Ages ago, I wrote this blog post on how I want our children to grow up experiencing every human emotion possible so that they know how to handle all of them when they come up later in Life. I want them to feel scared, stressed, left-out, worried, picked-on, sub-standard, insecure, uncertain, etc. Not that I believe they ARE any of these things, but there's not a person on the planet who doesn't experience them at some point in their lives, and I want them to learn from an early age how to manage those emotions so they don't become crippled by them as adults.
Then there there was this blog post about one of the most fantastic commencement speeches ever. I don't want to say 'Ha! See? I told you so!' but frankly, I did.
And then today, I see this BBC News article and can't help but think it's just further proof. We need to stop bigging our kids up so much that their inflated heads start floating off into the stratosphere and get their cute little butts back down here on Earth. The most interesting part of this article to me is the side note saying: She found that first person plural pronouns (we, us, our etc.) decreased
in use by 10% while first person singular pronouns (I, me, my etc.)
increased in use by 42%. I heard that 20 years ago from one of the Japanese girls we hosted, when we asked her what she thought the biggest difference between Japan and America was. 'Oh, that's easy,' she said. 'In Japan, everything is we and us. In America, everything is I and me.'
You're not so special. Get hurt. Adapt, survive, and thrive my darlings.
1 comment:
I do so agree with you. Unfortunately I think the increased self-confidence often translates to inflated (and unjustified) self-opinion and promotes an unrealistic sense of 'entitlement'. Too many people think they are too good to need to learn some basic knowledge of a job/skill or acquire any experience and expect to start half-way up the ladder. Much better to learn this lesson earlier rather than later in life! - Granny Eagle Eyes
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