PARENT TRAP: You’re too soft on your kids
A new book argues we are failing our kids by being too kind. Russell Blackstock reports.
Parents have become unpaid servants and bankers to their children. Kids need to step up and parents need to step aside. Yvonne Godfrey
When Morgan Oliver turned 16 two years ago she couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
The Napier teen grew up in a happy, stable home and should have been having the time of her life — but instead she was riddled with anxiety.
She was being bullied by her peers; having relationship dramas on a daily basis and felt alone and directionless.
“I just wasn’t myself but I didn’t know what was up,” she says.
“I was really unhappy and quiet, and I was letting life get to me.
“It was a really difficult time for my mum too as she was aware of my behaviour but there was nothing we could seem to do about it.”
That was when her mother, Tina, sent her on a self-improvement course for youths because she thought an outside influence might help.
Within a year, Morgan’s circumstances and attitude had changed significantly.
Instead of fretting endlessly about her future she is now a focused and happy young adult.
“One of the first things I learned was how to set myself some achievable goals and all of them have happened,” Morgan says.
She now has a part time job, her driver licence and is at college studying trade and tourism.
“At first I didn’t want to be sent on any course for teenagers because I thought it would be like a boot camp. Instead, it has turned out to be just the confidence boost I needed.”
The youth empowerment course Morgan attended in Auckland is called Making It On My Own. It is run by straight-talking parenting expert and author Yvonne Godfrey.
Godfrey was a host parent on Australia’s The World’s Strictest Parents reality TV show and she speaks at schools and conferences all over New Zealand.
To complement her four-day motivational programmes, the 61-yearold breast cancer survivor and grandmother of two has just launched a new book aimed at 16-24-year-olds called Making It On My Own: 52 smart ways to smash it in the real world.
It ’s a “get real” guide to independence for young adults that aims to give the latest generation a short, sharp lesson in financial, physical and emotional independence.
In her previous book, Parenting Yadults, Godfrey tells carers they, too, need to take a long, hard look at their parenting.
She believes if kids are over indulged, they become co-dependent and lazy offspring who will never learn to act responsibly and fly the nest successfully.
Many parents are compensating for their children, causing them to be “soft ” and develop an attitude of entitlement, she says.
“These parents have become unpaid servants and bankers to their children.”
Making It On My Own asks youth to start thinking, speaking and acting like adults. Godfrey also asks schools to be aware of what part they might be playing in holding pupils back from taking full responsibility.
“While yadults are holding their parents hostage, parents are holding schools hostage in a worrying PCsensitive triangle.
“Schools and parents need to find ways to work together for the common good of their emerging adults to prevent divisive behaviour.
“People also need to stop micro-managing their kids. Kids need to step up and parents need to step aside.
“If teenagers want to leave home and make it on their own, I ’m simply here to show them how to do this successfully.” T oday’s young people are often regarded as being more materialistic and less likely to work and study hard than any generation in history.
But the Baby Boomers before them were considered spoiled and selfabsorbed. Then came Generation X, who were thought to have so little interest in working hard they were called “slackers”.
Now it ’s the millennials’ turn.
The youngest generation of Kiwi workers is entering the workplace amid accusations they are self-centred, unable to take criticism and unschooled in the art of working hard.
However, despite these concerns, this is not always the fault of “soft parenting”, says psychologist Marc Wilson, from Wellington’s Victoria University.
“The world in which young people grow up is constantly changing, and probably more quickly than ever before,” he says. “At the same time, the developmental challenges that young people face are the same — working out who they are, their place in the world, and how to function as an individual.
“Parents are and always have been a vital part of this. They are role models, as well as facilitators.”
Parenting is a balancing act, he says.
“You want to give your kids the chance to dirty their knees without risking their lives, to experience both the ups and downs of life so as to be able to manage them when they’re adults.” Wilson’s recipe for making the world a better place is simple: “If you have children, try to have a family routine that has some things that happen regularly.
“Time together and time doing life together like sharing the dishwashing duties, eating together at the table without screens or phones. Ask your family how their days were, and let them tell you.” J ohny O’Donnell is another successful graduate from Godfrey’s self-improvement programme.
He is 23, happily married and runs his own business consultancy in Motueka, near Nelson. He has clients as far afield as Sydney, London and Barcelona. O’Donnell left school at 16 to pursue unrealistic dreams of spending his days
volunteering in the community. “I was bored and because I was doing a lot of community work I became disengaged in the school system,” he says.
“But when I left school I realised it wasn’t viable to be a volunteer full-time and I needed a job and some cash. I was lost and had no idea what to do. I was in a tailspin and going nowhere fast.”
As a last resort his frustrated solo mother, Elle, sent him on the Making It On My Own course. At first he was so reluctant to go, he hid under a table at home and refused to budge.
“It turned out the programme is one of the best things to have happened to me,” he says. “The benefits have been enormous and I’m still in contact with some of the great mentors and speakers I was introduced to.
“I went from someone with zero confidence or self-belief to a person who could rock right up to a potential employer and shake hands with the manager.”
His mum does not regard sending her son on a self-empowerment course as any kind of slight on her own parenting.
“Johny is a bright boy but he was disillusioned and needed some proper direction,” she says. “Teenagers often don’t want to listen to their parents anyway so getting advice from an outside source has worked well for him.”
James Beck, national attitude manager at The Parenting Place in Auckland, thinks an element in Godfrey’s success is her no-nonsense approach, coupled with treating teens as young adults, not kids.
“She packages it well. It ’s like oldschool wisdom without the false teeth,” he says.
Beck believes part of the problem with parenting today’s youth is they have different expectations to the previous generation.
“The Baby Boomers regarded success as owning lots of stuff,” he says.
“But the millennials are significantly less likely to judge people by what they have accumulated. They now see success as being someone who is ‘ authentically’ happy. And they will pursue this happiness at the expense of everything else.” They still want some of the things their parents have but realise they also need money and a job they enjoy, he says.
But that “takes an awful lot of work that they don’t necessarily really want to do”.
“It is all very well having your mates see you as a success because you are good at computer games or operating digital technology but you can’t get a job based on your XBox achievements.”
Back in Napier, Morgan Oliver’s mother, Tina, is happy she and her husband sent both kids on the self-empowerment workshops — which cost about $995 each.
“I nstead of seeing t his as a fai lure on my part as a parent, I feel we have done t he kids a favour by giving t hem a new toolbox for l i fe,” she says.
“A lot of what they got taught on the course is things I have told them already, but sometimes advice carries more weight with teenagers when it comes from someone from outside the family.”
I went from someone with zero confidence or self-belief to a person who could rock right up to a potential employer and shake hands with the manager. Johny O’Donnell