Modern Parenting
An, in my opinion, great post at Black Shards about the Virginia Tech shooting and, more generally, the way children are raised these days…
Few children in earlier generations would have even acknowledged the idea of assaulting their parents or grandparents. This is a modern problem, one that’s been created in the eras of “peace, love, and understanding” and the aftermath.
Whether the V.T. murderer Cho Seung-hui was one of the children this country has failed to raise correctly remains to be seen. Indeed this may never be known. But consider the trends already seen and understood by Harris County’s prosecutors.Our children are perhaps no more violent than previous generations; however, the targets of their aggression are more and more often chosen inappropriately. Parents, relatives, siblings, small neighborhood children, the elderly. All are potential victims of a generation without boundaries.
I believe that the failure of parents to properly discipline their children at a young age is responsible for a large percentage of behavioral problems experienced by school-age children. Anyone who is involved with children can see which at a glance which ones have been raised to respect authority and other people and which ones have not. Children who are rewarded for behaving well and punished for breaking the rules grow to fit into society when they become adults. Often those that are allowed to wreak havoc as children become misfits later in life. Not all misfits are bad. But some are and we’d do well to give them a sense of propriety from the very beginning rather than suffer the consequences later.
As Marc points out, whether this was the case with Cho, the shooter, remains to be seen, but I do agree with Marc that the general trend is worrisome. Children are not taught to respect their parents anymore, they are taught to consider them to be friends. When a father (or mother) says “I am my child’s best friend” I always cringe: best friend? You are your child’s best friend? You should not be your child’s best friend, you should be its parent.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice
I like that (have not seen full article yet).
I think a lot stems from 2 parents needing and wanting to have full time jobs. Often the TV set is the babysitter.
I personally have seen a reversing trend back towards more involvement by parents. it’s slow, but it’s promising.
yes, that is part of it as well.
I hope that society will correct this. The problem is that once an entire generation is raised by the TV and with the idea that parents should be ‘friends’, well, it is difficult for them to break with that.
Screw up one generation, in that regard, and you’re sure to screw up at least, say, 4 or 5 generations following.