Dr. Laura:
I think parents are afraid of their kids for a few reasons:
- More than any other time in our history, adults do not want to be and/or don't know how to be adults.
- A lot of parents see their kids as only an extension of themselves instead of seeing and raising their kids as individuals, created in the image of God, with their own personality, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
- Parents who want everybody to love them or who try extra hard to please everybody often have poor self-control, poor sense of responsibility, and poor emotional/spiritual/psycho/mental development. They have an immature view of what it means to be an adult.
- Parents who don't have a solid spiritual/religious foundation often don't have a moral purpose for their kids, or themselves.
- A whole generation of parents are so self-indulged, so 'educated,' and so myopic, they foolishly believe that kids should be able to 'choose' their own path and a whole lot of other psychobabble.
In my opinion, these are often parents who were raised in the 60s. As a child born in 1971, I often have the sense that my generation, children of the 60s parents, is/was the cusp generation. We were the kids who were experimented on with our 60s parents. For the most part, as a generation, we turned out okay because our grandparents were still around and had a major impact on our lives, so we were able to benefit from the morality, teaching, wisdom, discipline, etc, of them.
Ultimately, parents fear their children because they are weak, naive, immature, lazy, selfish, etc. and it takes too much time and energy to train, teach, and discipline their child. These parents have too many other important things to do than deal with a whiney, spoiled kid. What the kid ultimately learns is that if I whine, cry, or throw tantrums enough, I will not only get my way, but my parents' ATTENTION - even if it is negative attention - which gives the kid some sense of control and an attitude of 'sticking it to mommy or daddy'. What the parent fails to grasp is that this behavior may 'work' in their own homes, but not in the real world, where little Johnny or Susie will have to learn these behaviors will be met with an equal and opposite force that they will not like.
Evie
