There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children
Nelson Mandela
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO PASS ON?
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been asking one question to my circle of friends and family who are parents: What are the qualities you want your child to possess when he or she becomes an adult? No one said math skills, proficiency in soccer, patriotism, mastery of scientific knowledge, obedience, or compliance. Instead, overwhelmingly, I heard things like courage, open mindedness, critical thinking, trust in themselves, confidence, creativity, and ability to participate in loving and fulfilling relationships.
So why don’t we spend as much time teaching our children about empathy as showing them how to ride a bike? Why don’t we encourage diversity in choices as much as we push them to find their favorite things? Why don’t we honor their mistakes as much as celebrate their successes? As long as they are safe from the elements, why don’t we let our kids wear whatever they want as a form of self-expression? Why do we say, “be quiet” more than “tell me what you think?” And why don’t we support them for saying no to authority instead of demanding they do as they are told without questioning?
One of my greatest parenting wishes is to raise my kids to be responsible global citizens. Now more than ever, I try to prioritize social justice and responsibility in our family dynamic, whether it be in conversation at the dinner table or support I offer them academically or socially. I am often left scratching my head with the question “what can I do?” as I see inequality all around me in the media and in my community. I realize that I can do something every single day to address what is happening in our world, and that shows up to a large extent in my family dynamic. I am responsible to raise my kids to be inquisitive, kind, compassionate, and socially assertive individuals. Parenting for social justice might be the biggest part I can play in making an impact on inequality in our world. I have an opportunity to make a difference through every word that I speak and every action that I take as a parent.
Every day, parenting experts appear on television, photos of “perfect” families flood our social media, and new books come out on how to raise a family. There is no universal manual, of course. Most of us parent our kids consciously or unconsciously according to what we learned in our families growing up. But with some education and reflection, we can learn new ways and emotional skills with which to interact with our kids that can lead to a more functional society. One day, all too soon, THEY will be the ones making decisions and impacting our world. Isn’t it our responsibility as parents to teach them how?
EPIDEMIC OF FEAR
There is an epidemic of fear and anxiety running rampant through the country and it shows up all around us in our young people. According to a report by UNICEF, American youths now rank in the bottom quarter among developed nations in well-being and life satisfaction (Dijkstra, 2009). A report from the CDC shows that stress levels in US adolescents surpasses those of adults (CDC, 2018b). Another recent study shows that more than half of college students experience overwhelming anxiety, and a third report intense depression (Lipson et al, 2019). Over the last two decades, there has been a 28 percent increase in suicide rates in the US and that number is steadily climbing (CDC, 2018a).
WHAT ARE OUR KIDS MOST AFRAID OF?
According to researcher and parenting blogger Carmelo Spatazza, here's a list of what teenagers fear most in 2020:
PEER PRESSURE/NOT FITTING IN
One of the most difficult parts of adolescence is navigating the complex social life as a teenager. Teens can often feel peer pressured into engaging in more adult behaviors like experimenting with sex and drugs. In a survey from Stage of Life, 40% of teens reported fearing peer pressure. The angst of not fitting in could easily lead to feelings of increased anxiety and depression. Roberto Rodriguez, 17, reveals that his biggest fear in life is “honestly, the feeling of being left out, like, by my friends.”
SEX/INTIMACY
While some teens become sexually active, others are afraid to. Unfortunately, sex education is woefully inadequate in the US. It’s a difficult subject for many parents to broach, often leading to increased anxiety and confusion when it comes to sex and intimate relationships.
FAILURE
Whether it’s tests, auditions, dating, or life in general, teens fear failure — just like adults. Many simply don’t want to disappoint their parents, friends, teachers, or themselves, which is why it’s considered one of the top fears in 2020. Fear of failure is a pervasive emotion for teenagers, and contributes to much of the depression and anxiety that teens are diagnosed with each year.
