There was a local kind of market put on not far from us today, and we went there with the family of one of Smallsteps' school friends. It really wasn't anything special at all, but it was nice to get out and have a chat as the kids walked about and also did some painting and the like. The mother of the friend is an "active" parent and is vigilantly paying attention to what goes on at the school, especially when it comes to things like bullying.
I get it. But...
I get that parents want what is best for their kids and want the schools to ensure that bullying doesn't happen. But at the same time... Where do the parents expect their children to develop strategies to deal with difficult people, to negotiate, to build resilience, to learn how to stand up for themselves, to come to terms that there are always going to be asshole people?
Like most skills, the foundation of these things and a myriad more aren't learned in adulthood, because by then it is too late. If they aren't on the road to development from young childhood, they are going to suffer later in life. A lot of the lessons we learn come through negative experiences and our ability to face the challenges and overcome them are going to lead to our future abilities and wellbeing.
I believe that because of our desire to create "easy lives" for our children, we are actually going to do them more harm in their adult lives, as they are not going to have the tools necessary to deal with what are normal situations. And, I think we also attribute the wrong causes to some of the outcomes. For example, childhood suicide is increasing globally and this is often driven by some kind of bullying, but is the bullying a cause, or a catalyst? And, if people are becoming less resilient, less able to cope, it is going to take less stress to get to the breaking point. This likely also applies to things like work burnout also, where people who might have relatively comfortable jobs compared to their parents and grandparents, with conditions that are far better on average, are still unable to cope.
Is the problem the conditions of bullying and work, or is it in us?
Is a "bad boss" today comparable to a bad boss fifty years ago? Is the type of bullying experienced in a school significantly worse than that of when I was a kid? There are differences in medium like cyber bullying which didn't exist earlier, but the kids have also grown with those conditions, so perhaps they should have developed slightly different strategies.
If for a thought experiment we were to take the average child of today and put them in the average school in the mid-1980s when I grew up. How would they cope?
We have trained our kids to be hypersensitive, but this doesn't mean we have taught them how to deal with their emotional state under stressful conditions. Instead, we have told them that their feelings are the most important thing to consider and then we wonder why they react as they are, effectively drowning in their emotions. This isn't protecting them, it is exposing them to be pushed and pulled by external forces and the opinions of others, without helping them filter the validity of the input.
And then, we have created a world where victims are celebrated on social media, which makes the young constantly aware of what people are saying in a way that they can twist the most innocuous comment into a threat, into an attack on their identity. And, their "identity" has to be protected, without them considering that if it is theirs, they own it and that means that it doesn't matter what others think of who they are, they are able to stand strong. But, instead, what their "identity" actually becomes is how they are treated by others. It isn't their at all, is it?
Kids can be cruel, because they don't understand all of the ramifications of their actions, but for the most part, the harm they do is not life threatening. I think that this is nature's way of giving a relatively safe environment for humans to learn how to deal with other humans. But, if we are constantly interjecting ourselves into the problems of our kids, they aren't getting the practice to deal with these things themselves.
And as I said to the other parent, if we take away all the hurdles in childhood, while it makes our lives as parents easier, it also takes away our ability to help our children through the difficult times and help them mature their strategies. If they never come home upset about how a peer or one of their friends behaved, we can never have the conversation around that kind of topic with any kind of practical application. This means that the conversation comes up unnaturally and is theoretical in nature, but the base of the theory will inevitably be faced in later life, and they will have no applied experience to deal with it, so will be learning hard lessons as adults, where the impact is far greater.
For instance, I know a couple people who are now in their mid-30s who grew up in this non-committal relationship culture, and their first breakup was the downfall of their marriage. Their marriage likely broke down due to the way they both acted, but their behaviors after breakup were essentially at the level of 15 year olds. There was no maturity at all and they saw it as the end of their world. I have seen it in people in their mid-20s too, and they don't care as much, because they were never really committed it seems. They expected the relationship to end and they knew there were plenty more fish in the Tinder sea.
Will they be lonely in a decade or two when no one knows who they are or cares about them?
Culture is of course constantly changing, but I believe that there are fundamental skills that people need to learn and conditions they have to have strategies for, because no matter how culture changes, these things are going to persist. However, I think that through the way we can engineer our environments now and pick and choose what we consume, we are leaving out a lot of the opportunities we have to learn these lessons. We are wrapping our children in cottonwool and they are able to double down on it through their behaviors so that they don't learn the lessons. However inevitably, they are still going to have to face the circumstances at some point.
It is like dealing with stress - if we don't learn strategies, it isn't going to take much to stress us. And, I think we are seeing this more and more in the world, where people are stressed by the slightest inconveniences or pushbacks on their belief system.
We want our kids to be resilient. We want them to be mentally and emotionally strong. Yet, we expect that they will have these skills without ever having the opportunity to practice them. It is like learning to surf from a book. You can know all the theory, but it doesn't mean you can put it into practice once in the water.
We are teaching our kids that they won't face conflict in their lives.
It is a lie.
Conflict is how we evolve.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
