The mollycoddling of our children

I was reading an article recently regarding how we are not bringing up our children to have ‘resilience’. It reminded me of a number of references I have made on how parents in the Cook Islands are raising their children. One of those articles dealt with child abuse and the risk that this poses for us going forward. In this article I want to expand on the concept of ‘resilience’ and how we are bringing up our children to fail at a time when we need them to be able to manage in an environment of adversity and challenge as adults.

?We all love our children, and we want to protect them from danger and adversity. Danger represents harm, hurt, illness and death. Adversity represents facing challenges, risk taking and coping under pressure. The problem I see is that parents are trying to do both, i.e. protect their children from danger and adversity and thereby stunting their ability to cope in adverse situations. They do this in the mistaken belief that they are doing what is right or best for the child and muddying the child’s coping mechanisms.

?I suspect that a lot of this mollycoddling is a reflection on how many of us current parents were brought up. Speaking as a baby boomer, I can recall vividly how poor my parents and their parents were after WW2 and the early 1950’s and 1960’s in Aotearoa (NZ). We had moved into a Maori Affairs home in the early 1950’s into a Maori settlement or village which was out of sight and out of mind as far as the local City Council was concerned.

?We had a concrete water tank attached to a runoff pipe off the roof and this became our first fridge. Glass jars of butter, milk, jams and other perishables were suspended in the cool waters of this tank and brought out when we needed them. My first bed was the mattress on the wooden floor, chairs were beer crates, and Dad had removed the lounge door and mounted it on beer crates for our table and Ma had sewn up an old sheet as a table cloth. We couldn’t afford shop bought nappies, so Ma made do with old sheets and old flour sacks which were bleached, starched, washed and then ironed.

?No disposables in those days just back breaking work washing out pooey nappies, soaking them in bleach, boiling them in the old copper, rinsing and then hanging out to dry on the clothesline. No dryer, radio or tv in those days. We even made our own soap in that copper as it also took turns for boiling up old chooks, pack horse crayfish, pork bones, puha and watercress and fish heads and was especially versatile for massive family gatherings at home.

I wasn’t the only one of my generations brought up in similar surroundings and growing up in that environment shaped our lives in ways we could not have imagined. We learned to improvise, we learned to take risks, we learned what it was to go without and make do, we wore hand me downs and designer wear, what was that?

?As children we had to learn to use our brains and our hands, to cook, sew, wash, clean, garden, fix, repair, modify and reuse. We looked after the little ones, changed their pooey and pissy nappies. We went hiking, camping, swimming, climbed trees and we thrived picking wild mushrooms, blackberries, puha, watercress, fishing for crawlies and trout.

?Going eeling and generally getting into all sorts of strife were some of the highlights of our lives. If we got hurt or injured, we sucked it up and got on with it, we had to. Who wanted to have the tag of ‘baby cry’ or ‘cry baby’ as we were called in those days, a ‘mummy’s boy’, a ‘sookie bubba’ or a ‘tangi weto’, you had to be tough, or you got singled out for teasing.

?There were stereotypes galore growing up in those days, we had ‘golly wogs’, ‘niggahs’, and ‘black arses” and other derogatory names which we were proud of and those were just the nick names of cousins or mates. No PC or woke brigade, no taking part in competitions just for the fun of it, we were encouraged to compete and win. We even went out and helped ourselves to the local neighbour’s fruit trees, which is called stealing these days.

?If we wanted something we traded for it, saved up or persuaded our parents to give it to us for Xmas or birthday presents. Contrast that with a lot of children these days who cannot do half the things we took for granted. I had to teach my first wife how to do all the home stuff that I was taught by my mother and grandmother. In the kitchen, hopeless, sewing, forget it, go buy it off the peg, make home-made gravy, no way it comes from a packet, jams, preserves all bought at the supermarket, baking WTH is that. Grow fruit trees, nahh go to the supermarket and buy the fruit.

?In short, our home conditions developed a generation of children with resilience. Unfortunately these experiences also drove us to ensure that our children would not suffer the lives that had shaped us. In doing so I believe we set up a rod for our backs. In shielding our children from the hardships that a lot of us faced growing up we have unwittingly turned a generation of children into those unable, unfit, or unwilling to face adversity.

?A generation that we have encouraged to be self-centred, indulgent, run home to mummy if something goes wrong and not take any responsibility or accountability for our actions because someone will always be there to pick us up. Clean the house, tidy up their rooms, hang out the laundry, no way! because mum or dad will do this.? We know they get frustrated at our poor standards so they will eventually give in and do it themselves.

?We’ve all experienced this, and it is usually mum that caves in. We all know the type of children I am talking about, the, ‘I won’t listen to you, if I don’t get my own way’ child, the child who’s ‘hand is always asking for a hand out rather than a hand up’. The child who throws a tanty if they can’t get their own way. The child whose social habits in their room or on the table while eating is socially unacceptable.

?We all know children like this, but more importantly we all know parents who just give in to their child’s poor behaviour. Not realising that they are contributing to a social misfit who thinks only of themselves because mum and or dad won’t take a consistent approach to setting their child or children right. The child who plays one parent off against the other without any compunction at all.

?We do not run our homes any more without one child or children thinking that they know what is best for themselves and as for discipline or punishment, what is that when it’s at home? We are trying to become friends with our children when children do not need their parents to be their friends. Friends come and go, friends tell you what you want to hear, and friends can be your greatest asset or greatest liability.

?Parents are family, family gives you grounding, family tells you to your face, family are not PC, family use your real name, family are the last line of defence when you are in trouble, family is blood. Blood will not take any crap from you, blood gives you whakapapa, blood takes you in when no one else will, blood is thicker than water, and blood endures across time.

?When have you exacted some form of punishment only for your child to disregard this and you do nothing about it. When you finally do something about it, it is because you have blown your stack and lost your cool thereby becoming the very child you were trying to discipline. Children need boundaries; they need to know that there are consequences for breaking those boundaries.

?The child needs to understand that they have responsibilities to themselves and their family and their friends and that they will be accountable for their actions. Children do not need parents for friends, because they have friends who fit their idea of the ideal parent. Children need a whole range of coping mechanisms that they can call on and that will help them grow into mature adults and future parents and future leaders. What we have done with our children is social engineering on a vast scale because we love them and want what’s best for them.

?We faced dangers and adversity growing up, and we don’t want our children to be exposed to that sort of a lifestyle. The upside is that a lot of us baby boomers are several steps ahead of where our parents’ generation was. But in terms of our children, we are several generations behind the ball when it comes to building their resilience to those dangers and adversity we were faced with.

?In following this path, we have done our children a disservice, we have dithered when giving advice, we have procrastinated when we should have been more forthright. We have allowed them to dictate the relationship on their terms and we have made excuses for them which they do not need. They have friends and their peers who do this job quite well thank you very much.