Over-reaction is what authorities too often do when an event occurs before which they should have taken action.
Category Archives: Parenting
It is difficult to be a good parent when our own unmet childhood needs subvert or take precedence over those of our children.
My whole childhood was spent being curious, analyzing, dreaming, creating, sketching. I was never lonely. Though the crime rate was significantly higher than today, I was never afraid to be alone in any part of our tough industrial city. I walked everywhere and nowhere for hours – discovering, observing and wondering – being sociable when encountering others but preferring silence. That no one recognized I had been gone most of a day pleased me. (Where adults are concerned, being invisible is sometimes a gift. . .)
Lacking physical prowess and coordination, I practiced sideline sportsmanship instead of sports. But despite being last chosen in playground activities and suffering from chronic daydreaming in class, I survived. . . with nary a syndrome nor a multifaceted deficit disorder applied to my child or adolescent being. Oddly, no one seemed perturbed by my being “different” – least of all, me.
By the age of 16, I was on my own – a stock clerk, living in a boarding house. . . blissfully being and becoming whatever it is we all become at one point.
And so. . . looking back. . . wondering as I have always done. . . What would my life have been? And who and what would I be now. . . if, like today’s hovered-over children, I had been forced to live a more ordained and most euphemistically called “normal childhood”?
Limiter les enfants à l’enfance, les adolescents à l’adolescence, permet aux adultes de ne jamais leur ouvrir la porte à la vie adulte.
(Relegating children to childhood and teens to adolescence justifies blocking them entry into adulthood.)
When we see danger in everybody and everything, we instill fear in children. That, in turn, erodes their innate daring, curiosity and all manner of creative potential.
Loving parents guide their children through the minefields of life – all the while stifling the urge (and their fears) to completely smooth out the road before them.
In our obsessive quest to eliminate failure and make every encounter and environment safe for our children we are fast becoming the greatest danger to them?
In a child, self-reliance, a sense of achievement and independence are only possible when parents stop being dependent on a child being a dependent.
As with many social engineering concepts, child-centeredness has always been an iffy proposition. Its greatest flaw is that it presupposes that the adults administering and practicing it are “adult”.
To our mothers our artwork is always be beautiful. That’s why our mother’s words are rarely critiques and our artwork is rarely art.
