I read an article on Facebook the other day about a girl who was doing heroin and passed out in her car with her infant in the backseat. An officer took a picture of the awful scene and put it on the internet to show people how drugs can affect them, and the young woman's mother was irate. Why was she so mad? Was it because her daughter endangered her life? Or her grandchild's life? Was it because she had just helped her daughter through rehab and here she was unconscious because of an overdose? No. She was mad because said photo was going to embarrass her daughter who just slipped up one time after rehab.
The article was going viral with a title that asked the question, and I'm paraphrasing, "Do you think the mother has a right to be mad?" and it made me think about everything going on in the world and how if parents didn't enable their children so much, most of it wouldn't be happening.
It starts small. You tell your child's teacher off because they got a bad grade and "it couldn't be their fault." Then you cuss out the baseball coach because they aren't letting your kid play and after all "he is the best on the team." Then it gets worse. They start getting into fights and you make excuse after excuse for them until you're trying to make excuses for theft, drugs, maybe worse and you wonder how it got this far.
Well, let me tell you how. You. You're how. You enabling your kid making them think they could do no wrong and it'll all be okay. It's not their fault and they're a victim to everything. "You can be anything you wanna be," even a criminal because mommy and daddy will take care of everything for you. We'll make sure you don't get in trouble and you don't get embarrassed.
News Flash: They need to be embarrassed and get in trouble. They need to feel like crap and honestly, so do you. People these days are so busy trying to play the victim and protect their image, and baby their children that everything else is being shot to hell. Why do you think a crime has gone up, or drugs are becoming more and more of an epidemic, and bullying is more of a problem, and we're caught in a race war? Is it "just this generation"? No, it's the generation that raised this generation. And all of the parents that don't tell their kids when they are wrong but instead blame it on an absent parent or the teacher or the drugs or anything else but never ever their child or their parenting. Maybe if parents started showing their kids how to be kind to others and not to play the victim card every ten seconds or that what they do is their fault and their fault alone then maybe this country, and this world wouldn't be in such a crappy place.
All my life my parents have taught me to take responsibility for myself, and my actions. You'll never hear me blame them for my mistakes or my decisions. They may have influenced me but I made my own decisions and they were the first ones to tell me that. When I was in trouble, I was in trouble at home too, and If I wasn't good at something we worked on it until I was. I always pitied the kids' whose parents would call the teacher and tell them why their child deserves a good grade, or why they should be able to play on the team even if they weren't that good. I wondered how those kids would grow up to be, and now I know. I'm more than grateful to have had parents that didn't enable me, just as I'm sure they're more than grateful for a child that wasn't enabled. Don't you wish you could say the same?
