Click on the cartoon to take the Barack Obama Test Hat tip: Further Adventures of Indigo Red
-Nietzche, paraphrased
A recent study indicates that telling your kid he’s smart, might be doing more harm than good.
I think a good analogy to the article, is in how difficult it is to find plain soap nowadays, because everything has been inoculated as an anti-bacterial products. The downside of such overprotection, is that some studies are suggesting that children don’t get a chance to develop an immunity to certain germs when they are shielded from them. You see, exposure at an early age strengthens the immune system. Similarly, then, it is my belief that we are so overprotective of our child’s emotional and psychological well-being, that we don’t allow them to experience failure; we shield them from hurt feelings, when hurt feelings are a part of life.
We love our children. We want to provide for them with more than we ourselves had as children. We spoil them. We encase our Rapunzel in a tower to shield her from the world, and end up doing more harm than good. Because what you end up with, is a grown adult who has the emotional tools of a little child, when she finally has to confront life in the real world.
One of the best lines I’ve heard, was from a listener on the Dennis Prager Show (I think it was last Friday): "Once you realize life is hard, it gets easier".
Please check out my previous post on "the self-esteem" generation, linking to two USA Today articles:
Yep, life’ll burst that self-esteem bubble
Enough already with the kid gloves
Don’t forget to click on the cartoon (you won’t be sorry- unless you’re liberal, in which case you HAVE to click on it, to be cured of your diss-ease); also, An Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings links to The Origins of Political Correctness
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
Once again, a cartoon which captures graphically and with humor a complex subject and shines the light of truth on it.
Oh, and the quiz was GREAT! Let’s see how many libs figure out the secret and join the 95th percentile club.
I learned from Public Television that polio was a common everyday virus which was relatively harmless, just one of those millions of bugs existing in the environment. Kids got dirty, they were infected with the polio virus and in a week or so were just fine agian.
Then came the do-gooders seeking to clean up the cities at the start of the 20th Century. After the cities were cleansed and kids were sanitized, people were felled by polio as a crippling and deadly disease.
A London hospital study recently showed that kids in clean homes were sick more often than kids in less clean homes. As cleanliness has increased, so has asthma. As smallpox was eradicated across Africa, AIDS followed on the heals of the do-gooders.
Oh, wait! Now science is finding similarities between the AIDS virus and smalpox. Could it possibly be that smallpox provided a natural vaccine against AIDS? When we mess with natural selection and save those non-optimum individuals, we end up with a very large population of sickly folk who should have never survived childhood. Harsh? Yes. But, that’s life, and then it gets easier.