Aug 24 2006
wimpy, wimpy, wimpy… HEFTY HEFTY HEFTY
So I’m a member of this message board that is all about debates. I’ve been addicted to it for years… I love it. Sometimes I get mean and aggressive when I’m worked up about something. Sometimes I’m my normal VERY SWEET mosquito-attracting self. But I have fun there.
I was thinking, if I’m EVER going to get any haters sending me mean emails like all the cool bloggers, I’m going to have to be a little more controversial than MOSQUITOS, right? So maybe I’ll occasionally pick a hot topic from my debate board and write about it here. But then what if you people say “Oh, for fuck’s sake - look how opinionated and aggressive she is? I’m leaving…” That’s my concern. On the other hand, I don’t want you to think I’m some opinionless wimp. I’m full of opinions. And cellulite. And Skittles.
So here I go. Feel free to use comments to agree with me OR disagree with me. This stuff makes for interesting discussion in my opinion… Of course, many extra points when you agree! Ha!
Psychology Today posted a recent article called A Nation of Wimps. I think it’s a really good article! It’s long, but worth the time investment in my opinion.
Go on - go read it. I’ll wait.
Goodness, could you possibly read a little faster? I haven’t got all day. I’m supposed to be doing a job here!
OK. So what did you think? I nodded so hard all the way through this article that my damn head came disconnected from my neck. It was quite messy but I’ve sorted it all out and reattached my brain stem and we’re good to go.
Can I pull out a few germane bits that I found particularly compelling? This complete passage struck a chord:
In his now-famous studies of how children’s temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.
As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They’re easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.
While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn’t turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.
A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.
There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life’s day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies. “Children need to be gently encouraged to take risks and learn that nothing terrible happens,” says Michael Liebowitz, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and head of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. “They need gradual exposure to find that the world is not dangerous. Having overprotective parents is a risk factor for anxiety disorders because children do not have opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world.” They never learn to dampen the pathways from perception to alarm reaction.
In addition to that, there were some other bits and pieces that had me nodding:
…”Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.”
…Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.
…But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they’re robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we’re on our way to creating a nation of wimps
….Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they’ve maintained over their children. The goal of parenting, Portmann reminds, is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later, he says, most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity. Parents may find it easier to give up some control if they recognize they have exaggerated many of the dangers of childhood—although they have steadfastly ignored others, namely the removal of recess from schools and the ubiquity of video games that encourage aggression.
This, my friends, is controversial. I don’t know if it’s currently seen as one of the mommy wars but it has the potential to be one. In the one camp, there are those parents who feel that if you attend to the child’s every need, if you make yourself 100% available to respond to them, then they will grow secure enough to separate from you, on their own schedule, and face the world. These parents feel this approach makes a more secure child because the child has 100% faith and trust in the parent/s.I think I belong to the other camp. My camp is the ‘meanie’ camp. I think that a child learns GRADUALLY OVER TIME to deal with the world. I think that if we protect the child from the world too much, they are ill-prepared to become a part of it when they reach adulthood. I think that we are now doing way too much to homogenize our children’s lives. Things like… doing away with honor roll so the kids who don’t make it aren’t hurt. Things like… everyone gets a trophy so no one feels left out. Like not keeping score AT ALL when playing competitive games.
Some of these things are fine at younger ages, but eventually the kids have to face the reality of the world in small and safe ways. When they learn from the safe and small disappointments, they are able later to handle bigger and more serious disappointments. They learn coping skills.
Also, there is an unfortunate consequence when we homogenize everything. By saving the kids’ feelings who don’t make the grade, the team, the goal, we no longer are able to recognize the talent of the kids who do make the grade, the team, the goal. In my estimation, every child is a star at something and he should be allowed to shine. If you take away the honor roll so the kids who didn’t make it feel better, you also steal away the chance for other kids to shine at what they do best. If you give everybody trophies and treat their performance equally, you hurt those children who may thrive on their athletic prowess - maybe that is the thing they are good at. If so, doesn’t their egos matter too? Shouldn’t they be able to feel strong and proud for how well they have mastered a certain sport or skill?
I want my children to be HAPPY. The question becomes, how do I best assure that? I cannot possible stay glued to my children to manage their environments all their lives in order to protect them from disappointment. So I think it’s only right that they are taught - through experience - to deal with the disappointment. That’s my job as a parent. And I’m not shirking my responsibilities when I allow them to fall or fail. I am STANDING UP to my responsibilities by doing that. I’m not mean for pushing them a little outside of their comfort zones. I am teaching them that it’s OK to try and nothing horrible will happen. I’m teaching them to take some risks, to stretch, and that failure isn’t the end of the world.
When I push my little birdies out of the nest, I want them to be able to fly. If they are ill-prepared for the challenges and disappointments of life and fall in a crying heap, I will have failed.
Bring it on…
Sincerely,
JustLinda {not wimpy, definitely HEFTY}
ps: I don’t really want haters… it just seems like all the cool bloggers have them so I probably should want them. Kind of like crocks - I don’t want them either, but then it seems that they are the thing to have. If it came down to it, I’d probably prefer a pair of crocks to a mean ol’ hater.
