Parenting: Are We Getting a Raw Deal? by Rhonda Stephens

Parenting: Are We Getting a Raw Deal? by Rhonda Stephens

We just don’t have the cojones our parents had. We aren’t prepared to tell our kids that they won’t have it if they don’t work for it, because we can’t bear to see them go without and we can’t bear to see them fail. We’ve given them a whole lot of stuff; stuff that will break down, wear out, get lost, go out of style, and lose value. As parents, I suppose some of us feel pretty proud about how we’ve contributed in a material way to our kid’s popularity and paved an easy street for them.

This is spectacular. In education, there is a lot of talk about instilling "Skills for the 21st Century: problem solving, creativity, analytic thinking, collaboration, communication, ethics" (which are really the same skills they wanted in the 19th and 20th Centuries, maybe for all the centuries). Perhaps, schools can only do so much when parents work overtime to undermine those very skills. I'm just as guilty as anyone of wanting to smooth the path for my kids. But how can we raise "problem-solvers" when we never give them a problem to solve?