MONEY
Teens, even those who aren’t in the workforce, have seen and felt the effects of the rising costs of living coupled with stagnant wages. Many of them have witnessed it with their parents, and 56.4% of teens surveyed by Stage of Life expressed that trying to earn enough money for themselves or their families is high on their list of fears.
THE FUTURE/GROWING UP
Today’s teens worry about a lot more than the hottest new song or going to prom. Aside from real quagmires like climate change and social revolution, teens fear an uncertain future. This includes the above-mentioned fears of life with COVID, but it’s more than that. Young people are still dreaming of college, life after graduation, and their career paths, but they fear what’s beyond the comfort of their teenage years. Adulting is hard, and they know it.
BULLYING/CYBERBULLYING
Bullying is no longer limited to schoolyard scuffles. Now, contemporary teens must worry about bullying in the real world and online. A 2018 Pew Research study found that 59 percent of US teens have been bullied or harassed online. Cyberbullying has become a growing problem due to the rise of social media.
LOST IDENTITY
Teenagers are generally in a hurry to grow up. On the cusp of adulthood, they tend to struggle with finding themselves during this formative time. From what we know about the teenage brain, when teens lose their pre-adolescent self they’re in desperate need of a new identity. While many of our personality traits don’t fully evolve until later as adults, many teens are torn between knowing who they want to be and finding who they really are. This also includes gender identity and sexuality.
SAFETY
With an increase in bullying, assaults, school shootings, and other violent acts perpetrated across the US in recent years, teenagers are afraid. These kids shouldn’t have to fear for their lives when just getting an education is difficult enough.
EMBARRASSMENT
If there’s one fear that teens can agree on, it’s being embarrassed in front of their peers. Teens hurl dreaded ridicule from the lunchrooms to the chatrooms, and anyone unlucky enough to do something embarrassing in the digital age will be doomed to relive their embarrassment online for all eternity.
FEAR AND RACISM
Attitudes of extreme hatred are usually based on fear. They come from primitive survival mechanisms—our instinct to avoid danger—to fear anything that appears to be different, which leads to fear of the other. “When one race of persons unconsciously feels fear in response to a different race group—fears that their own level of security, importance, or control is being threatened—they will develop these defensive thoughts and behaviors,” says psychologist and political advisor Dr. Reneé Carr. “They will create exaggerated and negative beliefs about the other race to justify their actions in [an] attempt to secure their own safety and survival.” Increasingly, researchers are looking how lack of emotional skills and ensuing racism is impacting kids in our country. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) calls racism a socially transmitted disease. A 2019 report from the official journal of the AAP titled “The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health,” states: “Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks (which is what we call ‘race’) that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.” Racism is a social determinant of health that has a profound impact on the health status of children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families. Although progress has been made toward racial equality and equity, the evidence to support the continued negative impact of racism on health and well-being through implicit and explicit biases, institutional structures, and interpersonal relationships is clear. Failure to address racism will continue to undermine health equity for all children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families,” (Trent et al, 2019).” According to Dr. Claire McCarthy, Senior Faculty Editor for Harvard Health Publishing, “Racism hurts children, in real and fundamental ways. It hurts not just their health, but their chances for a good, successful life,” (McCarthy, 2019). She goes on to say that, “racism and its effects can lead to chronic stress for children; and chronic stress leads to actual changes in hormones that cause inflammation in the body, a marker of chronic disease.”
Emotional Intelligence (EQ):
The ability to understand and manage one's own emotions.
