This insightful article was published 4 years ago by the Washington Post yet couldn't be more timely for the modern day parent. I love this quote:
"Let's shore up boundaries and let them be kids in the kid zone. And
let's allow them to experience some of life's disappointments. Let's
talk on the phone and go out on weekends with our friends. Let's start
worrying less whether our kids are happy all the time and more about
whether we are enjoying them and ourselves. Let's get a life in the
parent zone."
The article (and link) is below in its entirety.
Happy Gswede Sunday!
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A Lost Art: Instilling Respect
By Patricia Dalton
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
There's been a fundamental change in family life, and it has played out
over the years in my office. Teachers, pediatricians and therapists like
me are seeing children of all ages who are not afraid of their parents.
Not one bit. Not of their power, not of their position, not of their
ability to apply standards and enforce consequences.
I am not advocating authoritarian or abusive parental behavior, which
can do untold damage. No, I am talking about a feeling that was common
to us baby boomers when we were kids. One of my friends described it
this way: "All my mother had to do was shoot me a
look." I knew
exactly what she was talking about. It was a look that stopped us in our
tracks -- or got us moving. And not when we felt like it.
Now.
These days, that look seems to have been replaced by a feeble nod of
parental acquiescence -- and an earnest acknowledgment of "how hard it
is to be a kid these days."
In my office, I have seen small children call their parents names and
tell them how stupid they are; I have heard adolescents use strings of
expletives toward them; and I remember one 6-year-old whose parents told
me he refused to obey, debated them ad nauseam and sometimes even
lashed out. As if on cue, the boy kicked his father right there in the
office. When I asked the father how he reacts at home, he told me that
he runs to another room!
It came to me like a lightning bolt: Not only are the kids unafraid of their parents, parents are afraid of their kids!
What ever happened to the colorful phrases our parents relied on to put
us in our place? "Keep your shirt on." "On the double." "What do you
think we are, made of money?" "Because I said so." "If you want
sympathy, look it up in the dictionary." Or one of my personal
favorites: "Don't bother me unless you're bleeding," which a friend's
mother said to her six kids when she sat down to read before dinner.
The Honor Is Yours
Today's generation of children is the most closely observed, monitored,
cherished and scheduled in our history. They are also the most praised.
Families are smaller, and there are fewer children upon whom parents can
beam their attention.
Today there are moms and dads who aren't just parents -- they believe in
"parenting." They read volumes and volumes about how to be good parents
and view parenting as both an art and a science that must be studied
and updated and practiced self-consciously. Letting children run around
the neighborhood and be bored some of the time is anathema to them.
Many parents these days don't expect their children to contribute much
around the house, although they do expect them to achieve outside the
house. They have strong beliefs about what makes children successful and
happy-ever-after, and underpinning those beliefs is the concept that
they -- the parents -- are all-important in this quest. Such parents
believe that self-esteem is the key to lifetime success, and to this end
they compliment their children a lot.
They are egalitarian, and they believe families should be democracies.
Needless to say, they don't give orders. They believe that children will
do things when they are ready to. They ask their child politely if he
or she will do something and are surprised and dismayed when the
response is "no."
It's as if parents have rewritten the Fourth Commandment to read, "Honor thy children."
And, boy, are they paying for it.
When a teacher, pediatrician or therapist suggests that perhaps these
"parenting" behaviors are not helping but in fact causing harm, such
earnest parents can be hard to convince. They don't want to have to hear
that their New Age concepts for raising kids not only do not work, but
actually are prescriptions for disaster.
'Scrumptious'? Please.
Let's take the constant parental praise. I first noticed it when my
three children were small, and I would hear mothers lauding their kids'
incredible artwork or rich vocabulary. I can recall one mother who
brought her 6-year-old to my office after the school observed some
social difficulties. "Isn't she scrumptious?" she said, in front of her
beaming daughter. (I made a mental note to myself: This may be part of
the problem.)
After all, there is a difference between appreciation, which is from the heart, and flattery, which is from the mouth.
Starting in the mid-1990s, a team led by psychologist Carol Dweck did a
series of experiments on fifth-graders over a 10-year period. One study
compared two randomized groups of children in a classroom setting. In
one group, researchers attributed children's achievement to their effort
and in the other to their intelligence. Those praised for their hard
work, it turned out, were more likely to attempt difficult tasks and
performed better than those praised for intelligence. Children who were
told that innate intelligence is the key were less likely to expend
effort and take risks, perhaps because they were trying to maintain an
image that they felt was not under their control.
A later study that Dweck conducted among seventh- and eighth-graders
confirmed these findings and found that an effort mind-set also led to
higher achievement, as measured by math grades.
More-serious concerns were raised by a 1996 review of 200 studies on
self-esteem by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State
University. Rather than promoting success, he found that an
"unrealistically positive self-appraisal" was linked to aggression,
crime and violence.
It all makes a therapist long for the days of the good old inferiority
complex. And for parents who could put children in their place. Some
interesting research on interpersonal attraction has shown that
self-confidence in combination with some degree of vulnerability makes a
person more appealing to others. Unshakable self-regard is a liability.
And dominance is the kiss of death.
Over-parented and under-disciplined children can also have trouble later
as young adults with the process of separating from home and creating
an independent life. Kids who were constantly praised often become
thin-skinned adults who have trouble taking negative feedback on their
job or in their personal lives. And I have had more than one client over
the years who was positively indignant when a boss expected him or her
to be at work on time and to call in sick only when necessary.
Kids who were told, "You can do anything," may have extremely high
expectations that can be hard to attain in our multifaceted modern
lives. In her 2006 book, "Generation Me," Jean Twenge, a psychologist at
San Diego State University, documented an enormous rise in young
people's expectations from the late '60s to the late '90s. Twenge refers
to a quote from the character Tyler Durden in the movie "Fight Club":
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be
millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're
slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very [ticked] off."
Maybe it wouldn't be so painful if parents would sign on to the
following manifesto: Let's expect more help from our kids around the
house and withdraw some of our frenetic investment in their academic,
sporting and social achievements. Let's shore up boundaries and let them
be kids in the kid zone. And let's allow them to experience some of
life's disappointments. Let's talk on the phone and go out on weekends
with our friends. Let's start worrying less whether our kids are happy
all the time and more about whether we are enjoying them and ourselves.
Let's get a life in the parent zone. And last but not least, let's
resurrect an old concept: Father and Mother Know Best. ?
Patricia Dalton is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Washington.
A lovely path to paradise in southern Sweden
