Tag: children

In today's society, so many of us feel that children are growing up with unhealthy values and unproductive attitudes. Children and teens are sometimes viewed as self-centered—seldom thinking about others in their family or community. While there are many factors that contribute to their behaviors and beliefs, there are ways to guide and positively affect their belief systems and develop a closer relationship in the process.

Children often develop a self-centered view toward the world either through observation and/or lack of exposure to helping others. As parents, have we ever really looked at ourselves as being a source of unproductive, self-centered modeling?

We’re hearing about it from all corners of the news: helicopter parents versus free-range kids, a "Nation of Wimps" versus "To Catch a Predator." It’s hard to know exactly how you should raise a child these days and make sure that your getting it right.

And that’s the point; you’ll never be sure to get it right. One of the reasons that parents struggle so much with helping children grow up the right way is that they are sure the decisions they make on a day-to-day basis will forever effect the outcome of a child’s life.

By the early ’80s, when I was in high school, divorce was so prevalent in my community that I’d ask new acquaintances, "Which parent do you live with?" The first great American wave of divorce that began in the ‘70s has now become as common as a high tide. A recent statistic shows that, in the U.S., 43 percent of first marriages end within 15 years. And, according to a 1998 University of Chicago national survey, nuclear families—which are married couples with children—make up only 26 percent of households, down from 45 percent in 1972.

Many of my contemporaries truly did not know what a good marriage was, though a bunch of us benefited from seeing good second marriages (showing that some parents learned from their mistakes).