Facts about raising children in the 21st Century
Children are being raised in a climate of ever increasing complexity. Why?
(‘Parents’ in this instance refers to parents, grandparents, carers, guardians, or anyone else responsible for raising children in the home; it’s just less clumsy to say ‘parents’, and refer to ‘their’ children. Please don’t feel excluded!)
- Technology is advancing at a rate that the emotional brain can barely keep up with.
- Parents do not understand that we all have emotional needs that must be met in balance, both adults and children.
- Parents generally do not get their own emotional needs met adequately in their lives, and so they find it difficult, and at times impossible, to meet the emotional needs of their children effectively.
- Economic demands make it almost essential for both parents to work, thus reducing the amount and the quality of the time parents can spend with their children.
- Parents often feel exhausted and this not only affects the quality of the interaction between parents and their children but it also impacts on parents’ capacity to impose boundaries consistently. In short, tired, stressed parents ‘give in’ and children know that!
- Guilt-induced over-indulgence by so many parents has become the new ‘love’, thus children are confused and don’t know the difference between a right, a responsibility and a privilege.
- The adolescent brain does not fully mature until approximately 25 years of age. Until then, you are raising a little alien! It’s essential to understand what makes your alien tick!
- Education has become intensely assessment focussed; children and adolescents have never been more stressed at school. Stress erodes emotional well-being and often causes children and adolescents to behave badly.
For all of these very important reasons, relationships in the home can become frayed and it can soon feel as though you have lost (or are losing) control in your home. Children are highly skilled at spotting chinks in their parents’ resolve to impose boundaries and they quickly ‘steal’ power and control in the household. Although they will exhaustively exploit the powerful position they may have grabbed in the home (and perhaps also at school), children do not relish this situation as much as it may appear that they do.
Anger and anxiety are often the bi-products.
There is a good deal that adults can do to reverse this situation! Join the growing parent army and sign up for a Potent Parenting workshop near you. If none are scheduled for your area yet, rally your friends, and express an interest on this site; we will soon resolve that issue!