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Clarity of hindsight can be painful
Parenting
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Q: My husband and I have micromanaged, spoiled and enabled our 21-year-old son all his life. We paid a heavy price during his teen years. At this point, he is arrogant, immature and irresponsible.
For example, he recently went online and posted a vile comment about a former girlfriend. When we confronted him about it, he told us she deserved it.
We realize the error of our ways, but our need to protect him from the consequences of his impulsivity and irresponsibility is so strong that we can’t seem to break the habit. On the positive side, he holds down a good job and also is going to college. Can you give us some advice?
A: When I began writing this column in 1976, I never thought parents would ask me for advice concerning problems with young adult children, and for many years they did not.
In the past 10 years or so, however, as the pigeons of what I call postmodern psychological parenting have come home to roost, more and more parents have asked me what to do about children — and they are most definitely still children — in their 20s and even 30s still living at home, still expecting their parents to solve their problems and still acting irresponsibly.
For 40 years and counting, American parents have raised children in a manner that emphasizes feelings over rational thought and good citizenship. With rare exception, post-1960s “experts” encouraged parents to focus on the “inner child,” allow their children to express feelings freely and cultivate high self-esteem.
In the home and America’s public schools, training children to think straight and prepare them for responsible adulthoods took a back seat to helping them feel good about themselves and protecting them from failure and disappointment.
The result is Generation E — self-absorbed young adults who have a high sense of entitlement and low regard for others.
When feelings are not bridled by rational thinking, they drive behavior that often is irresponsible, self-dramatic and destructive (of self and others).
When the goal of parenting was to teach the child to think properly and act responsibly, that description rarely applied to a child older than 12, which is why coming-of-age rituals like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah took place around a child’s 13th birthday.
Today’s parents have bought the myth that behavior of the above sort is normal for teenagers, so they don’t expect much more, and they don’t get more than they expect.
The clarity of hindsight can be painful indeed, especially when it regards a child, but you have an opportunity here to redeem yourselves. I know you would say you love your son, but let me challenge you: Love is doing for someone what they need, not what they want.
Your son needs you to stop enabling. He needs you to emancipate him.
The only cure for his irresponsibility and feelings of entitlement is being out on his own, having to pay his own bills, solving his own problems and so on. He has no reason to wake up and smell the coffee if you continue to serve as his safety net.
Yes, it’s going to be painful for all concerned, but as the saying goes, “no pain, no gain.”
   
A psychologist, Rosemond answers questions on his website, www.rosemond.com.

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From the book 'Outliers' comes proof that good health is more than just genetics
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Friends Jim Young, left, Mike Natale, Jeff Natale and Ryan Kiernan were on Greenwich High School football team together and Jim and Mike were captains. Jim, who was the youngest in Sherry Young's family, was welcome in the homes of the other three boys who still had siblings around and grandparents near. - photo by Sherry Young
As I look back on my life and the lives of others, both personally and in the reading I have done, I am convinced of the necessity of positive human contact in our lives. We are doubly blessed when we are able to make good friends or are a part of a family where we are accepted and loved.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers tells of a time in the 1950s when Dr. Stewart Wolf met a physician who practiced in the area of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto was settled by a group of Italian families from Roseto, Italy, who re-created their life again in America.

This was in the 1950s before drugs and measures to prevent heart disease became important. In their conversation the physician said, You know, Ive been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of 65 with heart disease.

Wolf was surprised by these words as, It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.

Wolf enlisted the aid of a sociologist and friend John Bruhn to help him. They found, There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didnt have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didnt have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. Thats it.

They checked into diet, genetics and possibilities of something in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania but nothing made sense.

What they found was that Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. (Researchers) learned about the extended family clans that underlay the towns social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

What they found eventually convinced the medical establishment to look beyond the individual and understand the culture people are part of their friends, families and town they came from. They determined that the people we surround ourselves with and the values of the world we inhabit have a profound effect on who we are.

Likely, this study could have been done with other ethnicities. However, my family's experiences with the Italian families in Connecticut ring true to the study. Our hungry and growing sons, especially our youngest son, Jim, who was left home alone with two beady-eyed parents, all had some memorable experiences being fed and loved in the Cos Cob multigenerational families. Proof of the African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child.

We live in an age when the contact we have with people often is on the internet, and many of us live among strangers. Unless we make the effort to reach out, we will become isolated, especially as we age. The Rosetan study is proof that reaching out and communicating may be good for our health.
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