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cool yet disturbing article

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A Nation of Wimps

By: Hara Estroff Marano
Summary: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.

...Causes me to both bless and curse my parents on the same breath. They're not as bad as some of those mentioned, but, god. (ask

lierdumoa sometime for the story sometime when my mother called her to hunt me down. she found her number via my phone bill. ::headdesk::)

On the one hand, I wonder how I survived. On the other, I take an honest look at myself, and wonder if I truly did.

Also:
"In an era of rampant grade inflation, some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet"

le sigh.

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When I was 16, my mom called the police to report me missing.

I had gone to work 15 minutes early.

::blinks:: Whoa.

Actually, I think I remember my mother calling the police on me several times too. Once I think I was getting ice cream, another at the public library. It was almost comic.

It's good to be loved. : )

But sometimes...maybe not so much.

Yea. I can honestly, as a parent of two boys, see that happening.

Our kids have friends whose parents give them everything. My thirteen year old, best example, his friends have iPods (over $300), three gaming systems (XBox,PS2 & GameCube), swimming pools in their back yards, if they rip and tear up their clothes, their parents don't care. Off they go to the clothing store without a blink to replace them.

We, on the other hand, refuse the iPods, opting for the cheaper RCA mp3 player, ONE game system and after we purchased the first five games for Christmas the boys have to use their own money to purchase more. Also, we don't buy ANY games new, all are used from GameStop. Our oldest, when it was time to buy a computer for him, went with my husband to the Fry's (greatest computer store on the planet) and they bought the ingredients to BUILD him a computer. That task he had to help his father with and learn how it was done.

I wonder if it has something to do with the smaller family unit these days. When I was born in '63 (yes, I'm 41), my parents had 6 kids. There was far too much going on all the time to be spoiled. My Dad was in Viet Nam most of the time, so we all had to pitch in in our military family and work together. Not that there weren't millions of fights along the way, mind you. But we just knew how to band together and focus on what was important, not on what we had.

Now a-days, couples are having one or two kids and it seems they're pinning all their hopes and dreams on the success of that one or two kids. That kind of pressure or non-pressure just isn't healthy. They don't learn to share, they don't learn to not have things, they don't learn communication when sequestered in their room with all their stuff. Parents become detached parents, and that doesn't teach them how to become better parents, nor does it teach their kids how to deal.

There were 6 kids in my family and if one didn't work out, maybe the next one would do better... LOL.. just kidding. Seriously, though, there wasn't all this .... STUFF and the desire to have MORE stuff...

Recently, I lost my job. My husband's job is precarious, at best so we might find a whole new meaning for the word 'tough', and moving might be our only survival option. Our oldest, with his close friends, will suffer most, but he'll learn that life doesn't always give you the stuff you want, though I think we've been teaching him that, and stuff is less important than the family that supports, understands, and molds you into the human being that you need to be to suffer lifes disappointments when it's all up to you to survive.

Good luck and remember all this as you have your kids. We might be moving back to my little home town where all my sisters and their kids live, so life will do a major upheaval fairly soon, but who says that it won't be for the better.

Remember this: sometimes life knocks you on your back so that the only place you have to look is up. Seems we've lost our ability to live a life of meager existance. Time to get back to basics and remember, 'Less is more'.

Hmmmmm.

I don't think my parents ever babied me like that. I still ended up a little spoiled because I learned early on to get my sister to take blame for me.

I had a conversation Saturday in my film lab where we were supposed to outline our audio storytelling project and the idea of a guy going into an elevator followed by a mother and her obnoxious kid who hits all the buttons. I mentioned the mother smacking her kid on the wrist to make him stop and my lab instructor responded, "That was beating your kid in my family."

At time I simply chalked it up to not being raised by suburban white parents. While I don't think corporal punishment is by any means necessary to raising children, I don't think it's going to traumatize them either (unless you actually are *beating* them). If I were to name all the ways I think my parents traumatized me, smacking me on the bum would not be on the list.

And, because every discussion in the world my brain eventually links back to fandom, I wonder how this relates to newbies in fandom. There was that post you linked to a while back about not eating our young, and while I still whole heartedly agree with the post, I wonder about the culture it grew out of. If I don't criticize a newbie's work without finding something nice to say about it, it's not because I want to nurture them so much as because I don't want to be an asshole. I make the automatic assumption that I'm addressing an adult, and adults don't need nurturing.

