounced "piss") is a very real problem and one that the experts are not going to cure anytime soon. They are too busy making money by interfering with parent's rights to even study it.

So parents, stop doing the trendy helicopter/hyper parenting thing and ask your grandparents (unless they were hippies or New Agers) how to take control over your household and prevent this common and dangerous social disease from spreading.

Go back to a time when parents were parents and kids had few options but to obey you and knew their true boundaries. Generations upon generations did this before you did, so do it, for your children's sake.

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.