OK, I picked the blog title largely to share one of my favourite Seinfeld clips:
The title has a little more meaning than that. In recent weeks, I have had a number of people share this quote with me that has gone viral on social media:
This quote really has me thinking. I am not sure. I get this is the popular opinion. We are quick to want to pile-on that parents today have lowered their expectations and increased the enabling of their children. These kinds of issues are not simple. Yes, adults have changed, but so has the world around us. We need to be careful not to romanticize the return to a past that had its share of challenges and deficiencies.
There is no shortage of parenting books out there with advice for how adults should act with their children. Last week we had Dr. Shimi Kang speak in our community. Her book, The Dolphin Parent, is a National Bestseller. She notes that there are numerous new pressures on parents of the twenty-first century, suggesting issues like tougher school admissions, globalization and in-turn greater competition, the boom in technology and economic uncertainty are causing parents to act differently. She says, “These uncertainties are unsettling; they unmoor us and make us question some of the basic truths we have lived by. Even the best-intentioned parents among us are confused and frightened.”
So perhaps it is out of this fear that parents have, which emerges what Martin sees in the changing parents.
The best book I have read on the topic is How to Raise and Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims. She spent a decade as the Dean of Freshman at Stanford.
She sets the context which she sees in parents today:
Too many of us do some combination of overdirecting, over-protecting, or over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives. We treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens and provide a deliberate, measured amount of care and feeding while running interference on all that might toughen and weather them. But humans need some degree of weathering in order to survive the larger challenges life will throw our way. Without experiences the rougher spots of life, our kids become exquisite, like orchids, yet are incapable, sometimes terribly incapable, of thriving in the real world on their own. Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to protecting them from life, which means they’re not prepared to live life on their own?
It is this context that Martin’s quote seems to be speaking to.
Lythcott-Haims outlines numerous steps, small and large, parents can do to change things and allow children to chart their own path. She says:
As parents our dream was to have a child, but we can’t forget that our children have the right to dream for themselves. There is much more to each precious, unique child than we can possibly know, and that unique person – that self is for each young person to discover. We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to millstone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But over helping causes harm. It can leave young adults without strengths of skill, will, and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.
The more I read about the changing world with greater unpredictability and uncertainty I definitely appreciate urges to want to do more for our children, and not less. Especially when I am sure our neighbours are definitely doing more for their children – at least it sure looks that way on social media.
As a parent in these times I have empathy for the adults that Martin calls out. And I don’t think it is simple. But Kang and her reasoned approach to parenting and Lythcott-Haims and her view that we need to give our children’s lives back to them are important messages. They are ones we all likely know and agree with but ones we need to keep repeating.
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