How Parents are Supposed to @#$@#$@#$ Raise their Kids
April 08, 2006

While I'm not a Child Protection Social Worker anymore, one thing that still drives me eyes-out-of-the-socket-fry-eggs-on-my-bald-head crazy, are the number of times I hear, read or otherwise encounter some variation on parents shifting the responsibility for the guidance of their children off of themselves and onto the freakishly large, intimidating and constantly changing world they're supposed to be guiding said children through.

"I can't monitor the TV, so take everything off I don't want my kids to see."

"I can't know what every book is my kids are reading, so take anything I find objectionable out of the libraries or bookstores or magazine stands."

"I don't understand a computer..."

Make it easy for me, they say, because they just don't have time to do the hard a job of really raising their kids.

Ugh. Just. Shut. Up.

Now that I'm not a child protection social worker anymore, I can say this to such clods:

You had your 15 seconds of fun, now deal with the results.

Raising kids is @#$@#$ hard. It never gets easy.

You can't protect them from the world. You can't stop them from seeing everything you disagree with. You can't ensure they never do, see or feel something you don't want them too. No parent, in the history of the world, could do that -- or could do it for very long. (Go ask King Siddhartha Sakayamuni about his efforts.)

What parents can do is get @#$#@$@# involved in their kids' lives. They can set limits. Make boundaries. Give young people repercussions when they transgress those boundaries. They can hope -- and if they are so inclined pray -- that all their efforts will work out in the end.

Same as every other parent in history has done.

With that in mind, I love reading articles like this one from the LA Times, where instead of closing her daughter off from the internet world of My Space, a Mom actually got involved, joined with her daughter, and both grew as a result.

Ms. Saillant, the author of the piece, when confronted with one of the nebulous and scary events life threw her way, took the time to actually see what her daughter was doing. She figured out a way to teach her daughter. She moved past a quick, fear driven response to ban her daughter from using the service out-right (or banning everyone's child, teen or adult from using the same thing.) She looked for a use the maze of nasty come-ons, youthful explorations, and moral conundrums to educate her daughter about how to deal with My Space.

And her kid did -- about as well as every other 13 year does with every boundary they encounter. Her daughter tested the boundary and screwed up. Ms. Saillant banned her daughter from using the service, not because My Space was dangerous -- it was no more so than life -- but because, within the limits set, Taylor didn't comply. She didn't show the maturity to deal with such things on her own, unreviewed. Eventually even Taylor understood that it was her fault, and not her mothers', that she wasn't using My Space.

I'm pretty sure its going to take several hundred more such episodes to make that message stick with Taylor: that it's her responsibility to be moral, deal with life's dangers and act responsibly, through and through. Ms. Saillant is doing her best to teach that lesson to her daughter, as many times and as many ways as her daughter needs to hear it.

Yea!

Posted by Jody at April 8, 2006 01:53 PM

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Posted by: Brent Rasmussen at April 10, 2006 05:35 PM

Posted by: Jody at April 10, 2006 07:08 PM

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