Parents: Are You Sucking the Life out of Your Children’s Independence?
My, my, how the times have changed us! In our grandparent’s time, children worked alongside the adults to help keep the family business afloat. In our parent’s time, the comforts of modern day living freed children from having to work, enabling parents to spend more time simply loving their children. In today’s families, a higher standard of living and more available resources has resulted in our children not just being loved – they are cherished!
So is cherishing children a bad thing? If it leads to sucking the independence out of them, then definitely so!
Too often I see situations in which parents so desperately want their children to experience the best in life, they refuse to allow their children to fail. But stumbling and making mistakes are vital tasks of childhood.
Childhood is like an 18-year-long laboratory experiment. Few experiments are successful at the first attempt. With each failure, the child learns something valuable and utilizes this experience next time a similar situation is approached. Children need to be able to make mistakes. From their mistakes they learn consequences for the decisions they have made. For example, a child quickly learns that the decision to play video games all evening instead of completing his homework will result in a teacher annoyed that he is unprepared. This child will undoubtedly be displeased with the consequence – earning a poor grade. The teenager who spends her entire allowance impulsively on cosmetics will learn the consequence of her decision when she has no money to join her friends at the movies.
For a variety of reasons, parents all too often rescue their children from making mistakes. In the above homework example, many cherishing parents will call the teacher and make excuses. Or they will complete the homework for the child. Likewise, some rescuing parents will prevent their child from learning the lessons of failing to budget one’s money by providing money for the movies.
Too many parents are living vicariously through their children. Either they don’t want to see them as less than perfect, they’re competitively trying to keep their children on par with the other kids in the class, they feel that perfection is the only way to get into a much desired college and secure a future in an uncertain world, or they simply don’t like to see their child momentarily unhappy. Unfortunately, the end result is the same in all the above experiences - the child’s emotional development is thwarted.
To rescue our children is to convey the message that we don’t believe they have the capacity to do things on their own. Granted, they won’t always select the best option, but any selection (so long as it is not life threatening) offers life lessons that will aid them in future selections. As parents, we can help them process the results so that they can learn what aspects of their decision making was good, and what they would like to do differently next time.
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