Are parents slacking in the discipline department?
“I read an interesting article the other day that speaks to this very subject,” he says.
“It all has to do with this inter-generational cycle we go through. So if you look at thirty to forty year olds who have children now, they are the children of the baby boomers who in turn are the children of the austerity era. This was and era of depression, economic difficulties and so on, and so they grew up not having much; always living under a financial strain and when they became parents, their reaction was to be excessive and they were just giving their children whatever they wanted. They didn’t want them to have the lives they had.”
Terence says that those children having grown up in a world where they just got whatever they wanted are now becoming parents, and they don’t seem to know any better. And in this world the social fabric is starting to disintegrate because of the nature of the world they live in; Generation Y, 21st century, interconnected.
“A study I read recently said that teenagers of this era spend almost thirty one hours a week on the Internet. That’s the equivalent of a working week for the French,” Terence says.
So what does the future look like, he asks? Does it mean having this pervasive upbringing where it’s okay to bark: “give my child whatever he wants”? And this current generation we have now are molly-coddling their children; protecting them from all kinds of things. They protect them from failure and disappointment and perpetuate the thought that the world is a really scary place.
“And what we do is prop our children up all the time,” Terence says.
“The reality is: this doesn’t give them skills; they don’t play outside, they don’t fall down, they don’t graze their knees. They grow up weak and feeble and not able to deal with challenges and adversity. And most importantly, they grow up not learning consequence.”
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.
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