Telling your kids they suck

Apparently we’ve been praising our kids too much. Our kids have been born into an era obsessed with self-esteem. In fact, we’re so worried about giving our kids low self-esteem, we’ve actually given them low self-esteem. We’ve told them they’re so bloody fabulous at everything they do that they just can’t handle the pressure. Or the truth. If we were to be completely and brutally honest with our kids, a lot of stuff they do isn’t that fabulous at all.

My two-year-old came back from daycare with a painting the other day. It was a purple blob. The dog could have painted it. I said ‘Wow darling that’s amazing! What is it?’ She was thrilled at the approval for this very average portrait of her father. But I should have told her the truth. ‘That’s shit!’ And thrown it in the bin. Sure she might have cried for a few minutes, but she’d get to know that there are standards that she’s just not meeting. If you want to make it on the fridge you’ve got to try a lot harder than that.

And I’m not just being a nasty bitch. This is the thesis presented by Carol Dweck in her book Mindset. According to the findings of the American psychologist and Stanford University professor, our belief that constant acknowledgment and accolades for anything our kids do has created a generation so frightened of failure they’re atrophied into a bunch of lazy, challenge-phobic pussies. We’ve positively reinforced almost every aspect of our kids’ development. ‘You’re so clever! You are so handsome! You’re so fast at running!’

There are even those that attest that competition is bad for children’s development. Sure, but one day the poor little fella is going to have to find out he’s a loser, and the longer you wait to break it to him, the harder it is. Learning to cope with losing is an important life skill. How else do we find the motivation to strive? Maybe we should revert to some of our own parents’ techniques and just fail to notice our kids at all. Then the little buggers will put some effort in.

Right now our kids know that love and approval is unconditional, they don’t have to do a thing. Time to raise the bar. Life isn’t easy, it’s full of disappointments and failures. The mark of a good person, someone who is well adjusted and able to function socially, is someone who can accept failure with grace, not fall on the floor in a tantrum, key someone’s new BMW or glass their girlfriend.

No, it’s time we started getting our children used to failure. I’m sick of turning up to sporting events where every kid gets a trophy. They don’t all deserve one. I’ve seen some of those kids on the soccer field; they’re useless. What, the kid who runs in the wrong direction and cries when he doesn’t get the ball is getting a trophy? Nice one, let’s just reinforce poor behaviour!

No, trophies should be given to the kids who have earned them, and not as Dweck attests to kids with natural ability. We need to praise the process not the outcome. So awards for Most Improved or Best and Fairest are the go. We need to take a reality check on how we mould the next generation. While some attest that the next gen are ‘amazing, incredible and spiritually evolved’, I’d say bullshit, they’re a bunch of little Princes and Princesses who’ve been totally indulged, have no sense of compassion, are poor communicators, have no respect for adults and absolutely no resilience. They expect awards for wiping their own bums.

And, it’s all our fault. We have made them that way. Look at swimming lessons. These days we all take our babies to the pool and they swim towards plastic duckies and kick their little leggies with Mummies and Daddies in the pool with them all oohing and aahhing at their sheer brilliance. In the old days when it came to teaching a kid to swim, you waited a few years, threw your sprog in the pool, and waited for him to surface, kicking and gasping. There’d be the odd wildly inappropriate and homophobic statement of ‘what are ya? A poof?’, but by the end of the week, little Thorpie would be swimming like a champ.

Apparently we need to encourage the process rather than the outcome, and we need to give our children honest feedback and experiences of failure. Awesome, finally a theory has come out that acknowledges some of my greatest parenting techniques. Nothing like the silence on that long drive back from the sports carnival with a sulky kid who came last in the longjump. ‘Oh well, that was disappointing. I suppose you can’t just expect to turn up and do your best if you spend most of your time on the Xbox… loser!’ See, that’s not abuse, that’s resilience building.