Are Parents Ruining Their Children

Are parents ruining their children?

This expansive article by Psychology Today, first released in 2004, says yes.

It says that from infancy on, helicopter parents cushion their children’s failures while pushing them ever harder for success, and if that success doesn’t come naturally, well, the parents help the children along. Anything for a successful child. It concludes that the obsession with perfection from a young age prevents children from growing up. It sites increased depression and anxiety diagnoses and a slowed rate of adults actually being adults (which they define as completing school, holding down a job and starting a family) to back this theory up.

And it’s not that I don’t agree, necessarily. I think the five-page article brings up many valid points and that parents need to re-look at their dealings with their kids.

But I think those studying this need to take our society into consideration. Remember, if your studies start in 1988 and end in 2004, or continue to the present, you are using the same subjects as both the children and the parents. That’s important. For if this child-adults you speak of actually are the parents, then it’s no wonder why they coddle their kids the way they do. They don’t know any different. You cannot in one breath complain at the immaturity of adults today, then turn around and say those adults should know better while rearing their own kids. Of course they don’t.

This is a long-term problem that has been getting worse very very gradually, not just in the last 20, 30 or even 50 years.

As we become more technologically advanced, we are coming up with solutions to problems prevalent in the 1980s. In twenty years from now, the technology will be focused on eradicating the new problems brought into existence by our current solutions to our old problems. This is a pattern that’s gone on from the beginning of human existence. It can hardly be blamed solely on “hothouse” parenting.

 

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