No More Push Parenting by Elisabeth Guthrie

Author:Elisabeth Guthrie [Guthrie, Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48886-2
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2002-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Wall Street Journalhad an enlightening article recently tracing the changes in holiday gift-giving habits from the 1900s to today. One hundred years ago, even a wealthy woman would yearn for little more than a tortoise shell comb as a holiday gift. A child would be delighted by an orange or some candy. Of course you can see where this is going. If you're reading this book, you probably have children, and you probably faced a “wish list” last holiday season, perhaps one posted on the Internet for the convenience of friends and relatives, that might have featured a Nintendo or Sony PlayStation, a computer, a kickboard scooter, a Tamagotchi and Digimon, a mountain bike, Barney merchandise, and, of course, Barbie and her houses, cars, and endless wardrobe.

Entitlement really can's be cured; high maintenance can only be avoided. It calls for a bit less adoration and immediate grat-ification. And perhaps a few chores and a summer job. Fewer and fewer young people are working during the summer. As parents and students feverishly build résumés that will stand out, they forgo jobs like lifeguarding, cashiering, and waitressing for personally enriching experiences like working with na-tives in Costa Rica, trekking the Nepali mountains, or perhaps taking an advance course at a prestigious school. Among young men ages sixteen to nineteen, the summer employment rate in 1999 was the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1948. In a New York Times article, a George-town University junior is quoted as saying his time is worth more than the ten dollars an hour he could expect to be paid at a typical summer job. He was spending the summer at a South Korean university. But he may wish he's taken the job. More and more professionals and graduate schools are taking a skep-tical view of these too perfect résumés. I know of several department chiefs at teaching hospitals who have chosen the hamburger-cook-turned-B+ medical student over the A+ achiever who helped map the human genome. In their words, “These guys smell of high maintenance.”

As David Davenport, the ex-president of Pepperdine Uni-versity in California, remarks “To spend more time reading American history and playing soccer is not the same as getting out in the world and having experiences.” He admits to the New York Times that he irritates faculty by insisting “he learned more frying doughnuts in his father's bakery than in any uni-versity” As he claims, “We're crowding out the well-rounded development of our children.”

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