DooYoo want your child growing up to become helpless and ignorant? (Keeping Your Child Safe from the Outside World)

Member Name: Redhead23

Product:	Keeping Your Child Safe from the Outside World
Date:	13/05/01 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Children need to learn the facts of life in carefully prepared bite-size portions

Disadvantages: If they never get to know these facts, they'll struggle later in their lives

I thought long and hard before writing this opinion - on one hand I do not yet have children of my own, so I can hardly judge people for the way they bring up their children without 'really' knowing what it feels like to fear for your own child's safety.

On the other hand I have a few friends with small children and I have seen many different ways of bringing up children during my time as a part-time babysitter - I may not know if I will be able to do it 'better' once I have children of my own, but I still DO have an idea of how I DON'T want to do it. Still with me? Okay, here goes...

/////\\\\\ Our World isn't 'Barbie Land' ////\\\\

In an ideal world, there would be no pain, no suffering, no crime, no drugs, no disease and no famine - but that's not exactly going to happen now, is it? As sad as it is, human nature is sometimes cruel in its ways - greed, anger, jealousy and hatred are only a few of the feelings we all have to deal with, but some people (and more and more large corporations) don't keep those feelings to themselves, but live them out on other people's and mother nature's costs. In addition, there are tragedies that are as of yet outside of our influence - incurable diseases, earthquakes, floods, freak accidents or unexpected volcanic eruptions are just some of the factors that cost hundreds of thousands of lives each and every year.

You just have to open a daily newspaper or watch the news to be bombarded with sad and moving stories and images describing the suffering and pain that goes on in our world, and more and more people prefer to stick their heads in the sand and pretend everything is rosy and wonderful, even when it's so obviously not.
In the same way, many people try to pretend to their children that life is all sweet and 'evil things' like sex (out of fear their child may want to try it out immediately), drugs and crime are difficult
subjects that parents don't always feel comfortable talking about and try to avoid for as long as possible.

Children's minds are 'pure' so to say - they somehow manage to see good in everything and their creativity and imagination, combined with an insatiable appetite for learning, is truly stunning - how could anyone break down those little sweethearts' fantasies and tell them the sad truth about our world?

////\\\\ Children grow up some day ////\\\\

Actually, that title is an understatement - children seem to grow up so much faster than they used to, maybe it is because the mass media is constantly flinging pictures of tragedy and suffering at us, because cartoons, TV series and computer games portray murder, crime and even - *gulp* - sex more and more freely in programs and publications aimed at a younger audience than ever?

One minute they're your innocent little darlings, the next they come home using swear words that you KNOW they didn't pick up from you, they talk explicitly about sexual 'bits' and positions and they are not shocked when they see human bodies being blown to pieces on the news - instead, they think it's cool.

But can they really understand these things? Do they understand the meaning of those profanities they deal out so readily, or that of the sexual references they find so amusing to talk about? Do they understand the implications of the violence shown to them in their favourite cartoons and films? I don't think they do, and once they do, they learned the 'facts of life' from TV, from magazines and from their mates' second-hand 'experiences' - hardly what a decent parent would like to see, and not exactly a guarantee that they truly understand the meaning of those 'facts'.

There is a huge difference to being exposed to something and truly understanding its meaning and implications - so what is the solution? Put
ting your children in cotton wool and protecting them from the outside world by stopping them from watching TV and talking to their friends? Again, I think the answer is a big fat NO - children will have to learn about (and learn to deal with) the things that go on it the world at some point, but shouldn't that be the role of the parents?

////\\\\ Why Over-Protection doesn't work ////\\\\

I have a good friend who used to go to a 'Rudolf Steiner Schule', the Swiss equivalent of Waldorf Schools.
Although the aim of those schools is commendable, the problem is that they do indeed try to wrap the children in cotton wool and try to pretend all the evil in the world doesn't exist - children are educated in a protected and creative environment, free to express themselves and they aren't under any pressure to compete for good grades.

Sounds like a nice place, doesn't it? The only problem is that the parents who send their children to those schools often have exactly the same attitude - so neither school nor parents prepared those children for the big world out there.
As a result, most of the people who graduated from this school at the age of 18 didn't exactly have the academic qualifications that counted in 'real life', so they had to go to a college and get their 'Matura' (something between A-Levels and an HND) afterwards - but they had never learned how to cope with stress, how to work under pressure and how to deal with failure, simply because they were never faced with these things before in their whole lives, nor had they been prepared for them - stress, competition and problems are 'bad things' after all, so they were safely protected from these things - until it was too late and they had to face them completely and utterly unprepared.

As a result, many of them ended up flunking out of college, some suffering serious psychological problems are a result of their i
nability to cope with problems - so my point is? Well, sticking your head in the sand is nice and easy, and I do understand that parents often feel the need to protect their innocent little sweethearts from 'the big bad world', but simply ignoring those things and shoving them under the carpet is not the way. Keeping a child safe and unknowing of the evils and problems we're faced with in this world may work for a while, if you're lucky it will work for as long as your child is living with you - but one day your 'little darlings' will have to go out into the world and fend for themselves - and growing up in such an overly protective environment isn't exactly the best preparation for this!

////\\\\ A Happy Medium? ////\\\\

Of course children need to learn the facts of life slowly, and in words they can understand - after all, I really can't see how a child could possibly digest those facts if you just dished them out without trying to put them in words that they can understand.

When I was a child, I used to read a lot - of course I still do, but I believe that the 'lessons' I learned from those children's books, as well as from the stories that my dad used to tell me at bed-time, have contributed a great deal to my understanding of the world that I have today, and to my ability to deal with problems. I am not saying that children's books and stories are the ultimate solution, but they are a good way of teaching a child 'right' from 'wrong' as well as giving subtle warnings and explanations to bad things they might otherwise not understand.

If you warn your children about those seductive 'strangers with sweets', about the dangers involved in crossing the road or playing with scissors and other dangerous items, the idea is not to terrify them but to help them understand WHY those things can be dangerous - no 'moral lesson' is complete without an expla
nation that a child can understand. Telling a child something is 'bad' might not actually stop them from doing it - after all, if something is simply 'forbidden' then it could actually be just a grown-up, fun thing to do and children might come to see it as tempting rather than dangerous.

Of course the endless "Why? Why? How? Why" that children confront you with can sometimes be annoying, but they will find out the Why's and How's of life sooner or later - I hope that once I have children of my own, I can make sure they learn them as gently as possible.

So, to end this (far too long, I know!) opinion, I have summed up my points below and leave it up to you to digest them:

° Children will some day have to be able to cope with the world, as they won't stay innocent sweet little darlings forever

° They can either learn about these facts the hard way - through being confronted with them without adequate preparation

° Or they can learn it the easy way - by being told about problems, dangers and difficulties, thus getting prepared for them and learning how to deal with them/avoid them (in case of dangers)

The choice, ultimately, is up to you as a parent, but for the sake of your children - educated them about the facts of life!
Schools can fill their little heads with all the knowledge in the world, but you as their parents are the people who can teach them so much more than that - try not to miss out on that!

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