Let Kids be Kids

Okay, so is it just me or are kids being raised these days with absolutely no skills that are going to help them become well adjusted adults in the future? I see it and hear it every day. It's like we are so afraid to upset our children or have them suffer or want for everything, that they are growing up not knowing the facts of life and hard realities. My fear is that these children that are growing up today have no idea how to get along in the real world, and they are the ones who will be taking care of my generation when we get older. We are raising a generation of children who are coddled so much and we shield them from disappointment. I have my suspicions on why we are doing this, but I am also afraid of the direction it is leading us in.

I saw a disturbing segment several months ago on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumble. In the piece, they highlighted how schools across the country are starting to ban activities such as Tag and Dodgeball. These are games that go back decades; who doesn't recall playing these at school and/or summer camp when they were younger? Well it seems as though certain educators feel that these games are a danger to our children, both physically and mentally. There is the danger of a child tripping and falling during a violent game of Tag, or a possible welt from a well directed ball during a heated round of Dodgeball. But besides the physical hard, we are told of the mental scars a game such as Dodgeball can inflict on our precious little angels. The fear is that a child is being taught that if you get hit with the ball you are out and you lose. The fear of intimidation. All these things that I must have somehow blocked out of my conscious mind, because I took out of it that Dodgeball was a fun activity that promoted competition, physical movement and coordination. I must have been one of the lucky ones that escaped my years of Dodgeball hell without any mental scars.

Also in the segment on HBO was a Phys Ed teacher who instead of having his students jump rope, he had they go through the motions without actually using a rope. The whole point was that they can skip the imaginary rope as little or as much as they desire without having the failure of tripping on the rope. I suppose somewhere hiding among us are people just stewing inside because of the shame and disappointment of getting their feet caught up in a jump rope when they were children, right? Once again I was one of the lucky few who escaped only taking out of if hand to eye coordination and the art of exercise. In addition, there was a woman who I wanted to jump through the TV screen and strangle. She was a principle at a school in Arizona who declared her elementary school a "no touch zone". In other words, no child is allowed to touch another student AT ALL. This means hugging, high fives, whatever. They play "shadow tag", where instead of tagging each other they tag one's shadow, and give each other "air five". And the way the woman smirked and giggled when asked about the insanity of these rules, it just made me sick to my stomach.

We are creating an entire generation of sissies...children who experience no failure and do not know what it feels like to have their feelings hurt. Many schools around the country now forbid teachers from grading papers with red ink. The reason for this is because the color red supposedly relays anger and is intimidating. So God forbid children get upset when they read the corrections on a paper they turn in. Supposedly we all grew up bitter and shameful because whenever we got a paper back with red corrections on it we shuttered and hid in shame. This also goes along with many youth athletics in where the games or competitions end without a winner or a loser. And in the rare cases where they do declare a victor, the losers are also given an award or are said to have come in "second" as opposed to being labeled the loser. Somehow we have lost our competitive edge in this country. No wonder other countries around the world have closed the gap, if not taken over the lead when it comes to sports and industry. We are so afraid of hurting our kids feelings that we are holding them back.

My suspicion as to why we are doing this to our children today is because of the old adage "give your children a better life than you had". Now I am all for that simple desire, to try and give your kids every opportunity you didn't have, to instill in them the wisdom you gained from your experiences both positive and negative. But are people, especially educators and lawmakers not going overboard in order to shield our youth from any possible negative experience? After all, has anyone not heard the adage "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" or "learn from your mistakes"? We are bastardizing life so as to take away any chance at our kids failing, so that when they are in the real world and have to deal with failure they do not know what to do. I am all for giving our children a better life, but we can not take away the possibilities of the disappointments we endured in our youth from them. Kids need to live life, they need to be kids, they need to get bumps and bruises and get their feelings hurt, so that they can learn how to deal with it. Because God knows that as adults they will have plenty of disappointments and hurt, and if they don't know how to cope they will end up the ones shooting up a school or hurting themselves because they have no other outlet.

So please, let's not continue on this ridiculous path we are going down when it comes to the sheltering of our children. Yes, we all cherish our kids and want what's best for them. But by holding them back and not teaching them how to deal with losing and disappointment and shame, we are raising a generation who knows not emotion. We do not want a nation of robots, so please allow our kids to be kids...