First off I would like to say that I am far from being a parenting expert and I make my own mistakes on a fairly regular basis but some parents today are doing more harm than good when it comes to raising their kids. I'm not talking about the abusive parents who should never be allowed around children period. I'm talking about the parents who refuse to parent.
Example: Child A and Child B vandalize some property and are caught. Parents A take Child A to task and expect him/her to make restitution to the property's owner. Parents B either try to blame everything on Child A or they take out their wallet saying, "Kids will be kids," and pay the property owner and absolve Child B of any further responsibility in regards to his/her actions.
Who do you think were the better parents in that situation? If you said Parents B then you should stop reading this blog right now because you will probably not like what I have to say most of the time. Parents B have taught their child nothing about taking responsibility for his/her own actions and suffering the consequences of those actions. Parents A on the other hand recognize a vital life lesson that their child needs to learn and the sooner the better. Child A will be less likely to repeat his/her mistake and may avoid more serious ones in the future. Child B will go through life thinking that Parents B will always be there to protect him/her from the consequences of his/her actions.
Child B may even feel no one can do anything to them until he/she lands in such serious trouble that, as hard as they try, Parents B can't make it go away and Child B ends up doing some jail time. Parents B may, even at this point, wonder how their precious son/daughter got into such trouble and it must be someone else's fault. Parents B deserve a smack upside the head in my opinion. They are so deluded about their precious child that they fail to see what their own actions have created.
Why am I even talking about this sort of thing? Well, yesterday I say a video someone shared of the opening dialogue from Live with Kelly and Michael on ABC. (I'm not sure, but I think it's from their September 20th broadcast.) A NFL player was in Florida when his New York house was broken into and the culprits had a party and were very destructive all while tweeting about it and posting pictures of themselves committing the crime. The player took those photos that were publicly posted on Twitter and put them on a website to try and identify those responsible for the destruction. Now some of the parents of the culprits want to sue him because they claim he is hurting their children's chances of getting into college. I was floored when I heard that. What kind of parents get mad at the victim of their child's criminal actions for trying to find out who committed the crime? I was so happy to hear Kelly's reaction to that news and I agreed with her that my kids would be in so much trouble from me that getting into college would be the least of their worries. Those parents who want to sue are teaching their children the wrong lessons. They are teaching them that it's okay to commit a crime because Mom and Dad think getting into college is more important than learning to be a responsible and law-abiding citizen. These kind of parents make me sick!
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