Regain Childhood for Your Children

Anne R. Pierce, author of Ships without a Shore: America’s Undernurtured Children made a guest post at BusyMomsOnline.com on the current state of childhood. With children being pushed harder and harder to succeed at an early age it’s easy to lose sight of what it means to actually be a child. Her article helps put things back into perspective.

We have become unsympathetic to exhaustion, vexation, and demoralization, seeing them as necessary corollaries to high achievement. ”Come on you can do it” parents shout as children “try again” to achieve the perfect pitch of the ball, the perfect ballet pose, the perfect runner’s mile, the perfect musical performance. Thus, we are taken by surprise when success strategies backfire; when, instead of gaining momentum, children and teenagers lose energy, motivation and enthusiasm. But, this end result simply makes sense. For, it takes freedom to be creative, time to be a thinker, and opportunities for independence to become inspired. Moreover, when we emphasize outward displays of accomplishment over children’s actual moral and intellectual advancement, children feel a void.