<p>Cheers, my gripe isn’t that the disclaimers don’t exempt the “poor”. It is us ordinary middle class folk that don’t quite fit, either. Yes, here in California our kids did go to schools where there was a big push toward “self-esteem” – in kindergarten, every kid got to be VIP for a week, and everyone was special. But my point is that it never worked, except maybe to shave off some of the rough edges. I didn’t really mourn the loss of the practice of having kids pick their teams for school playground sports, one at a time, until the worst players were left isolated or standing alone. Nor was I upset when the day care staff made all the kids apologize for teasing the little boy whose brain surgery had left him with partial paralysis on one side of his body. A little bit of enforced niceness is not such a bad thing. But honestly, the self-esteem movement did no more to change the essential nature of things in the classroom and the playground than sensitivity training sessions do to change the workplace environment. The fact that it is no long considered p.c. for a teacher to scream at a kid and call him an idiot in front of the class doesn’t mean that the kids are being pampered. </p>
<p>The kids you read about here on CC haven’t grown up in a world where they are over-praised. The opposite has occured: the most frequent posters are overly competitive, distressed if they can’t manage to attain scores and grades that put them at the very top. They are in school environments where they are overworked and overstressed – taking half a dozen AP’s. </p>
<p>And the major trend in American education is to force all kids into more standardized testing - in many parts of the country, individual performance on norm-referenced group standardized tests scores are also used to determine whether or not a child is allowed to advance to the next grade, starting as early as 3rd grade. When an 8 year old is made painfully aware of his percentile ranked performance… when “normal” is not seen as good enough because all schools are required by law to “improve” from year to year by increasing test performance accross-the-board among every imaginable segment or subgroup of children, its hard to see where we would find an “overpraised” kid. </p>
<p>Yes, parents and kids do come to this board to brag, but most do so here because it is not socially acceptable for them to do so in real life. Even here, the bragging can be offputting, especially since it seems that in the anonymity afforded by the internet, truth has become somewhat elusive. </p>
<p>There are probably dozens of honest criticisms that can be leveled at the obsessive, HYP-bound kids and their parents who form a core group of this board. But “wimps” – they are not.</p>
<p>Fair enough calmom. However, the jist of the main article was the “attention-seeking” behavior that accompanies the self-esteem movement that accompanies our generation. “Wimp” was taken from a supporting quote. [Still, try not to take ‘wimp’ as a persoanl insult–take it as the Chinese mean it when they say that Americans can’t do bitter. Compared to the Chinese and what they haved lived through, it is unlikely that Americans could tolerate the Chinese version of bitter–even poor Americans. Do we need to be able to that kind of bitter? What level of bitter could our children tolerate?] </p>
<p>In fairness to schools, the “you can’t say you can’t play” movement did help build better communities. Teaching for tolerance does work. America is a more tolerant nation than most and a better demcracy for that tolerance.</p>
<p>However, somewhere, somehow, an unusual sense of entitlement got mixed up with the ‘self-esteem’ movement. Who hasn’t seen the obnoxiously self-righteous retail customer or parent who believes their self-esteem has been impinged? Hell hath no fury like the dissed–in 2005.</p>
<p>No, the nation isn’t going to Hades, but what an interesting phenomena our generation has created. </p>
<p>The kids on CC HAVE grown up overpraised (which might differ from over-indulged)–based on parent posts only. </p>
<p>Bragging and attention seeking on CC? The 18 year old version is acceptable, some honestly needing more than others. The privileged 45 year old version is much muchless attractive–even in an anonymous forum. It’s downright needy. Why is it there at all? So often the parent has a wonderful child, a true blessing to behold. Any student bound for a top 100 school is an indulged student indeed. Why all the angst amongst all of us?</p>
<p>Cheers,
Not to debate self-esteem as such, but to take up your point about parental behavior on CC. I am sure that many posters would not want to discuss the shortcomings of their offspring on a public forum such as CC. They might mention some–to them–fairly innocuous failings such as failure to keep their rooms tidy, having to be rousted out of bed, etc… As a result of this desire not to criticize their children to complete strangers, they may sound like overpraising. I would not take what is written or not written on CC as an accurate gauge of their relationships with their children.
