Are we coddling today's children?

Stress at home is brought right into the classrooms.

Who is to blame or what is at fault?

The parents or economic conditions effecting the parents and then to their children?

Stress in children is real. Teachers have to contend with children in this conditiion.

I have seen it many times on police calls. Stress at home is stress in a child living in that home.

@john65pennington Understood and I am totally agreeing with you. The thing i want to know is – those stresses have always been there in many families throught years and generations. The stresses may be different in different eras, but they are there. What happened to “sucking it up” so to speak? There was never a seminar to cope with that stress. There were your parents telling you “It’s life and deal with it.” Maybe not in such a harsh way, but essentially that was the message.

@Ponderer983 I am not so sure those stresses have always been there like you suggest. Last Sunday I watched with my jaw in my lap about “redshirting” where parents/mom’s deliberately held their kids back so their child was more developed,bigger, smarter, more agile and more competitive than their peers. I was astonished by this incredulous lack of concern by these parents who flat out admitted that they thought what they were doing is more than OK. So if you are at all surprised and taken aback by any perceived “coddling” of todays kids…I suggest you take your pick from this list of 60 Minutes exposes’ on this God Awful trend.

Let’s pretend that they can’t have stress at a young age (they can). That word right there, ‘coping’? That’s teaching them the coping skills for the stress they will have later in life. It’s really better to learn those skills early on, get into the habit of being able to cope (which is not just something you magically do, it’s something you learn, and coping is just another way of saying “sucking it up” and “dealing with it”), so that you don’t have to sidetrack your life later on just to learn a basic skill.

No..we are killing them. Children , and the adults they become, should be free to play and learn and explore not forced into not being themselves. No wonder Anxiety is high.

I don’t really understand this idea that throughout history, people were just really good at coping by our standards without any help. They weren’t. It was really common for ‘dealing with it’ to be really horrible things – like, give birth to a baby you can’t afford? Infanticide. Need to get out of this god-awful marriage? Poison. Are you an apprentice who needs to tell his master to freaking feed him already? Massacre tons and tons of cats. I mean, I suppose you could frame it as ‘dealing’, but… I’d kinda rather set the bar a bit higher. What’s so wrong about asking that things get better?

I think parents who have mental illness try to have their children coded.

I know my ex insisted my daughter needed therapy. When I met with the therapist, I expressed my daughter may have had some problems with the divorce, but I suspect she may be just milking it at this point, to make her mother happy. The therapist said, “I may recommend your daughter go down to once every 6 months, or as needed, to your ex wife”.

On the other hand, I think people who worry about coddling children are asking the wrong question. The question is, “Is my child kind?”. If their child is kind, than there is no problem. If their child is not kind, something needs to change.

Kindness is the only means I know to judge mental health. Toughness is an invention of those who see life as a competition they are losing.

@Ponderer983 I think I get what your saying. You are not disagreeing with stress being a real thing or ADD or ADHD. Your simply saying that it appears that it seems to be everyones scape goat for bad behavior. I agree. I think when I was growing up children where simply taught what was right and wrong and excuses wheren’t made. They were made to face the consequences and learned not to do them again. Of course some where perhaps ADD, or ADHD and could’ve used some understanding rather than punishment but there were not so many cases of bad behavior. Before one would say the bully in school. Now it seems to be the bullies.
And children where left to learn on their own how to handle stress but constant interference may be making them unable to handle their stress.
Stress has always existed and unfortunately, I think todays parents barely know how to handle their own stress and either have little time or little knowledge on how to teach their children how to handle stress.
I have a cousin that people think has ADD or ADHD. She is grown and I’ve known her through her teen years. She was calm and bright. Very happy. Now she works a lot and people can’t believe the energy she has. I’ve seen her down a lot of coffee. I think she is still smart and young and healthy. But now if you have too much energy, your hyper. If your low on energy your depressed or have thyroid problem. Its almost a dammed if you don’t and dammed if you do, kind of thing. It does seem like everyone must have something.

I think many kids are under stress. In the same way the rest of us are. They have to play sport, learn to dance, go to music lessons etc. etc. Some parents fill their children’s days with more and more things that they must do to be a well-rounded person. Add to that the pressure to perform at school. The relentless peer pressure that now doesn’t stop at the front door but is carried into the home with mobile phones and computers. Kids (like many of us) don’t get to switch off. To just be kids. Play in the garden. Kick a ball in the street.

