With a new small person joining our family in the very near future, my wife and I have been discussing our planned parenting style and how we want to inspire and nurture the next generation. Like all best plans, I am sure it will remain very much on the whiteboard, and that when reality hits our carefully thought through plan will go very much out the window. But with David Cameron recently talking about ‘Tiger Mothers’ and discussions about how the X-generation is on the whole a disappointed and negative generation we are keen to learn and adapt.
One of the points David was making when he referred to Tiger Mothers, or as I have heard it described, Dragon Mothers, the need to push children while ensuring strict discipline seems to be an art lost and as a result are we ending up with weak, carefree generations. This on a global scale is worrying when we are competing against other nationalities, like the Chinese (where the term Dragon Mother comes from), who are turning out hard working, responsible adults who don’t feel the world owes them anything. I am not saying one way or the other is correct, and I am sure I will find out very soon how difficult it is, but one thing I am concerned about is our society’s push to reduce competition and access to failure.
Some of my biggest defining moments in my life have been around my failures rather than my successes. It is not as though my parents set me up to fail but they allowed me to experience failure, rather than protect me from it, and pushed me to do things that I didn’t want to do so that I could really appreciate the things I enjoyed. One good example of this is learning to play a musical instrument. My brother and I hated learning to play instruments but had to persist until we were about to leave school. Now to our parent’s dismay we didn’t become musical geniuses, looking back we did expand our experience, knowledge and appreciation that we could do something we didn’t like or were particularly good at. The fact that we were regularly tested in the form of grades used to be a big negative, but again a useful life skill that I regularly employ in daily life.
While music might have been my challenge, it could have well been maths or science, which again we are told as a country we are lacking, but it seems to me that if a student picks a non-science route through school then they are pretty much able to ignore a big part of our society. Science touches every part of our lives, and I am conscious that later in life the student who didn’t enjoy science in the classroom might very well have flourished in the working world. So the Tiger Mother approach is not just to discipline but to push. I am sure we all have a view as to how much pushing is needed, but I don’t think it means that the child can’t push back and become stronger through that defiance.
As I say another area of interest is in how generation-X (babies born after the baby boomers generation) are so depressed and unhappy with life. The theory goes that the baby boomer generation were told how tough their parents had it, living through wars with rations and strikes, only to overachieve on their expectations. My generation however thought they would see similar increases in lifestyle, wealth and happiness with minimal effort only for it not to appear on our plates and for hard work and focus needed to overcome the high levels of competition so abundant today.
What does the world have in store for the next generation? I don’t know but I do realise the difficulty in bringing up someone who can deal with anything the world throws at them.
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