LOW EQ PARENTING
Researcher Jonice Webb, Ph.D., says our nation is facing increased levels of anxiety in adolescents as a result of parents who lack skills in emotional intelligence. A term popularized in the 1990s, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions. Children who are raised by parents by low EQ parents, according to Webb, struggle in specific ways:
LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS
Inability to feel, sit with, talk about, or express emotion
LACK OF CONTROL
Inabiity to manage feelings or difficult situations
NEGATIVE SELF TALK
Engagement in self harm and self defeating behavior
INCREASED FEAR
Consistent levels of fear and fear-based behavior
THE BASICS OF FEAR-BASED PARENTING
What You Need to Know
In her article "What is Fear-Based Parenting, and am I using it?" Emily Anderson says, “The basics of fear-based parenting are being taught, encouraged, and utilized throughout our society,” (Emily Anderson, 2019). She discusses that parents today are utilizing “socially acceptable” ways to parent their kids with fear-based practices including time outs, groundings, verbal intimidation, and threats. In answer to this, she says, “Children arrive on this Earth for the most part, as good little beings. When they are ‘bad,’ they are in the process of learning how the world works, how society works, and how their bodies work. But we parents take it upon ourselves to make much of this exploration a negative experience.” She summarizes, “Ultimately, cooperation and respect are what we should want, not blind obedience. Part of that is accepting that children won’t always comply right away. That we’ll have to spend more time talking to them, and reasoning with them. This doesn’t mean you let them walk all over you, or accept disrespectful or hurtful behavior. But it does mean that you will have to strike a balance between the obedience you want from your child now against the judgment and reasoning you want your child to have as an adult,” (Emily Anderson, 2019).
FEAR-BASED PARENTING STYLES
Trends in parenting over the last few decades
HELICOPTER PARENTING
This term describes parents who are overprotective and, more generally, over-involved in their children’s lives. A typical helicopter parents may say things like “It’s not my child I don’t trust, it’s the rest of the world.” They are convinced that danger lurks around every corner, and so they guard and advise their child at every turn.
In The Many Shades of Fear-Based Parenting, Peter Gray, Ph.D. says that researchers have identified helicopter parenting using questionnaires and have found at least a correlation between this style of parenting and offspring’s subsequent poor coping skills in young adulthood. These parents have difficulty letting go, even when their children are adults, perhaps partly because their kids actually seem to need extra help, as they developed habits of helplessness resulting from all the previous helicoptering. These parents continue to want to know all the details of their adult children’s lives and to offer unsolicited advice as the latter pursue higher education or careers or start to raise a family of their own.
SNOWPLOW PARENTING
Instead of hovering around to help them through the obstacles of life, snowplow parents smash down the obstacles. This is protective parenting gone wild, with money and power to pack more punch. These are parents who use their wealth, status, and privilege to clear the path for their children. Much of their effort is aimed at getting their children into and through the most elite college possible, or the most prestigious and well-paying career because these are parents who place great value on the outward appearance of success. Snowplow parents hire tutors to help with hard courses, hire professionals to write college application essays, make large donations to colleges in exchange for admission, and call teachers and future employers for extra privileges for their child.
FUEL-INJECTOR PARENTING
A relatively new term coined by Gray, fuel-injector parents are not so concerned with removing barriers for their children as they are with injecting their children with what they regard as the sorts of motives and attitudes that they (the parents) perceive as necessary to navigate the world. In particular, they are hooked on the idea that life is fundamentally a competition to be won or lost; to win you need to want to win and know how to compete.
Gray says, “It’s not surprising that many parents think this way. Our whole schooling system, by design, is a constant competition for children. Everyone’s on the same track, running supposedly to the same goal, and those who fall behind or wander down some other track are deemed ‘failures.’ By extension, many people grow up feeling that all of life is a competition, like school, where some are winners and others are failures. I’ve even heard parents argue, seriously, that the main value of school is it teaches children to compete,” (The Many Shades of Fear-Based Parenting, 2019).
Cindy Want Brandt, Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy, and Kindness:
What if diagnosis is the first solid step toward a cure? What would happen, if instead of handing out domination, violence, manipulation, and hate, we treat children with generosity, gratitude, love, freedom, and peace? What if the solution to the world’s complex problems begins in our homes and local communities, by unlearning the patterns with which we have treated children and having the courage to change? What if building a better world, a more just world, begins by raising one child – each child – with dignity?