Parenting: Not a Popularity Contest
Whether it is placating, pleasing, or atoning for your lack of presence in your child’s life, the cycle of madness needs to stop if you want a functional future. The need for a demanding career -whether to boost your standard of living, massage your ego, or concede to peer pressure- isn’t worth it if your children come in as a squeeze in between meetings of business trips, or an as afterthought. If you don’t want to raise a child, you don’t have to have one.
Equating love to gifts is bad enough, but now we allow, sometimes even encourage, behaviors that create physical, emotional, and mental issues within a child, which end up requiring intervention, labelling, and leads to the “medication” solution. The US ranks mediocre at best in education, and the majority of countries who rank higher rarely label and rarely medicate, especially in regards to ADHD. How come our children need drugs to achieve mediocrity and other nations’ kids achieve greatness without it?
We are bullied into believing that drugs are the right answers, while other less profitable solutions are ignored or worse, scoffed at. One pill oftentimes leads to another. All of these are merely band-aids that don’t help in the long term. Many issues, including ADHD, could be managed with more parental presence that pays attention to diet and understanding what is at the core of these behaviors.
It’s tough being a parent. Authority figures left and right push and pull you into the “best” solution for your child. The question remains, whose best interest is it really? The school? The doctor? Even the parents? You can say ‘Hey, my child did better once I medicated them’, but what were they better at? Mediocrity? Did you notice they lost some of the zip and zoom that made them who they are?
When you have a child, you make a twenty-year commitment to be there for them, to put them and their interests first. Arrange your life so that they have at least one full time parent. Manage what they eat, how they spend their time, and discover who they are and why they are unique. First, advocate for them, then advocate with them, and finally, teach them how to advocate for themselves. Don’t ask them why they behave like they do or tell them they’re an embarrassment if other countless, faceless adults are the ones raising your child.
