As someone who’s worked for over thirty years in the mental health field, some of the criticism leveled at narcissistic children and evidence of poor parenting skills belongs to me.
Children have been ‘owned’, or at least regarded as chattels by parents and the community for a very long time. There was an old saying that children “should be seen and not heard”, a chestnut of sorts that suggested that children, because they lack the wealth of experience, social and emotional skills of adults, were unable to contribute insight or values to an adult world.
Children were expected to be noisy and rambunctious, exhibiting limited or poor impulse controls regarded as manifesting the confusion, insecurity and trepidation expected of a developing human being…
Kids after all….were kids..
This translated in the adult world, the idealized orderly linear cause-effect perception of the mature human being, as evidence that children were best regarded as more similar in many respects to primitives. Undeveloped and prone to barbarism and perhaps from time to time anti-social behavior that emerged as “sass” as “skipping school” and sometimes juvenile delinquency.
Delinquency was a broad brush that could be applied to everything from complaining about the beans or carrots that were served with a meal to intentionally breaking windows or defacing someone’s property. If the “acting-out” of younger children failed to be successfully addressed through disciplinary measures, the assumption was developed that a child was victim to some unseen and never-before-encountered psychological or behavioral dysfunction. Ritalin and special education pigeonholes were the band-aid cure for a possibly maladjusted or disturbed child. The age of ADD and ADHD gloriously bloomed upon the social landscape relieving parents of the responsibility to parent….
Social dynamics, influences of the larger zeitgeist were credited as having a significant albeit largely hidden effect on children’s behavior. If a child lacked the new stylish clothing (fads) or brand name running shoes, there was the danger that the child would find only rejection among his or her peer group. Children bereft of the calming influence of color TV and the familiarity with television programming enjoyed by their wealthier school friends would find themselves ostracized and distanced from their colleagues. Concomitant with the trappings of a social plane defined ever-more absolutely by the objects of accumulation, the subtle statements of disposable wealth and aspiration to power and control that come with “success” and “popularity”, children became the focus of the engine of greed that was invited into the family living room. No child could be reasonably expected to develop “normally” if they weren’t afforded the equality of consumption that certainly parents of these times embraced as their entitlement…
Families’ needed both adults to work…to afford that entryway access to the new car, the vacation weekend, the exercise of that right to visit Sea World and Disneyland. No adult could be reasonably expected to suffer the ignominy of last years aging automobile, become the butt of jokes leveled at cocktail parties, because their house had no central air-conditioning….
A benchmark of “success” was the display and demonstration of wealth with the casual, off-hand flourishing of the American Express Card, of the Visa and Master Card that magically provided the better (more expensive) golf clubs that meant that mom and dad could better compete with their clubhouse friends. Children weren’t provided the explanation that the growing necessity of still more income was directly related to the wads of “bill-due” notices from charge-card companies and credit agencies. Cable TV and the accoutrements of the “modern home” simply appeared and after performing their function until one day after the guarantee ran out (planned obsolescence) were set by the curb with the accumulated junk of the disposable era to be whisked off to be buried, while celebrating the new digital toaster and the scientific/technological advances of the “clapper” to turn the lights on and off…
America was informed that a child’s self-esteem would suffer if adult expectations to perform academically or in sporting events brought with it a “consequence”….a burden of emotional and psychological damage that would surely result in self-mutilation or suicide….
But I apologize for my long-windedness, that isn’t what anyone here at Can Con likes or wants…it’s the quick and easy answer the “I have a problem now give me the answer to that problem”…kind of thinking that’s welcomed here….
Reflection on the complexities of the social dynamic aren’t appropriate unless we can identify and target some individual, some precise element of the cause-effect formula that must surely be more responsible for the mess we find ourselves in….more responsible at least than anyone here at Can Con is prepared to entertain….
uke: Parents piss me off!