On another note,I don’t think it necessarily takes a lot of money to be overprotective of one’s kids. Just the other day, there was a news item about a father in Springfield, MA, who punched a ref for making a negative call against his son.</p>
<p>Policy Review is a journal founded by the Heritage Foundation. What did you expect from a journal that feautres among its contributors: Tucker Carlson; Dinesh D’Souza; Michael Johns;Elliott Abrams; Dick Armey; William F. Buckley, Jr.;Tom Clancy; Bob Dole; and Daniel Pipes?</p>
<p>Geez. Right-wingers and NeoCons. They hate everyone.</p>
<p>Right wing neo-Con. Were that true, my father’s legion of prayers would have been answered. hah!</p>
<p>Does this article have no merit because of the journal it’s published in? Must we strictly site articles from ‘neutral’ publishers? Would you mind posting a list of those publishers? Between barrons and driver spitting on EVERYTHING in the NYT and this new objection, one is at loss as to what one should read.</p>
It absolutely does not, since it clearly violates the absolutely-relative-absolutes of Liberal Scripture:
never, ever refer to the texts of other faiths while making small-talk with the fundamentalist “libertine-and-lovin-it” crowd.<br>
Its unseemly and unnecessary.</p>
The article is an advocacy piece that is framed in language typically used to further a right wing agenda - it has “merit” if you are able to read it critically, recognizing and taking into account the bias and the agenda the article is trying to promote. The bias of the journal itself is part of the task of critical reading – just as I know that an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal is likely to offer a different perspective than one published in The Nation. </p>
<p>However, as far as I can tell, the article has nothing whatsoever in the way of factual support. Just the usual set of anecdotes ascribed to unknown persons - the mother who is tallying up her hours to compete with the nanny, etc.</p>
<p>Fair enough, the ‘sources’ cited by this author are primarily other articles–many of which have already been debated on CC. Opinion pieces are not academic or scientific papers however. </p>
<p>Funnliy enough, I have spent many hours in the offices of the left wing publication you cite. My question was a rhetorical one–meant for PR and NYT bashers alike.</p>
<p>Clearly, many Americans do not think it is possible read the article for merit outside of it’s (scary?) RW agenda. Left-wing editors in other countries must be more confident. I looked up the article after reading an excerpt in an overseas newspaper.</p>
<p>marite: I haven’t ‘met’ any CC posters. I have no idea if the posting personality is more attention-seeking than the actual one. I doubt it but those who have met lots of CC posters would be better judges?</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a matter of meeting people personally. It’s a matter of how you deal with your kid as opposed to how your present said kid to outsiders. Most people think that whatever scolding is administered should be done in private, though praise can be public. Parents are surely the same.</p>
<p>Another possible explanation is that many posters use CC to say things they do not feel they can say face to face to their acquaintances and neighbors. For example, in April, many posters will post their kids’ acceptances, but will try to refrain in person for the sake of other kids who did not get into their top choice. So I would not take CC behavior as necessarily indicative of how they behave in “real life,” though posters who sound overanxious on CC may have trouble refraining from communicating their anxiety to their kids.</p>
<p>I have many times encouraged “boasting” parents to read CC. They truly believe their child is so super special that HYP etc will of course accept the child. Other parents push child to go to “most prestigious” school accepted, even if school is far away and the child is not ready to be that far from home.The “narcissism” of these parents is that they try to live vicariously thru the child. I think the reverse of this is why so many CC’ers are reluctant to say where their child goes to school, if it IS HYP etc.
Kids do have ways to fight back; they blow major tests, act out with substance abuse, eating disorders, and procrastination of applications. I’m sure many other ways too</p>
<p>My Dad used to call these kids “gutless wonders” so I guess we had them in the fifties, too. (And probably the forties, thirties, etc.) It’s the sheer number of them these days that is disheartening - and most seem to have parents with acute controlling natures who have way too much time on their hands…</p>
<p>I really didn’t see much of this at my son’s private middle school or public high school, though I have read descriptions of these stereotypes from many sources over the past few years. </p>
<p>I do see savvy parents determined to be advocates for their children in ways that might not have been prevalent 10 years ago - for instance, going up the chain at the College Board to ensure that their child’s case for test accomodations is heard, or working tirelessly to identify a set of great colleges (like 95% percent of us on CC). That may be partially a legacy of the 60s - we stopped the war through passion and effort, QED, we can be great parents by the same route. Remember that the 60s teenagers were also 50s kids - we grew up with our hands on our heart fervently repeating the pledge of allegiance every morning in a culture where “hard work is always rewarded” was the collective wisdom. We benefited from the inspiration of Kennedy, the space program, civil rights victories - how hard can parenting be after that? In fact, success with one’s child (i.e., the child has developed his/her own interests and passions, is confident about life, goes after what they want, knows who they are, relates happily with others, has mastered the cultural idiom, and did reasonably well in school) - is far more satisfying than the deteriorating greater legacy we now have to watch disintegrating around us (e.g., Maureen Dowd’s recent NY Times article on feminism in the twenty-first century). No wonder people put so much effort into it.</p>