When I was a kid, I played ball in the street, hide and seek in my backyard. I had my sister’s hand me down Barbies, lots of board games and and I watched unlimited TV. I remember getting together with friends, riding bikes down the streets that had huge hills, and playing tag.
That was my childhood in a nutshell.
It seems as if I am living in a different reality. Although we limit our kids extracurricular activities and we try to keep our schedules low key, it always seems to me that we are running somewhere. Frankly, I am tired and I think my kids are too.
Lisa Levey has a great article about all this. She says:
“Our son played in an in-town soccer league in fourth grade and the coach was required to rank all the players on the team from top to bottom. Our son got amongst the highest rankings and the coach was surprised to hear that we weren’t planning on moving him to the cross-town league the following year. A friend in town, who was a soccer coach for the league, told my husband and me that the prevailing wisdom is a child still playing “in-town” by the time they are 9 or 10 couldn’t possibly have much talent. Talent dismissed before reaching double digits? Is it just me or is this madness? Our son did play another season in town but the following year there were so few kids that we succumbed and he joined a traveling team. Subsequently, Saturdays were spent navigating to find obscure fields in towns near and far. I continue to ponder: Is this necessary?
The word “success” as applied to children disturbs me. A quick Internet search on the definition of success focuses on achievement, prosperity, popularity. Now that is a certain aspect of success but certainly not my emphasis as a parent. To me the job of a parent is to help children discover their strengths and passions, to learn the value of hard work and, yes, accomplishment, to instill in them compassion and respect for others, and to figure out how they can be a contributing member of society. I’ve found that our modern focus on raising “successful” children seems to have transformed parents from guides or mentors to talent agents, continuously looking for the next angle to best position the child.”
(See the full article here: Are We Pushing Our Kids Too Hard To Succeed?)
What do you think? Are we pushing our kids to hard to succeed? What is our definition of success?
Harriet Cabelly gave a fabulous class on this topic: Charachter Counts:Raising Well-Rounded And Successful Children
You can get the audios here.
Dr. Shira Wiesen will be giving a follow up class on Monday, November 12, 2012:
Emotional IQ: Empowering Our Children To Become Emotionally Smarter
You can sign up for our live class here.