"For your own good," and all it will cost you is your liberty


Shielding "fragile" children from life

From an article in Psychology Today.

Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."

Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.

"Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."

Read the whole article, and then go reread my piece on American Guilt.

Hat tip to The Agitator.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - July 31, 2006 at 04:27 AM  Tag


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