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Are we raising a nation of wimps?

In the book Culture Shift, author R. Albert Mohler Jr. diagnoses a number of the things that are breaking down in our culture. Of particular concern is the poor parenting going on in our homes and families. Today’s parents have turned into hyper-protectors, Mohler says. Here are some of th…
By Seth Barnes
In
the book Culture
Shift
, author R. Albert Mohler Jr. diagnoses a number of the things that
are breaking down in our culture. Of
particular concern is the poor parenting going on in our homes and
families. Today’s parents have turned
into hyper-protectors, Mohler says. Here
are some of the key points he makes along these lines:

Today’s parents
are now spending a great deal of their time doing little more than
protecting their children from life. Our kids are growing up to be
pampered wimps who are incapable of assuming adult responsibility and
have no idea how to handle the routine challenges of life.

Kids have to excel at everything, even if parents have to actually do
the work or negotiate an assisted success. Although error and
experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking
pains to remove failure from the equation.

Smothered by parental attention and decision making during childhood
and adolescence, these young people arrive on college campuses without
the ability to make their own decision, live with their choices, learn
from their experiences, and grapple with the issues of adult life.

Even in prekindergarten programs, parents now show up with a list of
special demands, insisting that their child must be treated with
special care. Inevitably, this is often transformed into diagnoses of
learning disabilities that will require special instructional
accommodations.

Cell phones are partly to blame. Even in college…students are
typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting
every flicker of experience…. When parents play along with this
dependency, they ‘infantilize’ their children, ‘keeping them in a
permanent state of dependency.’ Life is lived in an endless present
tense, with no need to frame long-term decisions, make plans, or engage
in sustained interpersonal conversations.

Many see life as a competitive game, and they are determined to do
whatever it takes to get their children on top. One college student
said, “I wish my parents had some hobby other than me.”

In tomorrow’s blog, we’ll take a look at what to do if you wake up one day and discover you’ve become a helicopter parent.

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