I was asked by my colleague to help her in one talk show about children development, to be her partner. She’s the one who would do all the talking, and I will help her to answer questions from parents, as participants. During the talk show, I caught some interesting facts about school-aged children nowadays. Following are the description:
1. The responsibility has been transferred into parents/caregivers.
When children go to school, parents tend to worry excessively. This weariness due to their own pride and demands toward their children. Parents want the best for their children, and that’s a good thing. This ideal goal can brings children down when parents push to do it their way, and not allowing the children to be part of that ideal plan. Parents then control everything in order to sort things out quicker, compare to what their children can do. For example: when children haven’t finished writing down their diary for that day, parents will make the call to their children’ classmate and busily completing the information on homework and tests. This conditioning will make children learn that the responsibility of completing school work can be done by their parents/caregivers.
2. Children learn the self-helplessness strategy.
Following the first description, children will learn the self-helplessness strategy, in which, children will not do anything to help themselves. It could be started by small activity, such as: sharpen their pencils, writing down their diary or tidy-up their books after studying. And by the the time, this condition will be applied to more important activities, such as: being ignorance during studying time, because children think that everything will be handled by their parents. They do not need to think and analyze their math problems, because whenever they can’t do the problems, parents will give the answers, because parents want them to finish their homework soon.
3. Parents create a cranky and want-instant-success generation.
Children will soon lose their capability to fight harder in their future and they will find it hard to measure success objectively. They will be very dependent toward their parents in whatever they are doing, including completing their responsibility as students or adults, in later life. I remember when I was a child, my Dad was very hard on me. He used to watch me when I was doing my homework. He disliked any help given to me, from my mom or caregiver. I was not understand his motive at that time, but later on I become very grateful for that. When I told my relative about that experiences, she said that my Dad is an old-school (well, he is). She said that nowadays if parents do not help their children in compleying their school works, then the children will not get any awards at school, because all of their classmates are getting help. I wonder …
Parents have to work harder to fight the needs of themselves to show off through their children. Children have their own future and ways to gain their success. Parents need to guide their children, but minus their dictate ways to their children on doing things.
Way to go, parents!
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