Parenting Blog

Drop a frog into boiling water and it will jump out.  But put the frog in cold water  and gradually heat it to boiling, and the frog will stay in the water until it dies.

Imagine one of your ancestors dropped into your life today.  He or she would develop a thundering migraine by 10am.  But at least they would recognize the insanity of life as we live it.  We, meanwhile, go right on living this way.

We know that our hyper-scheduled, over-stressed lives are bad for us.   Our anxiety shows up in our pudgy, achy bodies, our insomnia, our divorce statistics.  A huge percentage of American adults are on medication for anxiety or depression; one in four has a diagnosable mental disorder.  Even those of us who somehow "cope" with all the demands of modern life find ourselves searching for meaning, wishing we could live differently.  We pay a high price for our entertaining, acquisitive, over-stimulated lifestyles.
 
But our children pay a much higher price than we do.  They suffer from the same hyper-scheduling, made even more challenging by their immature emotional and intellectual development.   Compared to us, they perceive themselves as powerless, at the mercy of parents, peers, school.

Children's brains are still developing, laying down neural pathways in the daily context of stressful over-activity, terrifying images and hyper-stimulation.  They struggle with pressures, from peer rejection to sexuality, which we could not have imagined.  And it is almost impossible, as parents, to protect them from our toxic culture.

What do I mean by toxic culture?  James Barbarino, the Cornell psychologist and researcher who coined the phrase, says:

“…we often refer to the culture of North America as socially toxic.  Just as the physical environment we live in can become contaminated by the presence of lead, PCBs, or radioactivity, social contaminants can become hazardous to our emotional and psychological health. The peril to our youth rises in the presence of violence-saturated media and a base exploitation of children through predatory advertising that stimulates or overstimulates cravings…”  

Barbarino and his co-author Claire Bedard list the following toxic hazards that parents struggle with daily: the widespread availability of illicit drugs and weapons, managing children’s access to the internet, evaluating the seriousness of TV viewing,  the challenge of maintaining authority in the face of relentless media portrayals of parents as bumbling or vicious, and the difficulty of developing spiritual values and a sense of meaning in a culture that “hammers home the message that our self-worth depends on the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the ski resort, private island, or ranch where we last vacationed."