If you were able to walk back to your childhood, what would you change about your upbringing?
I was thinking about this as I was helping Smallsteps prepare for a test at school and she was making excuses when she made an error and complaining "it's hard" before even really attempting. She is generally pretty good, but there have been plenty of reports that the children of today give up on challenges quickly, and have low resilience to discomfort.
That wasn't a luxury I had as a kid.
And it is a luxury.
It is no surprise there is a strong correlation between difficulty faced and level of personal resilience in the face of difficulty. Due to what has been a relatively controlled environment for the last few decades, many people have seemingly forgotten what hardship is - myself included. Though, compared to many, I am pretty sure that my life is pretty difficult in comparison, but probably not as difficult as my father had to face at times when he was a kid growing up in a warzone.
The hardships I faced as a child were more social at school, but as I was helping my daughter with her homework, which my wife or I often do, I realised that I don't remember my parents ever sitting down with me to help with my own study as a kid. As I have said before, I was left to my own devices and it taught me a lot of responsibility, and a lot of bad habits that I struggle with today. Study is just one of the many.
Our environment shapes us for better and worse, and the support mechanisms we have to make it through childhood will influence all kinds of aspects along the way, not just our behaviour. For example, if I had been better supported with learning math, I would likely have had potential to go into engineering or finance. Having early support opens up external opportunity, because the internal foundations have been built. Without those foundations built when young, opportunity passes by, unnoticed.
We don't know, what we don't know.
And it is because of this that I think young children shouldn't be sat on screens at all, or have the time severely limited. Because that is part of the learning environment, and part of the support mechanisms. And if a child becomes accustomed to being fed rather than exploring, and distracting rather than dealing, the wiring in the brain that would build curiosity and resilience, skill and emotional stability for the future, is missing. And unlike adding a new power socket, it isn't easy to change the structure of the brain, once it has already been set in stone.
Stone might not be the best description of the brain, but I heard a good one from a book where the writer described our young experience like a sponge, where we can soak up everything, good and bad. But over time, that sponge starts to dry out and everything trapped in there becomes who we are, what we feel, and how we behave. It isn't impossible to overcome the bad and react differently than the blueprint the sponge provides, but it is very difficult. And no matter how much the sponge is rinsed, most of the gunk gets trapped in the pores.
While we can't go back and change our past, we can at least understand what is trapped in there and work out ways we can mitigate the problems we can't change, and enhance the areas we can. It is impossible to focus on all aspects though, so it makes sense to discover which are the most valuable to improve. It is like a complicated set of stats for a character in a game, and boosting the ones that matter, the ones that make the largest impact on who we want to be today, and into the future.
Avoiding challenge is impossible.
There are always going to be challenges in life and the more we avoid, the more challenges we will feel, because the threshold to a situation becoming challenging lowers. It is like any pain barrier. Or skill barrier. My daughter might find it challenging to spell a word in English, because she doesn't have to know how to spell in Finnish at all. It is a phonetic language, so it is said how it is written. Spelling tests would be pointless. But it is also because of this lack of exposure to having to spell, that makes spelling uncomfortable for her in some way, if she gets it wrong, because she isn't used to getting it wrong.
And it is this last point that I think is a big reason that resilience and perseverance is reducing in younger generations, because they have been surrounded by an environment that gives them all the "right" answers easily, or at least makes them feel like they have the right answers. And when one feels right in that bubble, without exploring the possibility or having the experience of being wrong, there is very little exposure to failure. And without failure, learning is very limited, as are the skills and brain structures associated with how to deal with failure.
My parents failed me.
I don't blame them though, because they were carrying their own dirty sponge from their childhood and they had less knowledge, possibility, and culture to do much about it. They likely blamed their parents and childhood too, without recognising that their parents had levels of trauma also. But being traumatised (whether low or high level) doesn't mean we have an excuse not to work on ourselves, to improve, to overcome. Yet I find it interesting how many people want to be considered a victim of their childhood, constantly giving excuses why they can't, but don't want to be treated as though they can't.
They revere the label, but don't want to pay the price of actually being what they label themselves.
If we aren't willing to work on ourselves, why should anyone invest their time and effort into supporting us? If a person uses the excuse of childhood trauma for being bad in a relationship but isn't willing to change, then perhaps that person should not try to be in a relationship at all. Maybe they should just accept that they should be alone forever, so as not to traumatise a potential partners and children. If you believe you are broken and can't do anything about it, accept the consequences of the condition.
