Adultescents

8/29/2012

A recent edition of The New Yorker magazine contained a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert entitled “Spoiled Rotten,” which appears to be an excerpt from her book of the same name.  She described work by two anthropologists who compared child-rearing in the Peruvian Amazon and Los Angeles, California.  Mrs. Kolbert described how responsible the Peruvian youth were in that they swept the sleeping mats twice a day and fished, cleaned, boiled, and served the family dinner at age six and were observed to be mature beyond their years.  Among the observed Los Angeles families, no child had routine chores and often had to be begged to do the simplest of tasks.  Moreover, the children of the Los Angeles families were told multiple times to bathe and when seated at the table for dinner demanded “how am I supposed to eat?”  The father then got up and retrieved silverware for the spoiled child.

According to Kolbert, contemporary American children are the most indulged young people in history.  They have unprecedented possessions, almost all unearned and undeserved.  Additionally, many have unprecedented authority – parents seek their approval!  In some American families, the children have two or three adults at their beck and call.

Sally Koslow, former editor-in-chief of McCall’s, writes that the best way for us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.  Another psychologist wrote that, “by working so hard to help our kids, we end up holding them back.”

Pamela Druckerman, former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, moved to Paris only to discover that her child was invariably the worst behaved child in every French restaurant they entered.  She soon learned that French mothers have little concern about frustrating their children.  To the contrary, they believe that children don’t learn to cope with frustration without experiencing it.  According to  Druckerman, many American mothers would not consider allowing their children to perform a complicated task without supervising, notwithstanding the fact that often children strongly resist our supervision.  She writes that French parents say non (no) and mean it.  They believe that coping with no is an essential part of child development and combats self-centeredness.

Kolbert writes that so little is expected of American youth that they often cannot use the simplest of equipment, which results in them being asked to do less and less by parents.  Their incompetence begets parental exasperation, which results in even more time for video games.  It is often easier to do a task oneself than to get children away from the Play Station long enough to do it competently, according to Kolbert.

Kolbert states that American families view parenting as creating a child-centered environment that unfortunately includes unwarranted praise, no in-home responsibilities, and the removal of every obstacle in their path.  In doing so, these parents create “adultescents” where the simplest of responsibilities overwhelm them, and in time, they are moving back home in order to decide what they want to try next.

 Kolbert refers to other “unparenting” books that might be worth parents’ time.

          “A Nation of Wimps:  The High Cost of Invasive Parenting”

            “The Narcissism Epidemic”

            “Mean Moms Rule”

            “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the No-So-Empty Nest”

            “Bringing Up BèBè”

“Rescue America” is a book sent to me by Chris Salamone (relative of an RMA cadet) that addresses the renewal of America’s greatness through robust leadership and the founding fathers’ values.  He explains how we as modern-day parents seek to protect our children from the hardships, inconveniences, and disappointments that limited us by attempting to eliminate these trials and tribulations life presents them.  However, Salamone advises that these trials and tribulations are precisely what prepared us for life.  His points are not a condemnation of the good intentions of modern-day parents, but a plea for them not to interrupt or dissuade the very experiences that will make them decisive and independent adults.

I am not endorsing the theories in any of these books.  But they do create an awareness of how the well-meaning actions of us as parents and grandparents can be counter-productive over the long-haul.