How Did We Get Here - Some Observations

This first post is more of an observation than it is a Pearl. I came up with these one night at Sunday dinner as we old folks and our adult children were sitting around the dinner table talking about society today and the struggles to meet that right someone with whom you can raise a family. My son and daughter commented that looking for someone who was dependable and competent to build a home and family was really difficult. Of course that led us down the discussion path of how the current generation got the way they are and that to the topic of parenting. Parenting is a source of fodder that you are going to see a lot in Mom's Pearls. So get ready for some observations regarding how we got to where we are today.......

Our observations start out with the preponderance of misguidance that abounds when it comes to raising children. I say misguidance because much of how our society has parented over the last 30-40 years was done in the name of "being a good parent". These "Good Parents" devoted themselves to giving their children "what they never had" and “protecting” their children from the trials of life their parents made them bear.

Add in a booming economy, massive media exposure for experts on any and every topic you can imagine, movements from free love to civil rights, and you get a very busy but perhaps not very focused generation. A lot of these "good parents" wound up providing their children with surrogates in the form of computers, televisions, and organized acitivities, while they pursued Self Actualization on Maslow's Hierarchy or were busy succeeding on some other level. All the while making decisions about their children's future to protect the child from failure, so upon their entrance into the Real World, they were overwhelmed and under prepared.

Yes, I realize that I made some gross generalizations and I may have been a little harsh on my own generation with how we reared the current generation, but given all of the crisis in our society today, I don't think I went too far off base.

Being the eternal optimist, I do believe that this misguided parenting was with the best of intentions. And really, as a parent you don't necessarily know how it is going to turn out when you are in the heat of the moment. None the less, giving children the "best of everything" (except their parents time and attention) and protecting them from hardship and failure, i.e. not have to make their own choices, does not prepare them to navigate the obstacles of everyday life. And now of course, many of them are parents themselves and perpetuating the same misguided methods used on them.

As you may suspect it isn't working any better for the current generation than it did for the last generation. So, you may ask, what is the fix? I believe it is very simple, the fix is:

A. Teach
B. Educate
C. Train

Intrigued? Sound redundant? To simple? Comment and let me know if you think I have left something out. Stay tuned for my next post, "The Road Less Traveled is Not the Path of Least Resistance". Talk to you soon......