"We Protect Our Kids from Everything but Fear"
So says Paula Spencer, author of Momfidence!: An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Secrets of Happier Parenting,
in a My Turn Newsweek Column this week:
Rush Limbaugh read Ms. Spencer's Newsweek column on his show yesterday afternoon--and said this to his listeners:
I guess we're just raising the next Nation of Wimps.
in a My Turn Newsweek Column this week:It's not that I think parents shouldn't worry about anything. I'm personally petrified of SUV drivers on cell phones. I fret as much as the next mom about how to pay for college. I pray my kids won't wander onto MySpace and post something dumb.
But you can't go around afraid of everything. It's too exhausting! No matter how careful you are, bad stuff happens (diaper rash, stitches, all your friends assigned to another class). And it's seldom the end of the world.
Watching my daughter's friends ogle my pantry, I realized there's one big, legitimate fear that I haven't heard anybody mention: what's the effect of our collective paranoia on the kids? Yes, these very kids we want to be so self-sufficient, responsible, confident, happy and creative (not to mention not food-obsessed). They're growing up thinking these weirdly weenie views are healthy and normal.
Rush Limbaugh read Ms. Spencer's Newsweek column on his show yesterday afternoon--and said this to his listeners:
We have all of this paranoia: "This is going to cause this! This is going to get you sick! This is going to get you this! This is going to cause that," and every day there's more of it released, and it's just absurd. So she's right. There is a climate out there that's creating paranoia and fear of nature, human and otherwise, to the point that people are expecting that it's entirely possible to have a flawless existence -- one with little danger, one with hardly any disappointment, one with no failure -- and we want to shield all of our young people from the slightest bit of confrontation, the slightest bit of pain, discomfort, and all of the lessons that life teaches.
I guess we're just raising the next Nation of Wimps.
posted by Helen at 5:08 PM
26 Comments:
What I find funny is that America is the big bully country which stands ready to invade in to protect "freedom"(or oil), for our flag, on account of our national pride, etc. etc. yet, without a doubt, we are raising the biggest bunch of wimpy, prescription drug-dependent, depressed and neurotic children on the planet. The two situations are on a collision course destined for disasterous results.
Cham,
The collision course will happen when we stop producing brave soldiers who help protect our country. These men are cut from a different cloth than the depressed wimpy kids (and their parents) you are talking about. The biggest problem will occur when wimps run the country and do not allow soldiers to do their job. I have more faith in our younger generations than that, however.
We are raising a generation of wimps and most of the blame lies upon the women and the family court system. A culture of societal liberalism (not the false dichotomy of the left and right but the fruit of French liberalism that is to say the Revolution)wherein every woman is a Diva but no man is a Deus even though we are supposed to be children of the 'Enlightenment'--this is the worst society and civilization the world has ever seen. Just keep appealing to your flattery and the innumerable college graduates who just take a major the state says will make them a 'productive citizen' and you will see the America is the United Socialist States of America---thus, it is either time to swallow the bitter pill of reform or every true patriot should instigate a revolution.
off topic: Instahusband mentioned that blogger ate a post you'd put a couple of hours of work into. I am confused. Don't you first write your post on your local computer with Word (or equivalent) and then copy-paste into blogger (or into notepad and then into blogger to get rid of the formatting)? Don't you keep local, backed-up copies of everything you write? Just confused and curious about what "blogger ate my post" means. Sorry for the off-topic entry.
I don't know about what helen is experiencing, but I bought a new computer with Vista over the weekend and I am having a heck of a time posting comments to blogger. It times out at the drop of a hat.
A nation of wimps is better than a Rush Limbauh-oid Nation of Blimps!
Trying to be healthy isn't paranoid; it's thinking positively. It's thinking "I can do something smart that's good for us."
There is such a thing as paranoia about paranoia!!!
BTW, about the "Blogger ate my post" controversy, Blogger does do auto-backups--just not frequently enough.
