Make Limeade

Your Kid Sucks

Sometimes you reach this point in your life where you have so much work, and so much to get done, that you sometimes feel like just giving up. It used to be the case that  this sort of feeling only  affected college students and entrepreneur types, but more and more it seems as if high school students are being bitten by this bug. It sort of amazes me how strenuous and focused modern education has become. I think of all the baby boomers, and the children of the 60’s, who grew up during a time when school was lax. Sure, teachers were evil and wicked, they hit you with things, but school was still a place where you mostly just goofed around. College was something that only a few chosen rich kids got to go to. The rest, well, they had other things on their mind. In the 60’s it was loud music and mind-altering drugs, for the Baby Boomers it was avoiding war.

Then came the 1990’s. At this point, the world had changed drastically, old traditions were long gone, and parenting became a full-time profession. A new sense of entitlement seemed to emerge ; self-righteous parents started to believe that their children were capable of anything. It was the generation that told children “Practice makes perfect” and that they could be anything the wanted to be. The industry around this also flourished. Soon there were countless educational programs aimed at teaching toddlers, and radical new teaching methods entered the schoolhouse. With all of this, parents thought that their children were destined to become the next Albert Einstein, or the next Beethoven. And anyone who challenged those ideals were labeled an uneducated, old-fashioned fiend.

So I guess I’m one of those.

What I have discovered, as being someone not brought up with this new 90’s era parenting style, is that all of this sense of entitlement, and this self-righteousness is all phony. I do understand that no parent wants to hear that their child is stupid, or that their child is terrible at softball, but at some point we must learn to live with these facts of life. The worst thing that can possibly done is to make a child believe he or she is good at something when they are actually not. I’ve experienced this many times and it is quite sad because it is not the child’s fault, but their parent who indoctrinates them with this bullshit. Let’s face it, we all suck at some things. Heck, a lot of us suck at many things. But each of us is uniquely good at something. That’s what parents should make their kids strive for, their innate talent, not some contrived mediocrity.

What I am proposing is that we take a moment out of our busy lives to think back to our ancestors. For many of us, these were relatives who emigrated from Europe with very little money. Yet, they were incredibly attracted to America, a shinning beacon of liberty, that allowed all cultures, and races, to share the ideals set forth in the United States Constitution. These were the relative who had nothing. Absolutely nothing. They made an enormous gamble hoping that things would turn out well for their family, who were their most valuable asset. And it was these relatives who worked 18 hour days in very poor working conditions. They knew that they were entitled to nothing, no one owed them anything, and they just watched out for themselves and their family.

What’s happened?

Now we are at a point where parents are supporting their children well into their 20’s, and everyone feels entitled to whatever they want.  Where did that humbleness go? So quickly we have forgotten the struggles of out ancestors.

—optionshiftk

Monday

January 18, 2010