I live in a country where there is a incredible disparity in wealth. From people who live in houses valued in the millions to others who live in shacks made of corrugated iron and cardboard. With this in mind, you might realise how angry I became when once on a teen magazine program on local TV, after an insert on the new WII, the presenter said to the audience, “Go and tell your parents that you want one now!” This in a country where whole families live on less than a dollar a day, who make money, selling scrap metal that they carry for great distances.
The presenter reflected a demand that is all too prevalent in the modern world today – immediate gratification. The moguls of marketing have utilised the Jones’ very well indeed and parents are made to feel inferior. I don’t have the quote and reference immediately to hand, but I was horrified to read the comment of the CEO of a marketing company that their role in marketing to children was to get the children to make life so unpleasant for their parents that the parents would give in and buy the product. In other words, create brats and force divisions between parent and child. This is the strategy. A deliberate program by these immoral moguls to sell products.
The thing is that parents giving in has had a side effect and that is creating an expectation of immediate gratification and of parental slavery. I have heard of kids going to college who has never made a sandwich in their life, to other kids going to university and expecting their parents to fill in the application forms and then still stand in the queues. Parents used to acquiescing to their children over big Macs and Xboxes and the new iPhone, have made surrendering to the demands of their offspring a habit. The tragedy is that in doing this, they destroy their kids.
You see, character is not formed by a life that is too easy. I don’t mean that we need to be constantly nasty. But we need to use the other “n” word, the good “n” word – “no.” Parents do homework projects for their kids because they do not want them to be seen to be failures. Yet this common practice does not serve the child well, it serves their ego (perhaps) and their parents ego (perhaps). But it serves no development in the child. They do not learn knowledge. They do not learn discipline. They do not struggle. If they do not learn that they cannot have everything handed to them on a plate, be it a sandwich, be it an assignment, be it an iPhone, they do not learn to struggle and without struggle, character is not created.
I remember a Justice League America comic from way back when, which started with the wealthy going to an arena and it read something like, “The rich are different. Their lives are rendered empty by too much fulfilment.” I think the same can be said of the modern child whose parents constantly pander to their every whim, “These children are different. Their lives are rendered empty by too little struggle.” They are rendered without character.
We need to improve our children, by recalling as parents we have the right and indeed the obligation to use the good “n” word.