Our Poor Babies
Don Quixote at BookWorm Room on Apr 23 2007 at 7:20 am | Filed under: Feature Article, Va. Tech Shootings
One of the first news stories I heard after a nut case started shooting up Virginia Tech announced that counselors would be standing by at a San Francisco Bay Area college, to help those who were so traumatized by the event they needed psychiatric help to cope with it all.
What kind of mental and emotional weaklings do we think we are raising?
I suppose this is the inevitable outcome of accepted child-rearing practices of the last 20 years. We should concentrate on building little Jimmy’s “self-esteem” rather than teaching Jimmy to do something he might rightly be proud of. We should discourage anything that might reveal children as winners or losers. We should discourage competition in all its forms, even refrain from keeping score at our kids’ ball games. Any child who shows the slightest energy or enthusiasm is immediately labeled with ADD or ADHD and drugged.
No wonder our kids grow up needing psychiatrists. Any kid of even minimal intelligence must see through this nonsense. Unearned self-esteem is less than nothing. A kid who has never lost has also never won. 100% of kids are not in the top 50% of anything, but, if given the chance to compete, nearly every child can find the areas in which he or she does excel. Denied that chance, many children may never truly succeed in anything.
I suppose every generation worries about how the next generation will do when its time comes to take over. But we are conducting a grand social experiment here, and one that it seems to me is guaranteed to fail. I hope our children can overcome their upbringing because that upbringing certainly doesn’t prepare them for the real world, a point we tacitly acknowledge when we call in the counselors whenever the harshness of the real world shows itself.
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