Letting our kids become independent from us is a great gift to them but that doesn’t mean it is easy; in fact it comes with a cost.
As the parent of a college freshman, I can tell you it’s been difficult, as it is for so many parents, watching my child walk out the door and move to a campus far away from me. It is the end of an era, the end of a stage of life and a huge change in child rearing. She’s on her own, now literally for months at a time. But I also have to ask, what is our need as parents if our college kids are constantly calling or texting us four or five times a day, still needing our help with their laundry or homework or a problem with a professor or roommate? I think one answer is we want to feel that we are still needed, still central to our children’s lives and that they still want to spend lots of time with us. Becoming less important, after almost two decades of daily, even hourly parenting is hard to take. But it is exactly what they need.
If we have done our job well… protecting and nurturing them but also letting them go, they will be able to handle the challenges and solve the inevitable problems that arise. It is what they will need to know how to do for the rest of their lives. Of course, the irony is that they pretty much have to solve the issues in their college life… even with phone calls, email, and text messages because there’s little we can do from so far away, except create a very dependent student-child who, in the end, turns out to be a dependent 35-year-old.
In the news lately, there have been several examples of inappropriate and rude behavior in a public setting: Kanye West at the MTV awards, Serena Williams at the U.S. Open tennis championship, Representative Joe Wilson at the joint session of the U.S. House and Senate. These are very public figures; for better or for worse, they are important role models in our nation. And many parents are outraged, wondering what can be done about the worsening incivility in our nation.
I think there is much we can do; I think we as parents have more power than we may know. It’s not altogether effective simply to throw up our hands and blame school systems or government or media or the society at large. I think what works is for all of us to actively teach our children how to manage their behavior, teach them how we want them to treat others (and ourselves), and teach them what civility means to us. At the center of this issue is respect… for us, for siblings and other relatives, for teachers and students at their school, and respect for themselves.
We are living in a complicated, difficult time. We have to decide what standards are important to us and overtly go out and talk to our children about those standards. We need to say out loud, reminding them over and over again, this is who we are, this is what we do and what we do not do. And in all of this, we need to look at our own behavior, how we treat our children, our spouses, our neighbors, colleagues and others, so that in time our kids will watch and learn how to manage themselves.
Technology in the hands of our children has never been a greater challenge. The internet, Facebook, iPods, pictures and texting on cell phones, these are the ways kids communicate today. They have become a central and, arguably, indispensible part of their lives. It allows them a private life that most of us know very little about.
The key to how they manage this privacy is our “connection” to them. How closely do we stay in touch with our kids and pay attention to what they’re doing and when and with whom? And how often do we talk to our children…and really listen to them? If they trust us and know that we will be there for them, they’re more likely to adhere to the ethics of our family, the standards that are never more important than when parents are not around. If we talk openly about what we believe in, what we stand for, before long those values will become their own.
The challenge for parents is that our kids have a whole new set of communication tools and many of these young people don’t fully understand that the old rules apply, even here, even in the brave new world of social networking and text messaging. We actually need to teach them, literally and plainly explain to them how ethics apply to these tools. “If you wouldn’t wear it in front of your grandmother, don’t wear it to school or to the dance. If you wouldn’t do it in the middle of a packed football stadium, don’t do it anywhere someone has a camera or a cell phone. If you don’t want that picture on the front page of the newspaper, don’t send it on your cell phone.”
Kids just don’t think through the consequences. They don’t think, “If I send this picture out to Bobby, he might send it to some friends, who might send it to a hundred others and the next thing you know, it’s on a dozen Facebook sites and all over the internet, forever.” This just doesn’t occur to them; they don’t think that way because they don’t have the life experience that we do. We have to help them.
Cyberbulling is heartbreaking. We have interviewed so many children who talk about being bullied and harassed on the Internet or via text messages. They cry. Their parents cry. They tell stories about being tortured with cruel words and mean-spirited rumors so foul I cannot repeat them here. Many say it may begin with one bully but before long a whole gang of kids join in the cruelty. And often, despite the victim’s efforts to change passwords and screen names, the bullying continues for months or even years.
But it’s also heartbreaking for me to think of the bullies. How can a child, not that many years from the pure innocence of infancy, be that evil? When I hear Read the rest of this entry »
Terrell is 17 years old and maybe he said it best.
“I did a lot of stupid things while I was drunk, like about a thousand things, really.”
I think there are two lessons imbedded in his comment. He is not talking about being stupid after having a drink, having one beer or maybe two. He means he got stupid when he drank way too much, when he got drunk. Many will argue that at the age of 18, 19, 20, kids shouldn’t drink at all but the real problem is that so many kids binge drink, they slug down a 12-pack, or six or eight or 10 drinks at one sitting. They haven’t learned to go slow, to pay attention to the signs that they’re approaching the edge of losing control. In fact, that’s their goal, to feel Read the rest of this entry »
One day my daughter came home from school with a story about a kid who had been bullied. She was in middle school and she had witnessed a bully making fun of another child. I asked her how she responded. She said she watched and listened but didn’t do anything because she didn’t know what to do. As she told me, I saw the beginning of tears in her eyes.
It’s not that fame and fortune don’t make you happy; the news is actually worse than that. (Or, in this recession, is it better?) They make you unhappy.
Psychologists at the University of Rochester studied recent college grads over two years, trying to figure what made them happy. What worked wasn’t extrinsic things, a car, a big house, fancy clothes…but then most of us knew that. The joy just doesn’t last long enough, you always need newer and more. (Once you drive off the lot, it’s a used car.) Instead, the researchers find that contentment comes from that list we got from Read the rest of this entry »
Our children were out for Spring Break last week. As we headed to the beach, I looked through our bookshelf to find something inspiring to read and landed on a book called, The Measure of a Man, a spiritual autobiography by Sidney Poitier. I had purchased it a few months earlier since Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner(1967) has always been my favorite movie and To Sir with Love and A Patch of Blue rank in my top five. Read the rest of this entry »
President, Chief Executive Officer and Director, brings the culmination of a substantial legal and media career as well as a passion for child advocacy to her role as CEO…Read more
Cyberbulling is heartbreaking. We have interviewed so many children who talk about being bullied and harassed on the Internet or via text messages. They cry. Their parents cry. They tell stories about being tortured with cruel words and mean-spirited rumors so foul I cannot repeat them here. Many say it may begin with one bully but before long a whole gang of kids join in the cruelty. And often, despite the victim’s efforts to change passwords and screen names, the bullying continues for months or even years.
Terrell is 17 years old and maybe he said it best. 
One day my daughter came home from school with a story about a kid who had been bullied. She was in middle school and she had witnessed a bully making fun of another child. I asked her how she responded. She said she watched and listened but didn’t do anything because she didn’t know what to do. As she told me, I saw the beginning of tears in her eyes.
