<p>Has this been posted somewhere yet? It’s an interesting article on how the obsession with our kids happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods:</p>
<p>[How</a> to Land Your Kid in Therapy - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/]How”>How to Land Your Kid in Therapy - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>Interesting reading, thanks for posting.</p>
<p>Wow! Dead on accurate! I’m going to read it again and let it sink in some more. I’ve already emailed it to my DH and kids.</p>
<p>Great article. Thanks for posting it.</p>
<p>Reading this today was therapeutic. DD got very angry at me last night (called me “mean”) for daring to suggest that one aspect of her pending job application was rather weak. I told her that this relative weakness might result in rejection, and therefore she should keep applying to other opportunities. Now, I have always been “mean,” which I think has served my children well. If I said they did well, they could trust I meant it. However, my DD is witnessing her friends receive a much kinder and gentler parenting, which sounds like the equivalent of giving them trophies they don’t deserve. She has implied that their parents love them more. Sigh.</p>
<p>Great article, thanks!</p>
<p>I loved this quote:</p>
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<p>OK so what IF? Your child is away at School 500 miles from home, living on their own, learning to become independent, learning how to be social, and has Autism?</p>
<p>Then what? Yes this article hit me head on. My wife and I are guilty as charged. But when my son was 2 years old the Neurologist told us that his future was dim and that we could expect severe mental retartion and that he was Autisitic.</p>
<p>After 19 years of being “the perfect parents” he is on his own on his second semester so far so good. Sure he could have more friends and be more social. But I learned long ago that life is taken one step at a time.</p>
<p>Maybe for typical kids too much love is counter productive but in the case of students with special needs this love is mandatory.</p>
<p>My take is that this article, and others like it, is just more feeding on parental insecurity-the very problem it purports to address. Neglect your kids, you’re a bad parent. Dote on your kids, you’re a bad parent. Either way, you screw them up. Pay on the way out. Good grief.</p>
<p>“my DD is witnessing her friends receive a much kinder and gentler parenting, which sounds like the equivalent of giving them trophies they don’t deserve. She has implied that their parents love them more.”</p>
<p>My standard line with my kids is that I won’t allow them to (do something I think is age-inappropriate) because I “love them more than their friends’ parents love them.” We all know it’s a joke, but still…</p>
<p>so loving parents = feeling empty as an adult…stopped at that point</p>
<p>Snarky response to the article:</p>
<p>Anyone know the old saw about students going into psychiatry to figure out their own issues?</p>
<p>Anyone here read John Rosemond’s column?</p>
<p>The GFG–I had to think of my own mother, who assured us she could be very mean, and it was all for our own good. :D</p>
<p>A major problem in our culture is self imposed adult ADD… The need to be given all information in one paragraph or less, and the inability to continue reading beyond the first sentence we disagree with.</p>
<p>So, to recap, in one paragraph or less, the point of this article was that we need to learn to deal with a bit of adversity when we are young so that we develop confidence in our ability to deal with real life adversity when we face it as adults. Parents need to allow their children to fall down, to lose, to get cut from a team, to fail, to earn a bad grade, so that they can discover their own resiliency. Parents just need to back off a bit. Kids don’t need to be happy all the time. The parenting sweet spot is actually pretty wide.</p>
<p>First person who says they stopped reading my post after the second sentence wins a trophy.</p>
<p>Or maybe everyone should win a trophy. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel sad or left out.</p>
<p>Yes, allowing your kids to fail and pick themselves up is as important as teaching them to succeed. You are not being a mean parent when you set reasonable boundaries nor are you a permissive parent if you allow your kids to experience life’s adverse situations.</p>
<p>Q; What about allowing them to experience THIS kind of adversity?
–get bad grades and …
–take drugs and get in a variety of trouble
–drive willy nilly before they are really good drivers with good reflexes
–rely on parents’ money until age 21 or later with no savings or job experience
–party and have fun before schoolwork, EC’s, job gets done</p>
<p>THESE sorts of “adversity” should be PREVENTED, and would occur in the case of either negligent OR super-loving (coddling) parents!!!</p>
<p>SELF-RELIANCE includes the ability to recover from adversity (hopefully not too serious, but…).
SELF-CONTROL and the ability to POSTPONE GRATIFICATION are key to survival with any degree of safety. When we say “no” as parents, we are the self-control that the kids ultimately need to develop for themselves. And “no” can come with a lot of other great things, like explanations, negotiations, love, and so forth.</p>
<p>Without structure, a kid cannot develop inner controls to use later as an adult (anyone heard of the “super-ego”?)</p>
<p>Freedom must be earned and come with the ability to see and and handle the commensurate “responsibilities”.</p>
<p>"Ok, you want to drive? You need to practice a lot, and to pass the drivers test and get your license, then practice more. You need to learn how to put gas in the car, and how will you pay for that? What about car insurance? What are the rules of the road? You will pay for all tickets… And no texting or cell phone use by driver, no driving ever while under the influence, and care must be taken when driving with a group of friends… "
blah blah blah</p>
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Thank you, sunmachine! There’s got to be money in undermining parental confidence - soooo many experts out there want to do exactly that.
Briefly, till I realized how much I disliked the guy. We had an interesting thread that touched on his precise credentials last year: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1209103-im-over-younger-children-i-feel-bad-saying.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1209103-im-over-younger-children-i-feel-bad-saying.html</a> starting around post 51. Eye-opening.</p>
<p>Do we really need to be second-guessing ourselves, and others, about how now-grown kids were raised? Even if we were to agree (and I wouldn’t) that unhappy adult children are all our fault - then what? “Experts” with diametrically opposed beliefs have been haranguing parents for years. Ferberizing vs. attachment parenting; scheduled feedings vs. nursing on cue; spanking vs. not. Do many parents really put their own intuition on hold because an expert says to parent another way? I’ve made parenting mistakes but fortunately, my kids were resilient (and forgiving). As was I.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the article. Kind of with sunmachine, though. It seems like no matter what parents do, their kids might not turn out to be happy people. Hmmmm. Could it be that happiness really does come from within, and is not always a direct result of how your parents parented you?</p>
<p>So it sounds like the way people used to parent many generations ago should be back in style then rather than the kinder, gentler style of parenting we have now. Because my parents and their parents are so much more stable than kids today - they don’t need a psychologist at all. Yeah, right.</p>
<p>If we as parents can teach our kids to be “productive” adults in society and give them the ability to take personal responsibility of their actions, then I think that in itself is a success. Sounds simple and yet is increasingly rare.</p>
<p>yay for your post, straightshooter.</p>