Michael Grose - Spoonfed Generation: How to Raise Independent Children

ITS WELL ESTABLISHED that parents currently do too much for their kids. Before driving their kids to school each morning most parents wake up their children and make their breakfast and lunch, before reminding them to get dressed and brush their teeth. All this may make for an easier life at home but it encourages children to be dependent on adults for longer. This is the exact opposite of what parents have done in the past, which is to develop their childrens independence and achieve the most important parenting outcome of all their own redundancy.

There are a number of reasons for this high level of dependency parenting, including family shrinkage, older parents, busy lives and a heightened fear that the world is a dangerous place for young people. While terms such as helicopter parents, bubble-wrapping kids and over-parenting are now commonplace, they are unhelpful and offer little direction for parents.

In Spoonfed Generation , Michael Grose one of Australias leading parenting educators explains the importance of childrens independence and the vital stages to letting go. Never before has a generation been so dependent on their parents; now its time to remove the spoon and put it back in the drawer.

Currently we do too much for our kids. We give them too much, expect too little, and are raising a generation of nervous children who fall apart when a skerrick of pressure is applied to them.

Should we be worried? Yes, we should!

One in three girls and one in five boys in Australia now live with an anxiety disorder. Thats unprecedented. It shouldnt be happening in a prosperous country like ours, yet the statistics are there for all to see.

What has given rise to this epidemic of anxiety thats gripping our kids, making them fearful to navigate their neighbourhoods as their parents once did, leading them to avoid learning opportunities at school and restrict the possibilities open to them? The world certainly feels like a more dangerous place with the twenty-four-hour news cycle that graphically brings atrocities from around the world into our living rooms and heightens feelings of fear and helplessness. This fear is impacting our kids and the way we raise them, making them more dependent on their parents than was the case with previous generations.

Why are kids so fearful?

Our spoonfeeding ways mean we are raising a generation of risk-averse kids who are incapable of making decisions without deferring to a parent, sibling or peer lest they make a mistake; who cant make their lunch or cook a meal; who need a parent to defend them when a teacher speaks to them tersely; and who remain reliant financially and emotionally on their parents well into their twenties. Never before has a generation been so dependent on their parents; now its time to remove the spoon and put it back in the drawer.

Independence-building has always been the cornerstone of effective parenting, but over the past few decades weve lost our way. While parents mean well by protecting their kids its better in the long term to teach them to solve their problems rather than resolve all their difficulties for them.

The story behind this story

You want to go where? You want to go for how long?

My eldest daughter, at the age of fifteen, announced that she wanted to go to Denmark on a six-month student-exchange program. I wasnt prepared for such a request, but clearly she was. Her announcement took me by surprise because Emma was just halfway through her secondary schooling. She was doing well academically, however I was aware that she was having some friendship problems. But what teenage girl wasnt, I thought to myself. Situation normal.

My daughters Denmark Proclamation shook me out of my lethargy. Was she ready for such a trip? How would she cope being away from her family for such a long period? Didnt she know that she wouldnt get any visitors from home when she was on the other side of the world? Did she know what she was doing?

After the initial shock, my wife Sue and I decided to support her trip with one proviso she had to drive the whole project herself. Not only was this a test of her resolve, but it was also proof that she would be able to function without her parents. Her ability to organise all facets of the trip, from sourcing a suitable program to getting a visa and taking care of every other detail, was going to stand her in good stead while she was away. As it proved, she passed this test with flying colours and some months later with moist eyes, heavy hearts and much parental pride my wife Sue and I waved our daughter, then sixteen, off on her six-month sojourn more than 10,000 kilometres away in another hemisphere. I couldnt believe she was so capable. But I wasnt ready for her to go. I couldnt believe she didnt need me any more. I felt, well, not quite discarded, but redundant. For the next six months she wouldnt rely on her family to provide her everyday needs; to be daily emotional supports; to coach and coax her when she had social difficulties; to chauffeur her to sports and leisure activities, friends homes and parties. At fifteen, like most of her contemporaries, she was some way off adulthood but she was making giant leaps in that direction and possessed many of the tools as well as the motivation needed to make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. As parents I figured we must have done something right.

Failure to launch

In contrast, many young adults currently face enormous difficulty when transitioning into the next phase of development a stage that involves greater independence and responsibility. Dubbed the failure to launch syndrome after the 2006 Matthew McConaughey film of the same name, it refers to the increasing number of young people who may have left school but havent transitioned to the next stage of development adulthood. They are stuck in a netherworld between adulthood and adolescence not quite adults and no longer teenagers, these failure-to-launch kids depend on their parents for emotional and social support, well into their twenties, and in some cases beyond.

This failure to launch can be attributed to a multitude of reasons, including lack of rites of passage that act as natural signals for both parents and young people that they are moving away from the family nest and into another life phase. Many experts attribute this failure to launch to the current educational climate where students are spoonfed, or at least given every possible assistance to get them over the educational line. Once they leave school many find that there is a significant mismatch between the real world of work and their experience of school. In short, their schools may have prepared them very successfully to pass examinations but failed woefully to prepare them for anything beyond the examination room. Add to this an overprotective style of parenting where parents step in to rescue their children from a failing grade, an unfinished paper, or a disciplinary consequence, and its little wonder that young people remain heavily dependent on their families for longer than occurred in previous generations.

Out they go!

I read with amusement the headline of a recent article published in a major Australian newspaper: Why parents should kick their adult children out of home (Gab Doquile, brisbanetimes.com.au , 9 April 2016). The writer lamented the fact that many of her contemporaries were currently doting on young adults who were living at home rent- and responsibility-free while studying or working compared to her own experience of leaving home at seventeen. A parent of two sons who at the time of writing were in Years 9 and 11, she was determined to show them the front door once they left secondary school. While she is a parent after my own heart I couldnt help thinking that young people dont magically develop these coping skills and resilience simply because they leave home or reach a certain age. In fact, the readiness to transition from adolescence to adulthood and away from dependence on parents begins in early childhood. This is the stage immediately following infancy when kids are almost totally dependent on their parents and carers to meet most of their physical needs. During early childhood (around fifteen to eighteen months) kids are on the move and suddenly want to do everything for themselves. The wish for independence is paramount, and its during this stage that parents can begin to lay the foundations for real independence, which comes some years later.