Complaining about the younger generations has been a common habit for many millennia. The Greek poet Hesiod in the 8th Century B.C. groused about the young, “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.”
But the antiquity of such clichés doesn’t mean that in our time there hasn’t been a decline in child-rearing and education that has created flawed characters, dangerous ideologies, and bad habits among our young. For many traditional moms and dads, “gentle” parenting coddles and spoils children not just at home, but in grade schools, universities, and jobs, and accounts for many of the problems and dysfunctions of our young people.
Hence the trend of FAFO––the “f–ck around and find out” method of child-rearing. The New York Post reports one pioneer mother, Janelle who explains this novel child-rearing in her video. “I practice authoritative parenting but within what I would consider a subgenre that I would call ‘f*ck around and find out’ parenting… [kids] get their natural consequences and get to figure out the way through them.”
Just saying “authoritarian” will shock and anger school teachers and “gentle childrearing parents.” But for multiple decades, American primary schools and parents alike have failed dismally at educating and rearing many of our children––a national disgrace for the freest, richest country in the world. Part of the problem is the idea that learning should be “fun” and “affirming” students’ self-esteem, rather than requiring a work ethic to achieve proficiency and knowledge by meeting the challenges of rigorous standards.
Prioritizing “affirmation” also encourages dubious pedagogical theories like discarding memorization, examinations, formal grammar and writing, quizzing, and rote learning from lectures. The au corant credentialed mockers of traditional pedagogy smear these methods as “drill and kill” by the autocratic “sage on the stage.” All the painless coddling, and “gentle” therapeutic indulgences that also characterizes “gentle child-rearing” makes realist FAFO pedagogy a necessary reformation.
But the corruption of education and child-rearing by the therapeutic imperative has not just pollute K-12 education. For decades, the advent of “political correctness” in our most prestigious institutions has treated adult students as delicate “snowflakes” whose disappointments and thin-skinned lack of tolerance for insult and emotional trauma, are encouraged to responded to affronts with “primal screams,” and be cosseted with soothing “Healing spaces.”
With the advent of the “woke,” however, this catering to callow immature youths has exploded, reaching an astonishing level of moral and practical stupidity unimaginable a few decades ago. Back then, no one could have imagined university students in our most prestigious institutions would be chanting genocidal, antisemitic slogans, and praising sadistic jihadist terrorists who follow a creed that proscribes every dimension of the students’ beliefs and customs. --->READ MORE HERE
If you, like many parents, have an adult child living at home with you, you’re not alone. There’s an epidemic of young adults in our society who are struggling to get off the ground. In many families, this works out fine—the adult child is responsible and contributes to the household while they set themselves up to live independently.
But if your adult child has moved home—or never left—and expects you to take care of their needs, you’ve probably started to feel resentful and frustrated.
“An adult child can actually make a career out of earning income from his parents by working the emotional system.”
In part 2 of this series on adult children, Kim Abraham and Marney Studaker-Cordner explain why some kids choose to stay home instead of launching into the world. According to Kim and Marney:
“We didn’t write this series on young adult kids in order to judge parents. Just because your child may not have launched successfully yet, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. And it doesn’t mean they’ll be at home forever. There’s hope.”
Kim and Marney are experts in parenting, child behavior problems, Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), and substance abuse. They have worked with families for decades to help them resolve the most difficult child behavior problems. They are also the co-creators of The ODD Lifeline™ and Life Over the Influence™, two of the parenting programs available from EmpoweringParents.com.
Today’s Parents Expect Their Kids to Fulfill Their Emotional Needs
In part 1 of this series, we looked at how society has changed its views and approaches to parenting. Over the past few generations, our culture has increasingly encouraged parents to do things for their children that their kids should be doing for themselves. In other words, society has moved from caring for our children to caretaking. As a result, many parents find themselves solving problems for their children long into adulthood.
How did this happen? In today’s world, children are usually born out of emotional wants or needs. Many couples want to share the bond of having a child and the joy they picture of becoming a family. Moreover, married couples with strong spiritual or religious beliefs may see having a child as part of God’s plan or as sharing a spiritual experience.
Sometimes, teens or young adults believe that having a child is a rite of passage into adulthood. In addition, there’s often the belief that a child will love us unconditionally. And for those who’ve never had that kind of love, a child is a perfect opportunity to experience it. Sure, there are still accidental pregnancies. But more often than not, the choice to become a parent is primarily based on emotion.
If you think about it, there’s nothing logical about having children. Yes, they can bring great joy, but they can also bring great pain and frustration. Children are messy, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise, and often require parents to make great sacrifices. So if the decision to have children isn’t logical, it must be emotional. And since we have children out of emotion, we tend to parent out of emotion as well. --->READ MORE HERE
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