Who’da thunk?
Apparently this touchy feely progressive approach to parenting has churned out uncontrollable ego monsters and maybe, just maybe, has been the wrong way to go about raising a child…
They argue that many of our strategies for nurturing our children are backfiring because we haven’t properly understood the science of how children think or develop.
While they are not advocating a return to Victorian parenting, with children seen and not heard, or beaten when they’re naughty, what they do argue is that the touchy-feely brand of modern parenting, where parents are too weak to criticise and discipline, will actually damage our children in the long term.
One of the biggest failures of modern parenting, say the authors, has been our belief in the importance of instilling high self-esteem at all costs. We praise our children constantly and indiscriminately. A simple drawing is ‘brilliant’; getting a few ticks on their homework earns a delighted ‘you’re so clever’.
Expect the authors to be subjected to intense scrutiny to discover their evil right wing X-tianist leanings. This goes against everything the education system has been preaching and implementing for decades now. The entrenched and enshrined are probably not gonna take this lying down. It might require more work of the school system and… shocka… the parents themselves to actually raise a child.
Building up a child with false platitudes ends up destroying the child in the long run. If everything your kid does is fabulous, and you’re always telling him “good effort”, “good job”, when he does meet with failure – and he WILL meet with failure – he will have zero coping mechanisms for dealing with it. If a child never receives constructive criticism and suggestions for improving himself, he’ll never be able to deal with the reality of people telling him he made a made a mistake, or his work isn’t perfect.
Watching Supernanny lately, the truth of this (partial or whole) is extremely evident. Kids need discipline, they need love and they need structure. They need to be taught consequences of actions and can be, even from a very young age. You do a child no favors to always let him win.
Via Mitchieville
Tags: parenting
i completely agree with this post nicole. we are in the age of social promotion which in my opinion means that some kids who would do better to repeat grades and learn rather than to be promoted for social reasons. Our world has a way of dealing with these kids as adults by leaving them behind in society. Either way they’ll get left behind. which is better? hmm.. good post, interesting topic!
Lynn! Glad to see you back around. Hope all is well.
Excellent! My children were raised in much more the “old-fashioned” way. They do know right from wrong, good from bad, works good from broken.
Supernanny airs in the US? OMG how embarrassing. You will see the very worst of British society on your TV. Yikes. That show has kind of done a nosedive in recent years as I think people find it too depressing to watch. It never fails to aggravate just how rubbish people are raising kids and God forbid you tell them to get a grip on their urchins either. I can’t bite my tongue unfortunately. Has landed me in deep crap on several occasions but then there is only so much I can stand paying to be in a nice quiet romantic restaurant on a treat and having to put up with the screaming tantrums when neither parent wants to a) remove the kid even for a second that shouldn’t be in a boring quiet grown up type restaurant in the first place and b) cannot be told to be quiet. They ignored each and every tantrum until in the end everyone in the restaurant had left. I flat out resented them for the selfishness (rich liberals) and made that plain.
Rest easy, Alison. We get to see our US kids behaving badly on the version we see here. :)