http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... w0208.htmlNATION OF BRATS
Robert Shaw with Stephanie Wood
Feb. 8, 2004 12:00 AM
What is happening to our children?
Only four years after the massacre at Columbine High School sent a chill through our nation, Time magazine ran a feature story on violent behavior at American schools among 3- to 6-year-olds.
The emergence of such behavior makes it imperative that we recognize that we are in the midst of an ever-worsening crisis in parenting, a crisis that is leading to a plague of uncontrollable, joyless, alienated, disaffected and even violent children.
Children, including those who are considered privileged, are no longer developing empathy, moral commitment and the ability to love. These emotionally stunted children constitute an epidemic that is permeating American life.
Can you go into stores, restaurants or libraries without seeing depressed-looking children sulking, resisting their parents, pulling packages or books off shelves?
Do you notice all the tantrums, all the whining, bickering and pouting going on while parents, in turn, nag, complain or, even worse, try desperately to ignore their unruly, surly child?
As they progress through grade school and into the preteen years, these "epidemic" children often become sullen, disrespectful automatons, staring with deadpan faces at the adults they encounter - teachers, their parents and their parents' friends.
As preteens, many of these children become media-addicted mall habitués, disassociated from their families. Later, many become addicts of promiscuous sex, drugs and alcohol. At the extreme end of these behaviors we have seen the school shooters, the highly destructive hackers, even bands of wildly destructive suburban teenagers vandalizing houses, stealing, setting fires and sexually assaulting their own schoolmates.
This epidemic is the result of both diminished parental involvement in children's lives, and the overly permissive attitudes that have become the trend in families today. Parents have not only forgotten what their children need, but what should be expected from their children.
We have lost the idea that we can and should expect to have children who are engaged, loving, caring, able to learn, play and work. The rejection of parental practices of previous generations has left many parents with little knowledge of the level of social development they can or should expect from their children at various ages.
Parents have been encouraged to think that they are no longer central to their child's emotional development. They are reassured that it's sufficient to place young infants and toddlers in group day care situations, despite research indicating that long periods of early group day care are associated with increased aggressive behavior disorders.
Parents are just too busy to eat family meals, play with their child and engage in intimate chats, quiet times or amiable outings. This deprivation of parental connection interferes with bonding and attachment. Without a strong bonding experience, children do not learn to love or have empathy for others; without this, they have no reason to want to please anyone.
An entire arena of clinical diagnoses has been invented (without any clear neurological evidence for their existence) to explain why our children are without impulse control, are untrained and not socialized. This has led to preposterously large numbers of children with diagnoses of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and bombarded with psychoactive drugs. We pretend we are treating disorders, but in fact we are substituting drug control for parental control.
How could it have happened that so much of the joy of parenting has disappeared? The fun is gone; only duty and effort remain. Parents are frightened of their children, and so afraid of alienating them that in many instances they become peers instead of parents.
Parents have become hesitant in the face of any filial opposition; it is as if it were wrong to expect their children to follow rules and adapt to the family's way of being. Parents are finding it difficult to demand civility and respect. How can they do their job if children make the rules, become the arbiters of what goes and what doesn't? They cannot.
Parents want success for their children at school, in careers, in love and marriage, and with their future families. Humans, however, do not come with built-in directions for adjusting to society. "Humanity" is a learned skill. Our culture has evolved much more rapidly than our nervous system.
Children need to be taught how to function in their particular culture and era, and it is parents who are that instruction manual for their children. Instruction begins at birth, and children are formed by parents in every interaction or non-interaction. When parents are too busy or too inhibited by fear, or fail to give instruction through their suggestions, encouragement, expectations and limits, children will not turn out as most parents would hope. Those children may well be trained instead by peers, gangs or cults.
Here are some of the steps parents can take to ward off this danger to their children:
1) Provide a strong early maternal bonding experience, the provision of which is too often compromised by the limitations of time and lifestyle experienced by families today.
2) Establish yourselves as the lovingly firm authority in the family, beginning in early infancy. Absent and weak parents see their children becoming more argumentative, more surly and contemptuous as they get older.
3) Develop clear rules, limits, and expectations with appropriate consequences when they are not followed.
4) Be clear, consistent, and highly communicative with regard to their emotional responses and their commitment to whatever structure of behavior they expect.
5) Encourage family practices, traditions, and rituals that help develop the feeling of being part of a larger organizational structure, family, community, and planet as well as a sense of having a future. Family meals, religious or spiritual activities, regular times for being together are more important than most of the self improvement activities and courses toward which children are now being pushed. These practices help create a healthy identity for and in children.
6) Protect children from harmful exposure to electronic media. This will require a major effort and a willingness to avoid commonly accepted practices. Advertisers, the producers of children?s TV programs, the purveyors of sleaze, all want your children. Only totally committed parents can protect their child.
Changing the pressures of society will be difficult and time consuming, but every parent can prevent this epidemic from striking their children. Yes, it takes a village to raise a child, but not a village of silent placating adults who stand for nothing. Our discourse must change.
For decades now, studies have confirmed that love, closeness, attention, lovingly-set limits, structure, education, encouragement, routines, are what produce happy, well-adjusted, successful children and, eventually, adults.
Life is frequently frustrating, and the endlessly catered-to child who grows up thinking he/she is the center of the universe is likely to be ill-prepared to function in society.
Is this what we want for our children?
Robert Shaw, a child and family psychiatrist, is the author of "The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children," with journalist Stephanie Wood.
