By: Curt Williams, Founder & Executive Director
[This blog post is an excerpt taken from White Knuckle Parenting by Curt Williams, a book being released this year containing tried and true parenting principles that are effective, balanced and healthy, but be warned – the parenting philosophy described flies in the face of our modern culture.]
I am in touch with kids. I live with a bunch of my own children and work daily with many more. Our home, on the Houston campus of Youth-Reach, is a beehive of kid activity. I have watched the slow but sure evolution of several generations of kids. In my estimation, we are now seeing the coming of age of the most spoiled, entitled, indulged and unprepared generation our nation has ever produced. There are outliers who do not fulfill the stereotype, but the vast majority of today’s teenagers are weak and lazy, unproductive and demanding. And, with our distracted and passive parenting, we have made them this way.
With our participation trophies and obsession with their fragile self-esteem, we have fostered a generation that is woefully unprepared to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. When new boys enter Youth-Reach, it is my privilege to dump a truth bomb on their fragile egos.
It goes something like this:
“Son, I am glad you are here. It is a privilege for us to share in this short season of your life, but it will not be easy for you here. In every strong society, the individual journey each boy takes to manhood is painful and incredibly difficult. Our society is no longer strong because we no longer have many strong men. We have weakened the process of making strong adults by lessening the demands of responsibility and padding the raw face of reality. Here at Youth-Reach, we will not do that. Here, you will be pushed and you will be challenged. We will not lose sleep over your self-esteem, because you do not have any. A human is not born with self-esteem, but self-esteem is gained by achievement, choosing the right path over the easy path, and is the result of an individual’s labor. What we are born with is arrogant entitlement. We cry and we receive a breast and warm milk. We cry and our diaper is changed. We cry and we are held and comforted. Then the day comes when our crying should earn us nothing, but for many in your generation they still cry and they still get their way. They have not grown up. Here, your crying will get you nothing.”
I go on to share more good news:
“I have to warn you: the easiest day of your life is yesterday, and tomorrow will be harder than today.”
“You are in training for a coming day that we all must face. You see, in America, you are afforded twelve years of free education. This should be viewed as a head start for a race that is lifelong and ruthless. For the day will come, when you are between 18 and 23, when you will be evaluated. This evaluation will not be benevolent. It will not be kind. This evaluation will be harsh, painfully honest, and possibly even cruel. The world will look at you to see if you have any exploitable value. You will be either a commodity or a liability. It will evaluate you to see if you have an education, skill, trade or knowledge that the world needs. If you do not, you will be assigned to menial labor, demeaning servanthood, or you will live under a bridge with the rest of those who have gained nothing that our society values. You may have enabling family members right now, but they will not live forever. Their interference in this ancient process will not help you, it will only delay the inevitable and leave you more unprepared for the evaluation. If, by chance and hard work you gain an education, skill, trade or knowledge that is useful to the world, do you know how much they will pay you? (It is at this point that I always see an expectant smile.) They will pay you as little as they possibly can! They will pay you no more than they can get away with. Employers are not inclined to reward you because they like you, or for being cool, good at video games, a trendy dresser or fashionably late. The only way you can compete is to make yourself better; to improve your marketability, your work ethic, and your productivity. Here, we are going to assist you in this process. As we have no desire to waste our time and God’s money on a kid who only takes. Here, you will learn to give or you will be put out and we will take in another who values this opportunity.”
“Welcome to Youth-Reach, son…”
I am not a harsh man, but we are engaged in preparing kids to enter a harsh environment. For parents, this is also a mandate if you are truly going to be engaged in preparing your children to transition from your home to the world. As I have shared many times during parenting seminars, the primary job of a parent is to work themselves out of a job. That’s right, your job is to make yourself dispensable, obsolete and irrelevant to the success of your child. Many parents struggle with this because they are insecure and they gain a portion of their personal significance from being needed by their kids. Many times subconsciously, parents feel the need to have their kids rely on them to gain a sense of significance when they come to the rescue and bail them out. I am not saying that your child will somehow detach from you emotionally overnight, but if you remain a linchpin to the success of your child you are creating a dynamic of dependence that will handicap their future chances for success.
As parents, it is critical that we allow our kids to experience failure.
As humans, we learn very little from successes in life, and we learn negative lessons from artificial successes. If successes are not earned but are instead the result of parent intervention or intrusion, kids learn the negative lesson that they can achieve cheap success with help from their parents. Parents help build true self-esteem into their children when they allow them to achieve success on their own, otherwise, the child will believe that they can only succeed when rescued or assisted by others.
