Keeping Children Safe
There are so many ways to keep children safe, but is what I am doing really getting me the results I want. As a parent I wanted to keep my children safe from:
- disappointment
- failure
- hurt
- loss of friends
- sadness
According to authors Jim Fay & Dawn Billings, I may have been doing just the opposite of what I should have been doing. No one said parenting was going to be easy.
I have read the first chapter in From Innocence to Entitlement: A Love and Logic Cure for the Tragedy of Entitlement, and what an eye opener. It would seem that in my attempt to protect and provide, I may have denied my children the ability to learn how to struggle and accomplish things on their own and then have an internal sense of well being.
Here is a paragraph out of the book,
Entitlement flourishes in the disrespectful demands we hear too often from too many children, including our own. It is fed by the media and nourished by the overindulgence that many parents perpetrate on their children in the name of love. That is how entitlement creeps undetected into our homes, our communities, our schools, and our country. It disguises itself as love and generosity, when all the while it is a thief, out to steal all that is truly valuable in our lives and the lives of our children. As the cancer of entitlement grows ever stronger in our culture, it threatens to extinguish what we want most for our children — genuine happiness and success — while it simultaneously succeeds at tearing our families apart. Entitlement is clever, disguising itself as a friend pretending to bring more to our lives — always more. But entitlement is no friend of humanity, business, or families. It is a lie that exists for only one purpose — to steal our happiness, our respect, our appreciation, and our joy. Entitlement is one of the major reasons why over half of the marriages in this country end in divorce, and why at least a fifth of intact marriages are filled with unhappiness. Entitlement is the reason our schools are in shambles, our families are falling apart, and our children are less motivated to succeed than they have ever been. It is the reason why suicide among school-age kids continues to increase at dramatic and alarming rates. And only we can do something to stop it.
Whew! If you got this far, good for you. Want to hear more? Go to Love and Logic, a great source for uncommon good sense in basic human relationships and especially in parenting. I would love to hear what you think.
Blessings to all, Kahleen Edeal,
Director Mount Hermon Play School