Cham is an idiot.
You, Dr Helen, are a treasure, and any kid would be lucky to have you as a mom.
"A nation of wimps is better than a Rush Limbauh-oid Nation of Blimps!"
The anon who wrote this must be a female. First of all who said that anything on this post or even in reality is based upon the false dialectic of left,right and middle? Why does Limbaugh represent the so-called right? Being a wimp is a matter relating to the absence of moral character and philosophical acuity not physical dominance. Ostensibly, your snipe contrasts the slim with the rotund. However, it is an observation based upon materialism (if not dialectical materialism) and since the size and amount of matter fascinates and obsesses you, are you sure that the Capitalism that spawned material excess is not concomitant with Communistic material atheism? It is time for a revolution because I am growing weary of the 'college-educated' set who cannot even think for themselves or see the what lies before their eyes. It would seem that the ubiquitous material prosperity of the 'post-enlightenment' mind is afraid to even adjudicate between what is right or wrong never mind up and down,left or right, hot or cold. The inability to do that is the hallmark of a wimp.
I do think we "project" a heck of a lot of stuff on to our children that is fear based within ourselves. Of course I believe we all must be prudent...but I think it is way over done these days.
We're there Helen.
This administration chased out any leaders with military experience.
Soldiers are only as good as their orders.
Honestly when I first read your post, I thought: "Damn, she's finally waking up and admitting her "victim views" need to change for the good of the kids. Accept the tough parts of life, don't teach them to bitch and moan about how it's all sooooo unfair!!
But now I see you must include yourself in the tough-talking, realistic, consequence facing rural, community-oriented folks who know how to live healthily and be content. Have to admit, it has run through my mind what your only child daughter will turn out with such prominent parents. Sounds like you'll be encouraging h.s. ROTC at a minimum for the discipline, and perhaps she might even apply to a service academy? Too many kids today are encouraged to put themselves first, thinking they are better than their peer, teachers, school and are being "picked on!" Glad to see your committment here extends beyond handing out Oreos to your kid and her friends.
You were being serious, and it not all just talk, right?
Otherwise, I'm with cham in number one. You can't expect somebody else's soldier sons to continue to serve so others can binge drink, and lie and cheat their way to the top. Those kids raised right are no dummies as they look around and see how others are sacrificing for them. Or not.
The search for complete security can have contrary results. As a character in Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" puts it:
"To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law - a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."
John Stoesel just commented on this in his article on fear of kidnapping.
Many kids are terrified of being kidnapped. What they do not know is that almost all of the kidnappings are parental. The stranger kidnapping, with its attached violence, is quite rare at about 111 annual cases for the US & Canada combined. Not very many!
A kid has FAR higher odds of getting run over on the street than of being kidnapped. YET, for reasons unknown, our culture seeks to scare the stuffings out of kids about being kidnapped! DUMB! Real dumb!
in the Uk we have gone one stage further, which is scary.
we have headteacher banning tag, because touching another child is contact and it could be termed abuse so this woman head, has said only shadow tag, which removes the touching from playing.
you have to wear goggles to play conkers (a horse chestnut on a string, and 2 people each swinging one till the other conker smashes, then they win). skipping ropes being banned incase the children kill themselves with them.
snowball fights are banned, as it may hurt them, or there may be a bit of gravel in them. then they complain about obesity in kids.
I'm a dad who wandered into an About.com Toddler parenting group awhile back.
I looked over some topics - one of which was the {perceived} horror show that was the Mens bathroom and how serial killers lurked in the stalls waiting for 5-6 year old boys to go take a pee by themselves.
I posted, identified myself as a male with two sons and said that the biggest concern moms should have is the cleanliness of the bathroom itself and 'curiousity' on the part of the boy. "Wash, don't stare at other people, and don't play with the thing in the urinal" was my advice.
I also recommended that the mom stand 'in the general vicinity' of the bathroom, to look at a watch, and wait about 45 seconds longer than she wanted to before she panicked.