Not many people who claim their victimhood, are willing to accept the consequences of their condition, are they?
And this is the same for all the labels that people give themselves, or get diagnosed for. They use them as excuses as to why they can't do this, or behave like that, but expect to be treated as everyone else. If everyone else is able to manage their emotions, should someone who can't be treated the same? If everyone is expected to be on time to work, is it fair that some people should be excused? Because people only seem to "not be able to do" the things they don't like doing.
It is like a kid who is too full to eat more vegetables.
But has room for dessert.
If you label yourself as something and expect people to accept it. You have to also accept that people are going to treat you accordingly. If you say you are incapable, don't expect to be included. If you say you have challenges but want to try, even if you fail and you are supportive of other people trying and failing in the various challenges they face, then, that becomes a different story, doesn't it?
There are too many opportunities to walk away from challenges today, rather than learning to face them and overcome them, or fail, as the case may be. The more we walk away, the less curious we become, and the less skilled, the less capable and ultimately, the less we can be included in the lives of others. Another reason why so many people are lonely, perhaps.
Childhood has gone.
How much opportunity will keep passing us by, unnoticed.
Taraz
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As a recovering catholic (not funny I know,) I had some of my sponge soaked with fear of god, blame etc. As much as I would like to think I wrung all of that out before it had time to get stuck permanently, how do I know?
I came to terms, through trial and error and wasted effort and failure, that making excuses robs you of any power. Divert the blame so you don't have to address the stinging pain and you are free! When you look truthfully at that, the less blame you put on yourself for the consequences of your actions/decisions, the more you become a helpless victim of circumstance. Blissfully free of responsibility but mired in shittiness that is out of your control. Hmmmm....not thanks no matter how hard it is to own my actions.
I think every generation feels hard done by from their parents. Present one included. Maybe this generation of parents wanted to preserve childhood so bad that it is a contradiction when we see them failing as they learn, later than we might think they should?
Painting a whole generation with the same brush is one of the things we hated about boomers. I like to focus on what I can control which is helping the people I have responsibility to. Mind you I am not doing a great job at it but I will own it long enough to show by example that it is okay to be tough, human to make mistakes, and you can find peace while accepting blame on the way to empowering yourself and taking control of what you can.
I wonder if it makes you a better person to have a little bit of that in you still, where even though you might not believe, the habit is still there to do the right thing - just in case.
Yep. And yet, people fight to be labelled a victim of something. They want to have a disorder...
The problem I often see is that parents want to be friends with their kids, rather than parents. Friends don't teach you the skills of adults, they are trial and error support along the childhood paths.
Sure, but there is only so much granularity to add here. There are some who have good heads on their shoulders and will go far, but they are definitely outnumbered.
That is why my wife is investing a lot of time and money in our daughter: international baccalaureate middle school, private tutor for math, private tutor for art and she goes and travels with us everywhere. We plan Austria trip next year and that would be her first time in Europe, she went with us to Canada before...
Do people there often travel without their kids?
Have you noticed how a "good education" these days has to be paid for more and more and the bar keeps raising? It used to be "you need a village to raise a child" now, you need an industry.
A lot of people I know leave kids with parents. Yes, good education costs money, bad education costs money too in form of property taxes :) The biggest portion of local taxes is schools. And we pay around 20K USD per year in property tax...
If I were to go back, I probably would have been more involved in sports. I really wasn't because my dad doesn't care for sports that much. I'd like to think it would have made me more conditioned for my later life so that I could be healthier.
The influence is there. This is common for kids, or they play the same sport their dad played, because the dad knows how to teach it when young.
Yeah, that is true.
Hmm, there are a lot of sense in what you put up there. Like you said, we really can't have it all in life. Most of our parents struggle while raising us, and most of them don't even have that kind of life we had, and i think it changes by generation. Most parent wants the best for their kids even when they themselves don't have these while going up. And I can tell you for free that no other person wants the best for you or will be willing to allow you surpass them then ones parents because whatever you become is a plus to them.
Also, this made me think about my own childhood. I didn’t have anyone to sit with me for homework either as i was living with grandma, and most of the time, i had to go to visit the street brothers or sister to be of help when i realised i couldn't just cope on my own and most times, I had to figure things out on my own, and though it was tough, it taught me responsibility and how to push through challenges. But, like you said, it also left me with some habits I still struggle with today. Now, when I see younger ones give up easily, I understand how different their world is, too much comfort, not enough struggle.
