The biggest health problems I see in children are simply caused by parents being too scared to actually be the parent. Parents, for gods sake stop indulging in the hallucination that you need to protect your child from everything.... Firstly, you cant protect your children from everything.... Right now, my heart goes out to some family friends who are grieving the loss of their young child through a tragic freak accident that no one could have stopped. At the same time you have other parents creating melodramas over the most trivial of circumstances thinking that this somehow protects their child. In actual fact, the job of being a parent is to teach your children how to live without you. And if the notion of your children living without you may pull at your heartstrings and make you upset, it may be a sign that you as a parent are a major part of the problem. You see some parents, lacking their own sense of self, placate this need to feel important and worthwhile by raising their children in a way where the poor kids dont get an opportunity to fully develop. They let their kids eat what they want because they dont like the healthy foods. They let their children speak rudely to them without consequence because the consequences may upset their poor child. And then the parents involve themselves with every incident that occurs at school where the child gets upset robbing the child of the opportunity to work things out for themselves and robbing the teachers of an opportunity to teach some life skills. As a result the parent feel important as the child becomes conditioned to be dependent on their parents to solve all their problems for them. While these parents often label themselves as selfless martyrs because they do so much for their kids, I regard these parents as selfish. Why? Because they are place greater importance on massaging their own sense of importance than they do the wellbeing of their child. The problem is that those children grow up to have no resilience, no sense of what is healthy and get upset when the world wont conform to their personal whim. Resilience is a learned skill. Being a victim is a learned skill too...its called learned helplessness. Parental mollycoddyling creates learned helplessness. Bullies feed on people with this skill. I can hear some bleating hearts going on about what bad things bullies did to their children and as a parent you cannot stop this. But you can equip your child to handle and stop it. I know of a child who at the age of 8 received a death threat from a school bully, pretty serious stuff! After reporting this to the appropriate authorities, the parents didnt try to shield this person from the bully.They used it as an opportunity for growth. Through asking questions with their child (not giving them the solutions) they helped the child come up with strategies on how to deal with this bully. Many strategies they implemented did not work. The child even got into trouble at school for some of them. But they also taught their child persistence and after three months and with strategy number 11 they got the bully situation completely resolved. The gift in this experience (which many parents deprive) was that this child has learnt 11 different strategies for dealing with people and resolving conflict which can be used in the future. You see it is not about going out and seeking danger, trouble or pain for your children but if such events occur in life (which they probably will at times) it is about using them to grow and learn. Seek the possibility of joy and learning before the need to be safe.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 02:52:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015