To Overprotective Parents
Myisha Nawar
“Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers.”
-A Nation of Wimps, Psychology Today
So yeah, bad news-you are really messing up your kids! I feel like all this overprotective bulls**t started with our generation and is just getting out of hand at this point. Buying into the notion of juvenile fragility and continuously hovering over your children is doing much more damage than you can fathom. Yes, I am dead serious when I am saying that. Fact of the matter is that your kids need to fail. I totally get that, as a parent, you would want your little muffin to see the world through a pair of smiley-face glasses, but giving them a skewed perception of the real world is not helping them. All your overprotectiveness is turning them into prescription popping young adults with a mess of psychological issues including, but not limited to, depression and anxiety.
You are squelching their happiness. When parents do too much protecting in an effort to make their children’s lives stress-free, it often has the opposite effect. According to Dr. Resa form The University of Michigan Depression Center, children eventually become depressed and develop anxiety disorders that he attributes to obsessed parents trying to make everything perfect for their children.
You are decreasing their confidence. Your overprotectiveness is sending the message that your children are not capable of doing an adequate job and that you don’t trust them to make the right decisions. Adults acquire confidence by working hard and mastering what they seek to accomplish, children gain it the same way. Don’t make them go through life lacking confidence!
Take. A. Step. BACK. You are literally damaging your child’s brain. What your young churrins need most is the chance to be stressed, to be scared, to be unsure. They need to get the chance to adapt and grow and most importantly come to terms with the fact that something might suck a whole hell of a lot, it’s not going to kill them! They need the chance to develop the tough skin that will get them past the black hole of awfulness that is adulthood. Answer this. Do you want to have a fierce, self-actualized, confident kid, or a floundering mess of insecurity and self doubt? Just CHILL with the texting and calling every hour! Let them fall, break bones, cry, scream and make sense of the world IN THEIR OWN TERMS!