Adults at Major Turning Points

You may have over­heard or even had your own ver­sion of a com­mon con­ver­sa­tion these days: “I can’t believe what’s hap­pen­ing out there with kids. They hardly know any­thing, but they act as if they know every­thing — and don’t want to hear otherwise.”

Or this one: “I’m amazed that she lets her kids speak to her that way.” Or how about: “all my teenager wants to do is talk on her cell, or text, or watch YouTube videos, or click around on Facebook.”

I hear the phrase, “you’ve got the pick your bat­tles” all the time, but it does seem that more par­ents are choos­ing not to pick any bat­tles at all these days – which is really too bad.

Yes, par­ents are exhausted. They’re dis­cour­aged, too – with good rea­son.  And that low­ers the emo­tional energy and feeds the help­less­ness so many par­ents expe­ri­ence in the face of a cul­ture tug­ging in the oppo­site direc­tion. Plus our kids sense it.

Most of us once thought part of the par­ent­ing job was to help our chil­dren strug­gle well with human nature – their own, as well as oth­ers’.  That meant engag­ing with and tak­ing on child­ish self-centeredness, anxiety-driven peer pres­sure, cut­ting cor­ners, dis­re­spect, unkind­ness, cheat­ing, etc. Plus, we all knew then that you didn’t have to be per­fect your­self before you could legit­i­mately take those things on – but “good” par­ents, (mean­ing com­pe­tent par­ents) were absolutely right to have expec­ta­tions they were pre­pared to enforce.

Now we actu­ally have going this fool­ish notion that vir­tu­ally any enforce­ment of val­ues con­sti­tutes a “neg­a­tiv­ity” toward the child, crushes their frag­ile spirit or inter­feres with their self-esteem, and keeps them from devel­op­ing that “pos­i­tive script” suc­cess­ful chil­dren sup­pos­edly have.

What hog­wash.  It’s not work­ing. And it won’t ever work because that’s not how actual humans are wired.

Whether they admit it out loud or not, kids are appre­cia­tive when par­ents trans­mit a value sys­tem.  Push back, please — because every inch of ground mat­ters these days.   

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