Discuss Among Yourselves

I've never raised a child so maybe it disqualifies me for making comment on how children are raised but then again I've never written a novel but I know a stinker when I read one.

In the past week or so I've read a couple things online that made me think about how children are different than the time when I was growing up. I wish I could remember where I'd read these articles because I'd link to them but even if I made up these theories out of whole cloth myself I think there is least enough behind these ideas to merit consideration.

The first was a speech given by someone and in the speech the speaker referred to the C.S. Lewis book Voyage of the Dawn Treader where one of the characters, Eustice, is confronted by a dragon. In the book, Lewis writes that Eustice has no idea about dragons and what to do about one because he never read the sort of books that would feature a dragon. The actual crux of the speech, as I understood it anyway, was that parents limit their children's exposure to bad thing. Bad circumstances, bad things that happen in the world, and so on so that children don't gain any experience with the bad that can and will come into their lives. They're unprepared to deal with evil or bad things because they don't know how to recognize it when they see it. Too much shielding of children leaves them more vulnerable. Even reading stories with bad characters at least teaches children that bad does exist and not everyone will have your best interests at heart.

I think there must be a fine line here between having your child recognize bad things and making them overly worrisome over bad things. I can see the point of reading Grimm's fairy tales to kids and letting them see the clear distinction between good and evil but letting kids read about or see violence can have the opposite effect. I would think too much exposure would perhaps make kids numb to it.

The other article was discussing how a survey of current college students found the majority to be self centered and vain - that these students found themselves to be most important. The article discussed how the message being given to children as they grow up has changed over the years. I know when I was a child the message of "You're unique" was emphasized in an effort to make kids feel that it was okay if they were tall or fat or wore glasses or braces or good at sports or made good grades. That everyone is an individual with a unique personality. Evidently over the years the message has changed to "You're special" and kids have grown up thinking that since they're special they're somehow better or more important than others and therefore young adults now think of themselves as being the focal point and we've raised a generation of narcissists.

I like the idea of teaching children that they are special but perhaps the line is being crossed and "special" is being translated into "better than". Is there a difference between "special" and "better than"?

This is all probably why I don't have kids. I think I'd be so afraid of how I was doing as a mother I'd have my child boxed up like a veal calf.