I don’t think that that’s a symptom of kids today being overly coddled. I think it’s a symptom of the rampant paranoia about child abductions.
I have a very young son – about two and a half months. Young enough so that he doesn’t do much more than eat, poop, and sleep. Most of the issues in this thread haven’t come up yet.
Before he was born, the best advice I got from people was this: No matter how you raise your child, you’ll be criticised by other people. Some people will say you’re too strict, others that you’re too lenient. Some people will say you should do X, others that you should do Y.
Ignore them all, they said. Always do what you know is best for your child and your family, given your own personal circumstances.
+1.
Parents are the target for everyone with a grievance. They can’t do anything right - according to someone.
Therefore, in actuality they can do no wrong?
Nicely put. Thanks, bill.
Regards,
Shodan
Agreed.
I smell an excluded middle.
Or possibly a diaper. 
I disagree with the OP only because it’s the type of argument that is too often used by those who have a pathological need to see kids get their ass kicked. It’s very much like those folks who thought it was good sportsmanship to intentionally walk the good hitter on the other team so that you could strike out the special needs kid batting behind him in order to win the game. Do you think that kid needed any lessons as to the fact that the world often hands you shit sandwiches?
Sure, coddling is not particularly good, but on the other hand, the world will do just fine giving my kids some hard knocks. I’ve got no need to rush them into that or give them any knocks of my own. I also don’t want them thinking that I’m just as bad as the rest of the world. Besides, getting punched in the jaw once doesn’t particularly make one better at getting punched in the jaw a second time. That which doesn’t kill you…only delays the inevitable.
Similarly, kids don’t need any help from anyone else learning how to be competitive. A few years in childhood of non-competitive rec league sports participation isn’t going to set them back in their eventual desire to elbow out other people for a championship later on.
Parents of today are incredibly fortunate. Kids are safer today than any other time in history. I mean, in New York City alone, crime has gone down 80% in the past 20 years. 80%!!! Kids are safer while in the car, safer while walking to school, and safer at the playground. They really are amazingly safe.
So what drives me crazy is that so many parents believe their children are in so much greater danger ‘these days’ that in the past. That the kids can’t be allowed to walk a few blocks to their friend’s house or bike to school because 'you never know."
As long as the parents take reasonable precautions like teaching their kids to look both ways when crossing the street and to never go off with someone they don’t know, the kids are really very very safe.
One meme that comes up here fairly often is that our immune systems need to be exercised every now and then, lest they become so atrophied that they can’t handle even some minor germs. Therefore, living in a sterile world is a Very Bad Thing.
I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve heard it enough times and it makes some sense so I’ll accept it. But I’ve seen some threads here that take it to such an extreme that I’ve read things like “If you don’t expose your children to hepatitis and malaria and mumps RIGHT NOW, you’re a horrible abusive parent who needs to be murdered.”
You’re not wrong, Hentor, but there isn’t some switch that is pulled when your child turns 18 and now he is supposed to magically be able to deal with adult problems that he has never faced before - ideally there should be a set of age-appropriate steps along the way that have taught him skills and confidence to face the set of adult challenges. Everybody who is involved with raising a child should be involved in these age-appropriate steps - the parents especially, and also the babysitters/nannies and school. I think of it like a muscle - muscles build when there’s resistance. A child who faces no resistance builds no psychological/personality muscle for when he needs it.
True. I guess my point— buried beneath the meconium— is that while “ignore criticism and raise your kid the way you think is best” is a fine principle when applied by thoughtful, responsible parents, I suspect that the negligent asshole parents who allow their insufferable brats to ruin the lives of everyone around them probably espouse the same philosophy.
An even shorter way of expressing this is “Hit yourself with the clue bat ever now and then.” Applies to more than just raising children, and applies to everyone.
I suppose the way I’d put it is ‘ignore those who most vehemently argue that X is always the best way of raising a child [and that if you do Y instead you are Worse Than Hitler™]’.
For whatever reason, child-rearing is a topic that tends to produce more than its share of fanatics for various trends and causes, yet in my experience children are various in personality and what works with one doesn’t always work with another.
