How to land your kids in therapy.
A really fantastic, insightful article on how well-meaning, informed, supportive parents are fucking up their kids just as badly as the inattentive, shitty ones.
Comments
Interesting read. It has definitely occurred to me that not letting children fail (non-competitive sports) will probably hurt over the long haul.
I dunno if you read the whole thing, but I’ve been reading over the course of the day and I can’t tell you how many things seemed to jump out at me like “THAT’S ME!” All our parents were trained to raise us this certain way and then everyone wonders what’s wrong with our generation. Hopefully if people keep reading stuff like this, the next generation won’t be quite as bad as the one currently in college right now.
SEE ALSO: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/
If people aren’t failing, they are really missing out, because they probably aren’t taking chances. The most important things that have happened to me are the results of pretty big failures. And unlike the woman visiting the therapist, I am happy with my nice, average life.
Between the article I posted, and the one Mags posted, it’s a wonder I’m not a complete fuckup (or at least I’m blissfully unaware of it). As it is, I’ve got some mild narcissism coupled a case of smart-kid syndrome where I give up too easily on things that don’t come naturally and it’s a struggle. But I think back, I think, even if my parents had treated me completely differently, I was still getting told how smart and special I was by my teachers and relatives, and random people. So I’m left wondering if, as a future parent, the idea of having some sort of control over how your kid turns out is a farce.
We are all fucked, is what
Having control over how your kids turn out is a total farce. But not because of any particular way you parent. But because you have no control over what the outside world does. And after about age 5 or 6 they spend probably as much time with other people as they do with you. All you have control over is how you teach them to handle other people and other situations. But even then there are still a million other factors over which you have no control.
So it’s not that parents fuck you up (all though they can and do contribute), it’s that parents biggest mistake is thinking they have control over anything more than at most 25-30% of all the assorted things that make kids turn out the way they do.
What is a fuckup anyway? Maybe the problem isn’t that we are all screwed up, but how we measure success.
I agree with Kevin that all you can do is teach your kids how to handle other people and situations. And that includes modeling decent behavior, not just sitting the kid down and telling him what to do.