The Rapunzel Syndrome
Hat tip: Further Adventures of Indigo Red
-Nietzche, paraphrased
A recent study indicates that telling your kid he's smart, might be doing more harm than good.
I think a good analogy to the article, is in how difficult it is to find plain soap nowadays, because everything has been inoculated as an anti-bacterial products. The downside of such overprotection, is that some studies are suggesting that children don't get a chance to develop an immunity to certain germs when they are shielded from them. You see, exposure at an early age strengthens the immune system. Similarly, then, it is my belief that we are so overprotective of our child's emotional and psychological well-being, that we don't allow them to experience failure; we shield them from hurt feelings, when hurt feelings are a part of life.
We love our children. We want to provide for them with more than we ourselves had as children. We spoil them. We encase our Rapunzel in a tower to shield her from the world, and end up doing more harm than good. Because what you end up with, is a grown adult who has the emotional tools of a little child, when she finally has to confront life in the real world.
One of the best lines I've heard, was from a listener on the Dennis Prager Show (I think it was last Friday): "Once you realize life is hard, it gets easier".
Please check out my previous post on "the self-esteem" generation, linking to two USA Today articles:
Yep, life'll burst that self-esteem bubble
Enough already with the kid gloves
Don't forget to click on the cartoon (you won't be sorry- unless you're liberal, in which case you HAVE to click on it, to be cured of your diss-ease); also, An Ol' Broad's Ramblings links to The Origins of Political Correctness
Labels: political correctness
posted by The WordSmith from Nantucket at 2/27/2007 12:30:00 PM
2 Comments:
We have public service announcements here on one of the TV stations that give those 30 second 'tips for raising healthy kids' spots. The campaign is called "Success by Six". All I can think of are little roboty kids dressed in suits carrying briefcases.
Shouldn't kids be getting dirty and falling down and running around and laughing and crying ~ you know, being kids? Or is that against the law now? (My daughter is all gron up, so I'm kind of out of the loop, I guess)
I see a whole generation of future adults throwing temper tantrums in their workplaces when life comes at them hard, as it always does now and them. The parents who follow this line of thought (control) aren't doing their kids any favors imo.
I clicked on the link to the test. What a great article! :)
You're right about overprotecting the kids; that fits right in with the post I had about the teacher playing with the kids with scotch tape and being banned from teaching in Alabama. The kids were having fun, but because of two whiners she can no longer teach! Good grief! We are turning out people who will grow up dependent on someone for life, and I guess that's the plan. After all, if liberals don't make people dependend on government, then they lose. After all, that's their entire agenda. :(
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