If when I had started vidding someone had told me my work sucked so bad I should just give up, I would have ignored them. I do remember a few times sharing my vid ideas and having people tell me that either they didn't think it would work or it would be really hard to make work, with the implication that I couldn't do it. I may or may not have been able to prove them wrong, but at the very least I proved I had a spine.

And you certainly *did* survive. From what I know of you, you never expect anyone to handle your problems for you, you generally like yourself, and you're in a good (if mildly stressed) mood the majority of the time. You know how to deal with stress constructively.

I'd say for two crazy people the both of us are really quite well adjusted.

oh my ... I hope your mom doesn't find out that BOTH of you will be at my house Saturday. :->

Still, very cool articles, and I'm wondering how I can slip them into my SIL's reading list without her noticing...

Damn. When I was an adolescent, I was told, "Come home under you own power and don't call me from jail." As soon as I got a job, most of my financial decisions were left over to me. Blow my paychecks and be unable to afford insurance? Lose the keys. I knocked myself into a lot of walls and pouted a lot, but I think maybe I have a tougher overall callus because of it.

The second article certainly makes me wonder, though, as I took a communications course this past semester in which I honestly did not care. I wrote my speeches but didn't rehearse, had blurry conclusions, all of the basic signs of not particularly giving a damn. I did the math, figured that I would have a B but it still would not affect my GPA enough to put my scholarship in jeapordy, and decided that I'd done it to myself. When I got an A, I was ecstatic and figured that there was some kind of classroom participation angle that I hadn't figured into my formula. Now I wonder, and it honestly makes me a little sad. I knew I hadn't done the work to merit anything higher than a B, and I was okay with it.

A good portion of the bitching about grade inflation is misplaced. In the 1950s, elite American colleges almost universally had white, male student populations; even the admission of Jews was restricted by unofficial quota and/or quiet pressure on the admissions office. Stunningly, once incompetent scions of the wealthy were displaced by qualified women and racial and religious minorities, grades went up! Who would've thought?

Also in the past, there was less pressure by parents on the schools not because they had such deep, deep respect for the privilege of having their children attend, but because if young Biff got a C, it didn't actually affect his future. You can be damn sure that if it did, there would've been a *lot* more pressure exerted.

Wow. I saw a creepily accurate version of myself in that.

While my parents - I wasn't spoiled, but I was one of those perma-ill kids, so yes I got overprotected to an extent.

...Yep. The twitchy blossomed.

It's not ZOMG ALL THE FAULT OF MOM AND DAAAAD natch; my family is predisposed to twitch on both sides. But - yes.

It's weird, I see the over-protection of kids... and honestly, I don't get it. My parents didn't do that with me because they had lives of their own. They didn't neglect me, but they did turn over as many decisions about life as they could, since you know it was *my* life not theirs.

I take much the same attitude towards kids. When they're young, do what you can to keep 'em from electrifying themselves and try to give them a good example for living life, and let them sort it out themselves when they get older.

Of course kids are bit in the future for me... Don't really want to have to juggle a pregnancy and then an infant with school and probably a job. Could do it if I had to, I think, but ow the sleep debt that I'd rack up.

I know my parents babied me. But, I also know where they were coming from. My parents grew up in a neighborhood from hell. My father was abused as a child. I recognize their need to over-protect and over-compensate for me. And yet, I think of myself on many levels, and this is just another. Even if our parents guard us from the world and "protect" us on every level, eventually we are on our own. The pitfalls are quite real and quite painful, and I'll agree it's better to learn to cope early with failure, but if you don't then, you'll get to "now."

And, on my one positive note, I think that it is wonderful children consult their parents. When you visit an Assisted Living place, I wish for those people that their children and relatives would visit them. To some extent, all parents fail the coming generation. But, that is required. We all work to rise above our pasts and our failures for personal success. For some reason, I feel that is what all peoples have done, throughout time.

I have mixed feelings about the grade inflation thing. On the one hand, yes, I'm the student that sits at 2am refreshing, waiting for my grades to be online so I can find out if I got an A or A-. I've benefited multiple times - just this semester, actually - from the fact that if a professor knows and likes you, they are very very likely to give you that bump up from an A- to a solid A. I'm the anal-retentive honors student that panicks and asks questions about everything because hey, I'll admit it: I like being able to tell people I'm going into my junior year of college with a 4.0 GPA.

