Parent Participation Crisis

We've all been there as parents, we want to think that our child is perfect because in our eyes they are, but in reality there are some challenges we may not want to see.

Over the last 3 years or so, my wife and I have been working on getting things from the educational perspective of our son. She has done more of the work than I have by far, for various reasons but the important thing is that I do what I can and support her and him as much as possible. There is certainly a balance there!

What we've been dealing with has been challenging for sure, nothing extreme like paralysis or anything but definite challenges that we need to work through. What we've experienced from a perspective of doctors and clinicians has sadly been completely underwhelming. We have to do so much more work because there is just a horribly noticeable lack of good resources in this particular realm. It's not even an abnormal thing either! It's more common than people realize.. but the challenge is things get lumped all together out of ease of understanding or something. I understand the need to lump things together under an umbrella, but what often happens with that is people don't look UNDER the umbrella, they just look at the umbrella. It's annoying!

With this challenge, one of the things that we've experienced is that people we know have had similar or the same challenges with their kids. We've reached out to several people we know to try and start a conversation, see how things went for them, where they had challenges and all that. The conversation starts off well but once we start to try and introduce some of the amazing resources that we've painstakingly compiled, the people shut down and start to give us short responses to signal "yeah, I don't really care what you have to say" and that's been the most annoying thing we've seen.

We are at a crisis, not to use a term lightly that is quite frankly WAY overused in the day we live in, in terms of parents and their willingness to participate and get engaged in things like this. This has so many far-reaching implications and I truly wonder if this is a cyclical thing. It seems like it, because several decades ago there likely were similar challenges getting people to participate, which then caused extensive societal issues which causes pain. The pain then gets people to act, but once the challenge is "overcome" (not really, only subdued likely) then people scale back.

We have so many examples of people who ARE doing the right thing for their kids, and we have come to know some of those people but they are not people that we knew previously, and most are not people local to us so we can't go and have a chat or coffee or something about it all. The people, family and friends we knew that have kids now and have had some of the same challenges did not give us the light of day and were more interested in their careers, taking vacations and shit like that. It is quite frankly being selfish in no uncertain terms.

What recently made me think of this was a discussion we had with a mom who we were sort-of close to, and our kids got along well and hung out together. We tried to stay in touch and get things together via playdates and things but they kept blowing us off. We reached out again to talk about some things that we recently learned, and tried to get them aware of what we learned and how they could potentially apply the principles on their end and was met with disdain and a response of them "focusing on my career" which is a fucking pathetic response when it comes to the long-term success and health of your kid. We were so appalled by the response that after the conversation, we just deleted their phone number because we knew that it wasn't worth our time to try to connect with them as they clearly didn't care. Maybe that wasn't the correct way to deal with that, but after numerous attempts to stay connected they were clearly not interested any longer as we've outlived our friendship.

I am nervous about my sons generation, it seems like a continuity of feeble-minded and petulant children that become adults, because of the absolute abysmal consideration from the parents. It's scary!

What about you, do you experience some of these challenges yourself? How have you handled it? Let me know in the comments!