Once about 10 years ago, I was talking to a friend in her backyard and smoking a cigarette. (Yeah, get over it.) Her nine-year-old came up to me and said “You shouldn’t smoke.” My response: “When I was a kid, kids didn’t tell grown-ups what to do.”
They do now.
Modern-day Max is no longer sent to his room without supper for being a brat. CPS would surely come knocking, for one thing. But Mom and Dad wouldn’t think of doing such a thing anyway. Max is no longer forced to tame imaginary wild things because he’s angry about being disciplined. He’s the wild thing, and Mom and Dad are utterly, pathetically tamed.
There’s been a societal shift in the US when it comes to childrearing. I’ve watched it unfold for years. It used to be only rich kids who had silver-spoon upbringings, but at some point not too long ago, the middle class seemed to unanimously and simultaneously decide that their kids needed to be treated like heirs to thrones and fortunes too.
Was it guilt that caused this shift? Maybe. Fear? You can’t leave kids to their own devices in this scary world. Competitiveness? You bet. And what happened to discipline? Maybe it felt wrong taking away toys or privileges in response to bad grades or behaviors. Or was there something in the water that turned parents into a bunch of pussies? We may never know.
As for the question of competitiveness, I sense that cars and houses and other material trappings of success are no longer adequate status symbols for Americans, and that the ultimate status symbol today is The Perfect Child. And they’re all all extraordinary, dontcha know. Nobody in the American middle class has an average kid anymore. Today, parents are compelled to produce children who score goals and do triple salchows and arabesques and speak French and run the student government. Super Stepford kids, every one of them. They warm the cockles of a mother’s (and father’s) ego.
I read a great in-depth article by Joseph Epstein called The Kindergarchy, in which he describes the phenomenon I’ve been observing and deploring for years:
In America we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children. … Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy: dreary, boring, sadly misguided Kindergarchy.
Epstein, a university professor, touches on many examples I don’t discuss here, so I recommend the article highly.
It doesn’t end with kids being run through the specialness mill of extracurricular activities and lessons. Nowadays, a parent’s sole purpose in life appears to be acting as Entertainment Director on the voyage of childhood. My contemporaries have annual passes to the zoo and SeaWorld and Disneyland. They schedule play dates and ponies and fun jumps. Gawd forbid a child should experience a weekend or vacation day that is not filled to the brim with some edifying or stimulating activity and lots of Quality Time.
The saddest thing is that these kids are in for a real shock. They will get out into the real world and find that there is no audience waiting to applaud their every breath, no personal assistant to schedule all their activities and keep them entertained. No one to put their needs and whims and happiness before all else.
What will they do when faced with that void? Will they know how to earn the esteem of others that they’ll need so badly after having been raised on an IV of ego stroking all their lives? Will they know how to be alone with themselves, to spend time in their own heads, to tap into their own creativity, after having spent their childhoods having structured activities shoved down their throats like so many force-fed French geese? Poor things.
It’s also sad to see parents sacrificing themselves this way, to see them not taking time out of the glorious years of their 30s and 40s to engage in their own betterment and self-fulfillment. And at the same time, they’re teaching their kids, by example, that self-actualization is not OK, and thus depriving those kids of future happiness. And who is ultimately the better parent? One who continually explores his own human potential or one whose energy goes exclusively to scheduling and signups and meetings and dues?
The Stepfordization phenomenon isn’t as pronounced in France from what I’ve seen, although the bourgeois are just as concerned about status as Americans. And I had always heard that French parents were strict with kids. But what I’ve seen falls more in line with that old joke about why Jesus must have been Italian (because he lived at home till he was 30 and his mother thought he was God). Although French kids are made to work very hard for rewards in school, and individual achievement is not a raison d’être in this culture the way it is in America, the kids are pretty much waited on hand and foot at home.
When I was a kid, Disneyland and the zoo were once-a-year things. Events. The Wizard of Oz only came on TV once a year and I looked forward to it for months. I didn’t watch it 135 times in the back seat of my parents’ mega-vehicle. Kids of my generation had extraordinary things to to look forward to, to get really excited about. Today’s kids are so oversaturated with intense and continuous stimulation that they’re deprived of the pleasures of anticipation and delayed gratification. They’ll grow up completely incapable of enjoying small pleasures, expecting all of life to consist of peaks and completely at a loss when they find themselves in valleys. They will not recognize the sublime.
