How times have changed! When I was growing up, there was no pressure to go to university and getting a trade was a great result. There was no social media to live up to and the pace of life was so much slower. No one asked me if I had done my homework, no one really cared if I did well at school.
I must admit there were other pressures. For girls it was the pressure to get married and then to be the perfect wife and mother. (This would explain why there was absolutely no pressure regarding my education. There were definitely times that it would have been good to have a little more pressure!)
For boys, it was the pressure to be the “man of the house”, to be "strong" all the time and to shoulder all the household’s financial responsibility.
George Clooney said something wise recently (the fact that George married Amal in the first place made him a wise man already in my eyes!). He was speaking about why he and Amal gave their kids normal names like Ella and Alexander:
“I didn’t want, like, weird-arse names for our kids. They’re already going to have enough trouble. It’s hard being the son of somebody famous and successful."
What George was alluding to is that when his kids do stupid things like all kids do, there will be no safe place for them to realise their mistakes, learn the lessons, take the consequences and then move on. Because his kid’s parents are famous, their mistakes will be all over the news and social media and the added pressure could be unbearable. They will also be an enormous expectation for them to be as successful as their mega successful parents.
So for George and Amal, giving their kids really over the top first names would only add to the pressure and expectations they would already be under!
As children, me and my generation grew up in relative privacy. Our photos and our inevitable gawkiness and awkwardness and imperfections as teenagers were not on public display for an entire world to see and to pass judgement. Social media pressures kids (and adults) to be perfect, to look perfect.
When:
school photos need to be photoshopped
the photos of the wedding become more important than the wedding itself.
parenting with all its messiness and at times chaos is replaced by only photos of perfect looking kids and immaculately groomed parents
there is a sense that the normal has become abnormal and kids and teenagers are just being weighed down by unrealistic expectations.
These unrealistic expectations are sometimes then reinforced by the pressure for children to remarkable. If there is a choice between a child being remarkable and one that is happy and mentally well, I would take happy and mentally well any day. If they happen to be both, then that is just a bonus.
Most kids will be incredibly, undeniably and wonderfully average. Most kids will be naughty, make stupid decisions, say really dumb things and it is all ok because they are still learning, they are children. The pressure to be perfect should give way to just being given space to learn and for life to be messy. When a three year old can get expelled from day care and when in Australia we treat kids who are 10 years as criminal and not victims, I think we have lost as a society our sense of childhood and that as adults we are there to guide and not judge.
Educationally, there is pressure on kids to fit into a hierarchy of worth depending on their academic ability. They are tested every 2 years through Naplan and reminded of where they sit on this hierarchy. The bell curve will mean that at least 50% of them will be below average.
There is a chance that over 50% of our kids will have had some part of their self worth well and truly kicked out of them by the time they finish school and yet:
talent resides in many places not just academic ability.
The other 50% who are above average will have to live with the other pressure that if they do not do well at school, then they will forever miss out of opportunities to gain that economic advantage. For some children, there is pressure to spend every waking minute trying to be better than their peers to get that edge. And not to mention those extracurriculars activities.
Lots and lots of extracurriculars to get that edge! The endless running around takes time away from children to just breathe. Time to learn to be creative and to self-manage their own boredom. Time to just have fun and to explore and find that self awareness of what they like and don’t like without the need to succeed at everything they do.
And yet in all this, can we just trust that kids will gain self-awareness through making mistakes in a safe environment and trust that with a bit of guidance they will find their own way? That by learning that making a mistake or not always being the best at something or being average doesn’t always mean that it is the end of the world and that you can still be happy. That there is a tomorrow and when you are young, there are so many tomorrows.
What is important is that they come through as confident adults who not only understand consequence but who also understand that the meaning of hard work and perseverance. Young adults who are decent human beings who can communicate and who will work well with others.
When I was growing up, the only people we really cared about what they thought of us was our family, our friends and our boss because he or she paid our wages. Today, the quest for followers and likes is fraught with an illusion that it actually matters what strangers think. For children as a strategy to feel important and relevant, it is doomed to send them in a spiral of never ending pressure of a competitive game of winning the popularity of complete strangers and in some cases expose them to bullying and abuse.
Our reality is not the reality of social media and in the illusion of perfection that it portrays. There is so much pressure that comes with this illusion. I think our challenge as parents, is to help children understand this illusion by being real ourselves. To help children understand that our own reality is in the present with the people in our lives that actually do matter. It may also be in not being perfect ourselves and in recognising that our inner teenager with all its gawkiness and awkwardness and imperfections and uncertainty was the closest we will get to the absolute perfection of just being human.
George also went onto say something else that I thought was rather wise:
"We’re living in this world where everybody is trying to make themselves fascinating or important or something. When the reality is: Put that phone down."
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