Still, I try to guide them with patience, hoping they will ll build the resilience life will demand from them later. I also think time changes and everything changes with it. The kind of strangle people undergo then can't be compared to now that technology has made almost everything easy and it also has it own side effect. I remembered that while going up, I could count just a few households that have television.
There is a huge amount of value in this, but missing out on a huge amount of value too. There is an opportunity-cost to growing up too fast.
And there wasn't much on anyway. At least when I was a kid. If we as children wanted to be entertained, we had to do something interesting.
when I was a child I was getting some sweets and toys but now I think that I would have maybe benefited more is got pocket money instead. That and learning about saving/ investing earlier would be had been great. Also I would have liked to go to more basketball games with my dad.
Pocket money wasn't a thing in my family either. Nor were sweets and toys! It was special occasion only, and it taught me to eat all the candy, whenever it was there.
My dad was fit most of his life, but by the time I was old enough to play, he didn't play any sport games with me. I don't remember ever going to any kind of sporting event with him.
We cannot change our past even if we want to, but we can get an idea of what needs to be changed there. As you said, we never got help from our parents in doing housework in the past. It was the same in our case too. Although nowadays children get all these facilities, they are very much derailed.
I wonder if they will ever get back onto a healthy track.
My father never did my homework with me. My mother stopped checking on me after fourth grade. I'm grateful to them for that now. Thanks to stopping doing my homework at home and instead doing it during breaks and the first few minutes of class, I became more resourceful and adaptable.
This is one of the benefits, but there are downsides too. By fourth grade is fine. For me, I could read and write before school, so school was easy - but as it got harder, I didn't have any of the study habits needed to excel at it.
I had a similar experience; my parents weren't really involved in my studies either, which made me more independent and adult earlier.
And there are pros and cons to that. I didn't have a "childhood" like my peers had - I grew up too fast. It means missing some of the other fundamental lessons.
In order to be able, it is important to want and I am not talking about negative events, I am talking about pure and hard awareness, where there are only moments of "now I get it", there is the door to go out and look for learning.
Very few people are really willing to look hard enough at themselves. Most can't even be in silence or still.
Totally agree, human stupidity lives in all social strata and in all countries of the world
And the more they "flash", the stupider they are.
Hmmm some very interesting prespectives...
the math of today is just weird.. i was trying to help out my daughter before, but the way of figuring out stuff seems to have morphed into obscure patterns or something like that..
yea.. always work on urself.. even, or perhaps even more.. after school is finished. or become an old fart who just watches tv all day and night and shoves food into themselves.. :P
Took me down a rabbit hole. In my tend years I guess I sought too much validation from peers I felt were better than me (better looking, smarter). It really hit my self esteem at a time as I felt unwanted. Oddly enough I was wanted, and loved/admired by many people, I was just seeking validation from people I had no business with
I believe that most kids (atleast here in Western Europe) are indeed being spoiled and overprotected to an extent that is not helping them.
Physically we see kids at primary school on fat bikes while they only have to cover 500m - 1km to school (ofcourse they will struggle with obesity if they never learned to move).
Every kid is different, which all needs to have a name (ADD, ADHD, ASS, HG) but school needs to present tailormade approaches on each kid. Sounds good right? But I feel that is also labelling the kid as different and depriving them from the opportunity to just make social contacts and become more flexible. Later in life no1 will care about the label but will only notice the lack of social skills that came from being overprotected.
Fully recognize your “it is hard” example when it comes to learning also with my own kids haha.
My perspective on our own childhood difficulties and how it also helped us:
That being said I do believe that some childhood hardship provide a great stimuli for development but only to an extent. In a dysfunctional family , kids don’t learn to develop themselves they soley learn to survive by using coping methods that will be difficult to let go in their own adult life. So, a little hardship yes, but within a safe (both physical aswell as emotional environment).
It’s really better when we work hard to succeed because we can truly be proud of ourselves. Just like when I finished my studies — I was a working student, so it’s something I’m really proud of.
Parents today are less interested in parenting and more interesting in making money. So they pay less attention to the growth and development of their kids and the kids, left to their own devices, like you were, will pick up both good and bad traits. The difficulties kids experience should be somehow controlled by parents so the children don't pick up corrupting influences while they build resilience. I think parenting should become a mandatory educational course for every parent this generation as many have not the slightest clue how to go about it. Your are doing a good job with Smallsteps by the way.