Why Are We Raising Oversensitive Snivelers?Sen. Harry Reid is trying to outlaw prostitution in Nevada. One of the reasons he gave was this: "Parents ... don't want their children to look out a school bus and see a brothel or to live in a state with the wrong kind of red lights." Perhaps that's so. But considering any parent who grew up in Nevada grew up with exactly that view out the school bus window, it's odd that suddenly THIS generation is too delicate to take it. For some reason, today's kids are being treated like handblown bud vases: beautiful, yes, but so delicate that, at the slightest bump, they break. Cosseting our kinder has become a national pastime. Consider the children's Bible a friend of mine was reading to her toddler. She got to the crux of the story — in every sense of the word — and found herself reading aloud, "Some people did not like Jesus. They took Him away. His friends thought they would never see Him again. Then Mary saw Jesus. Jesus had come back to life again!" Hurray! Except ... where had he been? The principal's office? There's something missing from this particular version of the story. Apparently, the author assumed that the traditional narrative was just too much for kids to handle — even though this same story has been told to young folk for approximately 2,000 years, and most of them did not grow up too terrified to function. Or how about this incident I heard from a kindergarten aide? One day, the teacher there was reading to the students a picture book biography of Martin Luther King Jr., but when she got to the page with the assassination, she SKIPPED it. She was rambling on, when a kid in the class shouted out, "And then he got SHOT!" Kudos to him. The fact is that kids can understand history without being doomed to depression or violence or whatever it was that that teacher was worried about. This fear that our kids can't handle any bad news at all reached perhaps the nadir of absurdity when a children's TV show in England told its viewers: "Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.
That's right; our kids are too sensitive to contemplate even the idea of an egg breaking. Why are we treating our kids like the wussiest of wussies? It's because overprotection is the tenor of the times. This generation of parents — I'm part of it — slathers its kids in Purell for fear of the same germs we all fought off as kids. We buy educational videos for fear our kids won't learn their letters as we did. My generation goes to the baby store and finds products such as helmets for toddling — an activity suddenly on par with motocross — and infrared video monitors to scan the nighttime nursery for I-don't-know-what. Rats? Terrorists? Bad dreams? We drive our kids to school for fear of abductions; we drive them to after-school lessons because we fear that otherwise they'd fall behind. Sleepovers are out; our kids could get molested. Baby bottles are out, too; the plastic could be poison. And now we don't trust our kids to hear a sad story — or nursery rhyme! — and not fall to pieces. Instead of raising kids who are as resilient as rubber, we seem determined to raise oversensitive snivelers who are unable to roll with a single punch. Except ... that's not REALLY what we want. It's time to take a step back, remember that Humpty Dumpty didn't scar us for life, and start to tell our kids the truth: Life is sometimes imperfect, even harsh. Learn to deal with it and — you will! Then it's time to tell ourselves the same thing. Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
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