No matter the nature of their overindulgent parenting, I’m afraid this crop of parents will end up having produced a severely handicapped generation of ego-centric tyrants with an obscene sense of entitlement and self-importance.
In the end maybe it’ll be the poor kids who weren’t handed life on a silver platter who’ll be the leaders among this generation, while all these pampered brats stand around being indignant that nobody’s paying any attention to them.
We sure as hell do not let our kids rule us. We have made it very clear since day one that they are the children, living under our roof, our rules. When they become contributing citizens (ie – working peeps) they will be able to have some say. Please, thank you, yes sir, no maam are all mandatory and we have no qualms disciplining our babies when the situation calls for it. We never hit, but we have made it clear that our expectations are high for both their behavior and their school work. We are here to help them be the best they can be but we will never enable them to be less. Yes, sometimes our kids say we are strict, but the other day my son told me he was grateful we loved him enough to care so much. They get it.
It is not easy. There are tears, mine and theirs, and some nights I just want to throw in the towel, but while my life DOES to a certain extent revolve around my kids, they most assuredly get NOTHING they have not earned or deserve.
And for the record, we deliver as many hugs and snuggles as we do lessons. And laughter is a constant during both.
Good post Pam.
Parents need to take back their parenting.
The end.
Present company excepted, you’re right. Except that the first generation for whom that was true has just recently hit the workforce. Many of them find that without the continual praise and awards and treats and prizes to which they’ve become accustomed at school and at home, they are miserable. The Wall Street Journal reports that some companies have hired on full-time people whose job is to stroke everyone’s self-esteem and keep the workplace a fun and self-validating place. others have just decided not to hire the narcissistic little buggers.
I’m afraid I witnessing a “young generation of ego-centric tyrants with an obscene sense of entitlement and self-importance” emerging in Belgian society too Pam.
Just like you, I’m stunned watching the dream of that ultimate status symbol being nurtured by Belgian middle class families: The Perfect Child.
Like you mentioned: when the free ride will be over, they will fall flat on their face, faced with a world that serves no free lunch.
Hi Claudia. I’ve praised your childrearing before! (“Buy nothing”) A parenting style that is a mix of magical mystery tour AND realism (like yours) seems like a good combo to me. It sounds like your methods are like mine (were). It’s over for me, my boy’s 23!
Hi Peter. A colleague and I were talking about this phenomenon in France the other day. It sounds like it’s happening in other Western countries with a large middle class…
Another thing that saddens me is the pressure on these kids. And I wonder if they’ll ever feel satisfied if they don’t have a schedule to follow. It’ll be an interesting experiment to watch…
Hi Rebecca. Your boys are college age too, right? According to Epstein’s article it started happening about 30 years ago. I’m glad I missed that social trend.
What that WSJ article reported is mind boggling!! If you can find it, please share the link. That whole happy workplace thing is so alien in France to begin with.
I’ve also read something recently about schools not giving failing grades on school work in order not to destroy self-esteem. Please.
Percutant! Thanks for a great post, Pam.
It reminded me of a book I read when my kids were younger and I wasn’t offering them birthday parties at Chuck-E-Cheez like their friends’ mothers. We had birthday parties at home and everyone helped in the planning and execution.
It’s a great book called “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.” About how kids need to learn from “boredom” and devise their own plans and their own life. It was refreshing to realize that not everyone was being a slave to their children. The emphasis somewhere in there was about letting kids just play in the mud, for fun.
A sense of self-worth comes from genuine achievement, and kids fundamentally understand that.
P.S. For my kids, Disneyland was a once-in-a lifetime event. A daytrip, no less.
Case in point: an article by a 19-year-old French girl who’s in the US living with a host family:
“Actually, they [American families] live as French families live, but there are some differences with my own family. For example, Sally and Marilyn have a list of something to do to help their parents. In France, we don’t use a list to know what we have to do. Mostly, mothers cook, clean and tidy up.
I rest my case.
http://www.herald-mail.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=199201&format=html