Flashback: On A Serious Note...

Parenting With Fear

September 4, 2009 at 7:28pm

How confusing a message we must be sending our children by injecting our own political views on them. Because isn't that what all the hissy fits over Presidential addresses in our schools is about?

I find this so amusing, yet part of me wishes I could be more surprised. As parents in today's world, we proudly preen and declare our enlightenment from media pressures. We are the free thinkers. The individuals with awareness of the truths around us. Right?

Wrong. For all the strutting around and boasting of individuality, the parents of children today have proven themselves to be even more mainstream and part of the herd than any other generation before us. We gather in our groups huddled at the bus stop, making sure junior's Gymboree polo shirt match his Gap khakis, worrying over what fatal disease he will contract by attending school with so many other lesser children, while fretting whether we properly dressed to impress for the ten minutes we must stand outside and wait for that yellow bus to come around the corner of our properly manicured block. We clutch our designer coffee cup, injecting our opinion on the latest headline we caught on CNN or FOX (for the illiterate), in hopes of looking like the enlightened, intelligent beings we hope to project.

We are the competimommys and sanctimommys, yet we deny this wholeheartedly with the latest medical study showing why our children will rise to superstardom because we are so intricately involved in their every waking and sleeping moment.

The media is not the unbiased deliverer of current events you would like to believe, regardless of where you get your information. They are a cash cow, with an agenda just like your own. They bank on today's parents need to fulfill their own broken promises of self importance and grandiose lives through mandating their childrens every minute of their existence.

We inject not only our quest for the perfect image, but our own ideals, beliefs, and most importantly, FEARS into our children. Just as we don't see ourselves as individuals, we don't see them for the separate mind that they are. Our failures to succeed are passed on to them in the form of overscheduling, pushing for achievement, and intensity (or lunacy) in competition. Our beliefs are shoved down their throats through religion, prejudices, and our insistence in one line of thinking. Our fears are lived through our children, creating a fearful generation of youth believing there is nothing positive in this world.

Do we really think our children are being brainwashed by listening to a Presidential address on education? Or are we just projecting our own fears and ignorance on to minds that can't possibly understand the complexities of our current government? Are we not, in essence, by bowing down to the fearmongering of the media, participating in our own form of brainwashing on our own children? What would have been a simple assembly viewing a video, now has to be explained to each child in the form of a permission slip, while parents discuss and even argue the points of a speech in front of their child, because god forbid we actually just let things happen, and discuss something after the fact. We live in a constant state of protection with our kids, but do we even know what we are protecting them from? In light of all the hoorah being made about a Presidential address, I dare suggest our children need protecting from us.

Is it going too far to suggest that in all our pushing and overparenting, in all the endless babble of teaching our children to be the superstar of their future, we seem to only want the stardom if it fits our own agenda of what that should be? We make claims of nurturing their mind, encouraging their mental growth, and then we smother it the moment it starts to color outside the lines of the box we have built.

Is it any wonder that more and more children are medicated? Are in therapy? Are unable to cope with the trials and disappointments, and REALITY of the real world? Are they ever taught to actually THINK for themselves, form their own beliefs, and make their own judgements about the world they live in? Are they encouraged anymore to have lively discussion and debate with their parents, teachers, peers as they grow and form their own thoughts and opinions?

What, exactly, are we afraid of? Do we fear a child who grows into an individual unlike us? Do we fear them being exiled from the herd of nonthinkers? What, please tell me, is the actual problem?