So I agree with @Aethelflaed. Since we are unlikely to change this trend, let’s at least try to give our children coping skills to manage the pressure they are under.

On the scapegoating issue within mental health: I don’t see diagnoses as excuses. I do see them as reasons, as explanations, but not as excuses. However, I do feel like if I’m going to see this as only a reason, not an excuse, then there should be the tools out there to overcome whatever obstacles might exist. If the tools aren’t there (both in theory and in practice, including accessibility), then it does become more of an excuse. So, if there are these seminars and other tools (and, as a side note, I think seminars are on the less useful end of the tool spectrum) out there for kids with rough home lives, with ADHD, then I have no problem holding them to the same standards as everyone else. But if the tools aren’t there, then I’m more inclined to let them off the hook.

There’s this anecdote I know, that I think relates to this. I heard it (on TED) and read it (in a book of his) from Sir Ken Robinson. Goes something like this.

There’s this girl, she’s around first grade in school: young. Her teacher has to call in her parents for a meeting—the girl won’t sit still, keeps fidgeting and getting up and moving around, has trouble focusing, to the point that it’s disruptive to the classroom environment. The parents, concerned, and following the teacher’s advice, go to a doctor to discuss their options for their ADD daughter. The doctor watches as the girl, like at school, doesn’t stop moving, has trouble focusing. The doctor turns to the parents, asks them if they can step outside the room for a bit. This further concerns the parents. The doctor leads them out, and partially shuts the door, just enough open that they can peer in to the room. The daughter is up out of her seat and moving around the room, through the space. The doctor turns to the parents. “Your girl doesn’t have ADD,” he says. “She’s a dancer. Get her into dance class.” Another person may have simply prescribed the Ritalin to sedate her, and sent her back to sit in her seat at school. Instead, the girl grows up to choreograph CATS, among many other things—her name is Gillian Lynne.

Personally, all the structured/designed/mechanistic/cathartic psychological solutions don’t help much at all. Coddling, doesn’t help me much at all. But it took me a while to figure that out, because I thought it was all supposed to, I thought that was absolutely what it all did. I thought the changes I felt must be me getting closer to something important or fundamental. They were simply another lens, and ill-fitting they slipped off my nose to crack on the asphalt river.
Currently, I prefer my own pair of frames, and frequent adjustment of the glass-inner.

Funny, you say coddling and then you also talk about giving kids more attention to help them behave better. Maybe what you call coddling in that example is actually neglect? Not that I am accussing all paremts of kids who are out of control neglectful, I don’t think that. I do think there is a loss of calm in our modern life.

I saw a show recently that said the human brain was not made to be constantly under fear, time constraints, and tons of information coming at it at once. That we are on overload, and that is why we are stressed. Children too. Yes even Jr. high, even elementary. I don’t see why anyone is surprised a young child might be stressed. Even if their problems seem like not big problems from an adult perspective, their problems can be big from the preteen, teen perspective. And, of course some kids really have very worrisome troubles where their stress is understandable from any perspective.

@imadethisupwithnoforethought I love what you say about being kind, that is the most important thing.

Yes. The kids are learning at very young ages that they hold the power of a lawsuit in their immature, irresponsible, selfish little hands.

[Redacted by me.]

I am not that old. But I have occasion to work with and speak with children and adolescents. In my life, the kids have stayed pretty much the same-they are great. On the other hand, over the years, parents in general have become increasingly clueless and incompetent.

Today’s parents are yesterday’s children, maybe that is why they are increasingly clueless and incompetent. And I agree, parenting has been going to hell for quite some time now. But perhaps the current generation of great kids will turn things around. Let’s hope so anyhow. (Although in the paper this morning was an article about a kid, not a parent, dropping a rock off a bridge through the window of a car below and almost killing the driver and the one of the car he crashed into. So I’m not holding my breath.)

I think part of the problem is that when I was a kid, I was accountable to every single adult around me. If an adult came to them and said, “Valre did such and such!” I’d get in trouble by my parents. Nowadays it seems like people are more likely to say, “Keep your nose out of our business.”