| Here’s a great article about parenting, particularly in the massively-important area of age-appropriate behavior. http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/spoiled-child The neuro-scientist in me is astonished at how few adults are even marginally informed about “age-appropriate” and what that actually means. The problem I see all the time is that most adults refuse to acknowledge their own behavior as “bad” or “spoiled” and their own blow-ups as tantrums. “No, I’m not having a tantrum. I’m an adult.” Oh really? So why does your body movement and vocal inflection exactly match that of the screaming four-year-old in the grocery isle? In my thirteen years of teaching, I found the biggest problems that kids encountered were: 1) Their parents had never studied anything about child development and had no idea about children beyond what other misinformed adults said in conversations. 2) Their parents were completely unwilling to look at their own behavior as being “bad,” “needy” or “spoiled.” Most of it was! When I read the WebMD article, my first thought was “most of these parents need to evaluate their own behavior through this lens.” Yet, the fact is, the parents who make the accusation of “spoiled” about a kid are usually the worst-behaved adults. The parents who completely overindulge their kids have no idea what a “healthy adult boundary” is because they are so wrapped up in trying to get love from the kid. It is far beyond time that we stop blaming kids for adult problems! If adults had to be responsible for themselves in their own lives and relationships, no kid would ever wind up learning these dysfunctional behaviors from the adults in the first place! |