At the same time, in high school I was a teacher's assistant a few times, once during the teacher's break hour, and I cannot tell you the number of calls I overheard where some angry parent would call to ask "how dare you flunk my son/daughter?!" And the "you" is the problem there. We no longer drop the blame on the shoulders of the students who refuse to show up, or study, or actually do the damn work - grades are "given" and "Assigned" rather than earned. And this buisness of "if you try your hardest you should get an A!" drives me insane. Grade scales are not subjective and sometimes "your best" is not the same as a "90% or higher." Period. It's unfair, woe, but then...so is life.

Linzee

God, you know, sometimes, I wish some of those spoiled brats would stop whining. On the other hand, some of the teachers should stop whining.

I'm of two minds in the second article, because I know I've argued a grade once or twice. I even remember when, in 10th grade, my bitch of an English teacher gave me an F on a paper, in which I did the required work. I was exceedingly pissed off, because I later saw this shitty piece of work my sister wrote that got a 100! Her grammar was terrible and EVERYTHING. I WAS SO PISSED. And the teacher didn't change my grade after I pestered her about three times. And you know, I wasn't freaking out about an AfreakingMinus, I was complaining about an F that was UNDESERVED. *growls*

Oh, and incidentally, this teacher was a biiiit like Severus Snape mixed with Delores Umbridge. If you can imagine THAT, that is what I was working with. *beats head*

"...some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet"

Last week in Astronomy I (a 100-level course in my college, one of the four science courses students can choose from as their required science regardless of their major) a 30-odd-year-old woman turned to me in the middle of class and whispered, "There are only nine planets?"

She also seems to have never encountered the formula for converting units of measurement. And, I had to explain that kilometers are larger than meters, and centimeters are smaller.

excelet articles, thank you for sharing ^_^

and oooooh boy my sister is the poster child for phone-umbilicle baby! she's always been babied and it shows! at 30 she still sleeps with her "blanky" and sucks her friggen thumb! x.X and calls anyone who will pick up the phone in mass hysteria anytime anything goes wrong >.< </>

::blinks:: Wow. Damn, I've been lucky; my parents were cool parents. I had chores (much to the complete suprise of college classmates), a cerfew (which said classmates said was bogus) and had to either be home or call beforehand saying I was late. I had to get good grades *and* I had to do most of the work myself, tho' they'd help if needed. They wanted to know my general whereabouts when I went out and who I was gonna be with- not everybody but at least one person. When I started a job they charged me rent- $75/mo, $150/mo after I dropped outa college. Which I thought was reasonable, as it payed for dinner and munchies. Cerfew got later as I got older and they backed off after I moved out. Nowadays, I consider them friends- they get cooler every year.

And after my sister had her psychotic break and the rest of the family went to counseling (not me, I prefer to bottle things up in a completely unhealthy manner), my parents were told they were too hard on us kids. Go figure. And yet we all get along so well despite it.

To add to my family's crimes against children, we made my niece eat healthy (snacks were granola and yogurt related, toys and trinkets were traded for trick-or-treat candy) until she was ten or so, put her to bed at a decent time (she didn't have to go to sleep right away, but could play quietly), were (and are still) quite rigid about her tv viewing and made her play instead whenever possible and made her accountable for her behavior- within reason, kids will be kids after all. My niece could have been easily diagnosed ADD and drugged for it if my parents had stepped in to help. Good lord, we made her behave! ::goggle:: Ya think that's why my sister gets compliments on how well-mannered her kid is?

Damn glad I'm not a kid these days and I feel sorry for the ones that are. Back the *#$)! off and pick 'em up when they fall down, okay?

(blinks)
That [Anderegg]'s my teacher!
(is proud)

I see what happens to these kids when all this overprotection goes too far (not to say I wasn't overprotected myself, although I probably did most of it *to* myself), and let me tell you, it's not pretty. I've seen 14-year-olds who throw screaming tantrums when they're told they can't feel each other up in public or smack the behinds of adult men who are supposed to be looking out for them, who physically attack people and then go crying to a mommy-figure when even leniently punished for it, or who smile and act perfect and cut themselves up in private to feel like they're real.

I'm telling you, they work every system they're until it screams for mercy.

whoa. ROCK.

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cool yet disturbing article

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