Be a Student of Your Student
When it comes to parenting styles, everyone has an opinion. And while we could all stand to show more grace towards one another when navigating our role with our kids in this tricky stage of life, I think we can all agree there are some things we may be in the habit of doing that are good and some things that could be quite detrimental. Mickey Goodman, in a recent article tells stories of kids who upon arriving to college and receiving a less than satisfactory grade, had their parents call the professor to try and negotiate the score. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to relay the story of a parent who actually accompanied their child on a job interview. Yes, a job interview. Would you be surprised to learn this young woman did not get the job she applied for?
These may be fairly outrageous examples of parenting, but according to Tim Elmore, founder and president of the non-profit group Growing Leaders, they may be more disturbing than we realize because they represent a growing trend among parents. Hovering. Over-involvement. Intervening. They are evidence that a genuine attempt by parents to protect kids has evolved into something actually harming and stunting the growth and formation of a child’s identity. Which isn’t to say this is a parent’s intention. But however pure the motive, the result is not a good one. In other words, when we parent out of fear of what our kids may experience without our intervention, the actions we take as a result can have debilitating results.
It probably doesn’t take much prompting for you to remember the day you brought your child home from the hospital. The fear and terror combined with the overwhelming sense of joy and responsibility is enough to send anyone into an emotional tailspin. As parents, from day one, we have the engrained and prevalent instinct to protect our children—at all costs. But what more studies and psychologists are finding, the cost is actually the long-term wellbeing of our child. In an attempt to make sure our kids grow up safe, grow up protected, grow up secure and grounded in their identity, we are actually keeping them from growing up at all, leaving them ill-prepared for the actuality of the real world. So when it comes time to actually leave the nest, we are sending out kids with no real sense of who they are and no real skills on how to figure out life’s difficulties for themselves.
In other words we are raising kids not just sheltered from some of the harmful influences of culture, but kids sheltered from the realities of life—who don’t know disappointment and failure—and as a result don’t know how to recover from it when they do encounter it. And we are parenting this way for the sake of our own peace of mind. Tim Elmore says it this way. “We are consumed with protecting them instead of preparing them for the future. We haven’t let them fall, fail and fear.” In fact, you could say, we have done the fearing for them—allowing our personal apprehensions to dictate the way we parent, keeping our kids from learning valuable life-shaping lessons on their own.
And so, I wonder if we would do a better job as parents if we first dealt with our personal fears—be they well-founded or not—choosing to keep our fears from governing us and dictating the method and mode of our parenting. I wonder if we learned to take a deep breath and step back, if we just might be surprised, pleased and proud of the people—or maybe more appropriately, the adults—our teenagers are becoming—even in spite of us. And I wonder, if we learned to do this, what message it might send to our kids about the promise and hope they can find in themselves without our intervention, and if they would be more empowered and equipped to handle the world as a result.