Most parents, not being negligent assholes, genuinely want to do what is right, and (epecially first-timers) get buffeted by reams of conflicting, vehement advice about how. It is a rough guide, but in general any advice given by a person who assumes the recipient is a negligent asshole if they don’t take it, usually isn’t really worth listening to, with some obvious exceptions.
Advice worth listening to in childcare is often provided in the form of ‘my experience with X is …’ and does not attempt to lay down a universally applicable rule.
Parenting is a job where you don’t get to mindlessly apply principles. You have to think about whether what you’re doing is affecting your kid in a good way. That includes “ignore criticism and do what you think best”. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, just like so many other rigid principles people try to apply to parenting.
Of course, thinking like that is not easy, so a lot of people don’t like to do it. It can involve admitting (even if only to yourself) that you were wrong, which is another thing that people don’t like to do.
There’s no magic set of rules or principles that is guaranteed to make every kid turn out good. There are some that are more likely to produce that result than others, but there’s always a chance that a kid will turn out badly even if you did everything right as a parent. Once again, we don’t live in the just world, where bad things happen only to those who deserve them. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people sometimes.
It’s true that there’s no magic switch at 18. There’s a lot that happens between 0 and 18, though, isn’t there? If we’re talking about literally preventing a child from experiencing any “resistance” between 0 and 18, then fine, we completely agree that that would be bad.
My contention is that there will be a great deal of natural “resistance” during childhood without going out of our way to make any more, even by just standing aside as parents. Challenges don’t teach skills to handle challenges. Parents teach skills to handle challenges, and life’s challenges put these to the test. So I would focus on having parents be there to provide support, feedback and encouragement when life gives challenges, rather than flipping the matter upside down.
If it were all so simple as just saying that facing resistance built great skills at handling challenges, then the best adjusted adults should be those who grew up literally on the street, right? If facing challenges built the kind of muscle we want to see from adults, then kids in the poorest neighborhoods should have the best outcomes as adults, because they sure get used to a whole bevy of life’s little challenges from early on.
This is why I’m a strong advocate for instilling children with self-esteem. At first it’s necessary to give it to them so that they have a safe emotional base to operate from. As they grow, they learn to generate that safe emotional base all by themselves. And people who have that safe emotional base have far more power to navigate through life.
Giving this some more thought, I’m a possibly relevant case study.
Neither of my parents should have had kids. That’s just to begin with. I was singled out for emotional neglect and abuse by both of them essentially for my gender. I was the only boy, with three sisters. For my father, a professional football player when I was born, that meant that I carried the entire weight of his very, very male-oriented, macho legacy: he expected me to be a tough guy, even a bully, a sports nut, a hunter, etc. All the macho bullshit, which was all that my father gave any value to. My mother, on the other hand, had been emotionally abused by her father, and physically abused by my father, and was in addition a borderline personality. This meant that when I was born a boy, I was therefore born a bad person. In addition to which, she was raped at knifepoint when she was 8 months pregnant with me. So she disliked me from birth, and as I grew up she began to fear me: she had no doubt whatsoever that another abuser was growing, cuckoolike, in her own home. She started sending me away when I was 11. (My father was out of the picture by then.)
Coupled with the above background, I was born with an unusually high intelligence and artistic talent. Those two factors meant that my parents, while consciously trying to do the most obvious, paint-by-numbers “correct” thing as parents, constantly harped on my “abilities”; my potential. But because of their emotional rejection of me, the delivery of what they thought of as praise was always couched in a passive aggressive capsule heavily laden with abuse and injury.
I was never given unconditional praise, in other words; any praise offered always had to be couched negatively. The standard formula, when I would present something I was proud of, was along the lines of “That’s great, lissener, but we both know you could probably have done even better.” Or, “That’s great, but why can’t you put that same kind of effort into X or Y?” This had the effect of destroying any confidence or esteem I had, and has made fear of failure a debilitating constant in my life.
All this melodrama aside, my point is an admonition to consider the actual impact of what you tell your children; it can often have the opposite effect of your conscious intent.
Hmm, maybe, but I’d bet that the words don’t matter so much, and the intent comes through loud and clear. I’d bet (and correct me if I’m wrong) that the words your parents said to you weren’t all that bad, but they send out a vibe that was really toxic.
Not just one. But ALL of the later ones.
Unless you’re a gen X or Y, in which case, boomers are the assholes.