Mike
Carruthers:
Have
you heard the term extreme parenting?
Ann Dunnewold PhD:
Well, extreme parenting is that push we have to control
every aspect of our children's lives - every opportunity, every
choice, every event; so we can be a perfect parent, or we can
produce a perfect child or we can protect our children from every
danger.
Psychologist
Ann Dunnewold, author of the book
Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box, says we can
already see the results of this kind of parenting.
With the number
of kids that sort of boomerang back to home when they're done
with college - kids aren't really fully launched as adults until
much later in their 20's these days - because they never learned
to make their own mistakes and make their own decisions and
fight their own battles.
Ann says there
is a lot of societal pressure to push kids, make them perfect
and to be perfect parents.
I think many
parents that are caught up in it are so driven by anxiety that
they can't really see another way to do it differently. Somewhere
in the back of their minds is a little suggestion that "I
really shouldn't be doing all of these things for my kids."
But they're so concerned about keeping up and making sure they
give their child every opportunity that they just can't conquer
that anxiety enough to let go.
Perhaps we need
to step back and look at what the real job of parenting is…
Our job is really
to launch them and I think a lot of the current generation of
parents has lost track of that long-term picture and instead
thinks in the immediate - we need to make our child happy. It's
not parents' jobs to make the kids happy; it's the parent's
job to raise them to be good adults.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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