IT'S TRUE
Yes.
Many of us must plead guilty.
The charge: compelling our children to grow up too fast.
How do you plead? And,how important can such a choice be?
I think I am aware of the many excuses we can,
as adult individuals, use to justify our actions and attitudes. I've used a few of them myself.
Much of what we do, or avoid doing, seems to be founded upon a kind of adult peer pressure. That's somethings we find easy to apply to children's actions, but many adults – and you know a few of them yourself - are constantly being led around by what they see other adults doing. That becomes what might be dubbed the EDI Syndrome - “Everybody does it!” By some form of warped logic that makes it permissible.
At the risk of being branded as a thoughtless busybody, I venture to suggest a few ways in which we might achieve a measure of balance in our thinking.
I find it difficult to go along with any parents who are eager to form their little girl so she will grown up to be glamorous and seductive. They have her ears pierced, fit her earlobes with sets of gaudy earrings and bracelets for her wrists and ankles at every Birthday, Holiday, Store Sale or Guilt Trip they encounter. Most of this is for pre-school ages,after which it becomes a competitive thing. I do not favor teaching a little girl that painting her fingernails and toenails every color of the rainbow , nor do I think it wise for parents to dress her as living Barbie Doll. I cannot see them allowing her to choose what and when she will eat or forbidding her to have certain items in the almost-sacred name of “weight control.”
Little boys often have the same parental problems in modified forms. Dad buys the kid a gun before he can toddle. Sports activities loom large in the plans the father has for his son. He desperately strives to re-live the active life style he likes to believe he had at one time. I don't go for free reign of TV and Computer selection by either boys or girls,either.
I realize this places me well back into the pre-Woodstock era. I'm marked as a fuddy-duddy concerning the free life. And there was a time when that bothered me a bit; when I thought I was alone with such quaint feelings.
I am not alone, I have found.
More and more parents are coming to the realization that they are doing non-repairable harm to their youngsters by attempting to force their formation is such outward ways. The inner self is the parent's main responsibility. You know the proverb about bending a twig the way you want it to grow and a host of other such wise sayings. You are not expected to add the foliage and the colorful blooms as soon as the bulb sprouts.
A.L.M. January 22, 2003 [c497wds]
