Over-parenting our kids into mental health issues
I don’t want to be judgemental and I was far from being a perfect parent, but here’s sort of what I think’s wrong with the way we’re raising kids these days. So, there’s this ad on TV….a little girl, maybe 3 or 4, approaches her mother. “Hey, Mommy,” she says, “I want to be a fairy princess.” And just like, the mother arranges the most amazing princess costume for the girl and transforms the whole house into this like fairy-type place and it’s all gorgeous and magical and filled with little twinkly lights and, well, it’s amazing.
So, after watching this, I consider how my mother would have reacted if one of my sisters had approached her and said, “Hey, Mommy, I’d like to be a fairy princess….” My mother, who I’m sure dearly loved her children, I think would have replied, “Well, have fun, dear….” and that would have been the end of it. And my sister would have been left to her own devices to get some type of costume together and create her own fairyland. She’d have been sort of forced to deal with the situation herself. Yea, I think we try to do way too much for our kids these days and it only hurts them in the long run.
Kids seriously need to at least try to solve most of their own problems as they grow up – parents can’t do it all for them. That, I think, is why a lot of today’s young people have major problems when they head out on their own into the big wide world. When I was a young guy, most young people couldn’t wait to get out of their parents’ home and get going with their lives. That’s not usually the case these days. Kids tend to hang back before getting out on their own….mostly I think this is because they want to have everything their parents have before they leave that usually very comfortable nest.
When we moved out of our parents’ homes when we were kids, we very often didn’t have a “pot to pee in” as the expression goes. We lived in crappy apartments or old, dilapidated houses – anything we could afford to rent – we used ancient, well-used furniture….we drove really old clunky cars that were falling apart. Put simply, we lived in a type of poverty, but were sort of proud that we were doing it on our own.
Today, when kids go off to university or college, they often keep in constant touch with their parents, sometimes texting back and forth almost constantly. When my generation of young people headed off to post secondary education, our parents – some of who had only Grade 8 – had absolutely no idea where we were going or what we’d be doing. There might be a weekly phone call to keep in touch, but you likely wouldn’t see your parents until Thanksgiving and, after that, until Christmas. Our parents somehow trusted us….somehow thought we’d survive out there on our own. And they didn’t love us any less. And some of us failed at life, but that’s sort of the way it was – and should be even today.
Apparently, there are long line-ups for mental health services at universities and colleges these days. A lot of our young people just cannot cope with life on their own. And, in my opinion, it’s because we’ve done too much for them while they were growing up. I think parents these days are enormously well-intentioned. I think they’ve got only the best interests of their children at heart – no parent wants to watch their child struggle – but their over-protective style of parenting is not helping their children when they become adults.
Listen, I’m likely not the best person to give any type of parenting advice. I did my absolute best as a parent – which I’m sure most people do – but I still feel I came up short a lot of the time. I sometimes wish I could have done more for my kids. However, after a few bumps in the road, they are out there being contributing members of society and they are good people – and that’s about all you can hope for. And I have to hope they’re happy – because that’s what I want most for them. And I think I share that with parents around the world.