Parenting and Support of Children Gone Mad
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Callie Aarons
A man in Texas attacked a coach because he didn't like the coach's treatment of his son on the football team. This was one in a long list of strange behaviors parents are exhibiting toward their children in schools and on teams of play.
In some school districts in California, well to do and rich parents are encouraging their children to seek, and in some cases they are actually seeking for them, doctors' notes that claim their children have learning disabilities. The purpose is to secure extra time to complete tests in order to enhance their chances of making higher scores.
In still other rich school districts, some parents are going to school games with stop watches and timing the playing-time of their sons in certain games, then threatening to sue the districts if their sons are not played more.
And still other parents are doing their children's homework and questioning every grading decision made by teachers concerning their children. Parental involvement was always wanted by the school districts, but the amount of attention many parents are giving to their children's schooling has become intrusive and interferes in the educational process. Some parents have become obsessive and have become a pest to the schools.
Today's parents who are overly and adversely involved in the schooling of their children seem as if their lives are totally identified in the schooling and activities of their children; they face the challenges of their children and try, strangely, to dictate the outcomes of children's activities. That behavior actually takes away from the needed experiences of their children, and it cripples a child in his/her adult development.
This unique parental behavior is not parenting but parental projection; this behavior does not teach a child how to navigate his/her way through life, which parenting is about. Instead, the parent is living a second youth as he or she attempts to buffer his/her child through the normal youthful experiences that prepare a child for adult life. Second, this behavior robs a child of a meaningful and honestly competitive milieu that allows that child to gauge himself in comparison to others; if the parent is doing the work of a child, buffering that child from normal disappointments of life, the child will have an unrealistic perception about life and the situations and circumstances of life in the absence of parents.
Many parents are crippling their children by these overactive responses to normal difficulties of youth. It is this type of parenting that prompted one father to say to his son when that child was bullied, "Show me the kid who bullied you. Let's get him, and I'll show you how to handle him." That man put the teenage bully in his trunk, took him into the woods, along with his son, and beat the child senseless; then he told his son, "Now complete it like a man." That poor son obeyed a foolish father and shot the boy to death.
That son had a fool for a father; now both father and his son are spending life in prison together. His perception of life was unrealistic, and his behavior was a pattern of warped behavior transmitted to his son. And that can only replicate itself in the son; children are keen observers and imitate what they see significant others do.
Parents who engage in mad behavior are a destruction to their children. But many of these parents are only children masquerading as adults. They show their children patterns of unrealistically responses to stimuli. Those individuals who think murder and mayhem are reasonable responses to adversity are mad, and when they demonstrate this madness to their children, they are transmitting it to them. They are killing their children.
Republished
3/6/0611.28.05