This prompted a round of posting with suprisingly many women telling me that clearly I was naive and didn't understand the dynamics of a mens bathroom.
I underestimated the potential of violence directed against unaccompanied kids in a bathroom when their moms are standing right outside.
Oh, the bathrooms in question here are Borders Bookstore and Chick-Fil-A.
I learned a lot about women and motherhood from that experience - some are just bat-sh.t crazy.
It is the simultaneous feminisation and juvenilisation of the culture that degrades and denigrates male risk taking behavior and elevates passivity as a virtue. Its gotten to the point that when terrorists fly airplanes into buildings, there are those who say we have to understand the perpetrators anger towards us and have a dialogue with those who would rather eradicate us and our culture from the planet.
The healthy response is to recognise the threat and eliminate it, not have a chat with it or blame the victims, or some nebulous Other, like the Jooos or the Neoconsssss or BusHitler.
It is quite demented, this inability to discriminate between the two. It is even more demented to take the side of the barbarians over ones own country.
I also turn to Rush for advice on child rearing. His expertise in this area makes Chaim Ginott
seem like W.C. Fields.
My mother used to have a sign in her kitchen that I thought summed things up nicely; it said "This house is clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to happy".
My ten year old daughter will sometimes come to me with some sort of non-serious complaint.
My usual response is to say "You'll live. If not, you'll die. Either way, problem solved."
When people overhear me say this in public, the men usually laugh, and the women are horrified.
anonymous 9:44-
Accept the tough parts of life, don't teach them to bitch and moan about how it's all sooooo unfair
Yeah - why bitch and moan about unfairness when you can stand up to it and put an end to it.
Too many kids today are encouraged to put themselves first, thinking they are better than their peer, teachers, school and are being "picked on!"
Unfortunately, many kids today are being picked on. And many cowardly, gutless, juvenile teachers (being fixed in a HS mentality is what attracts many of them to the job) either join in or are too cowardly to put a stop to it.
anonymous 9:46-
Otherwise, I'm with cham in number one. You can't expect somebody else's soldier sons to continue to serve so others can binge drink, and lie and cheat their way to the top. Those kids raised right are no dummies as they look around and see how others are sacrificing for them. Or not.
What's sad is that the military and the men and women that serve in it are being abused and misused by sending them to Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
This isn't WWII. This is a group of religious fanatics numbering in the tens of thousands at most. No one needs to sacrifice in this situation, people need to put an end to it.
The best retained life lessons (outside schoolbook lessons) are those that were associated with a certain level of pain (physical or mental).
Direct observation of someone else screwing up and paying the price for it is almost as good. 2nd hand related stories rank a distant 3rd.
Watch someone in a hurry with a screwgun drive a screw right through their finger and its something you remember ;->
Watch a hotdogging parachutist smack into the ground on a landing and snap their femur in two and its something you consider when doing your own landings ;->
Get a little too sloppy when tuning a large model airplane engine...I still wear the scar on my arm from that lesson when I was about 15 years old. Never been bitten by one since ;->
purple avenger-
Interesting observations. Of course when someone inflicts pain on someone else to "teach them a lesson" that is called a crime and tort in the legal system and "teachers" like that are forced to answer for it.
Well, it should be obvious that we've spared many rods and spoiled many a child.
A don't approve of "beating" children, but the judicious swat on the rear as a child has gotten me to almost 50 years old without any interactions with the law other than a speeding ticket.
Yes, we're bringing up kids with an irrational fear of what "could" happen. But even worse is that we're bringing them up with the illusion of control. The fact is, no matter how much planning, anticipating, imagining or projecting we do, bad stuff happens. Let's not teach our kids that the underlying assumption when they're confronted by life's pitfalls is that they have somehow failed to prevent them. Better to educate the next generation in how to make the best of bad situations, learn and grow. Control is illusory.
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