Society needs to stop punishing kids for the sins of their parents.
We give them all the tools they need to be all they can be in life, but we do so without realizing the things that we have given to our children in its entirety...yes, even the bad stuff
We are who are responsible for the bullying problem in society today - us, the parents of the kids who we hear about on the news each day who push and hit other children or who, on the other side of that spectrum of violent behaviors, bring firearms to school and blast away at a population of people who also came from someplace where it was not ok to be imperfect, not ok to have an opinion, not ok to be young and new and have an imagination and most of all, not ok to be who you really are.
We want good kids, and we think and believe that we have to be punitive in the manner in which we teach them right from wrong. There is such rampant abuse happening in our midst these days and the only answer to the silent call to rise up and save our kids is to make sure that upon our rising up to save them that we do not in the process end up wrecking anyone else. This is the challenge for us. We want to better our world through not being awful to people but we are not sure where to put up the boundaries which will keep us safe from the monsters which live in the closets in our minds. We want to make sure that we never hurt and that our own kids never hurt, and even as we know that this is a fleeting notion at best, still, we try.
We try hard to shield our little girls from heartache by telling them that boys are bad for them and then we wonder why it is that these same daughters grow up to seek the attention of men who are bad to them. We try hard to instill into our sons that it is never ok to hit or push anyone, namely a girl, and in the same breath that we tell them not to hit people or to cause pain to others, we threaten them, even silently, with the idea that if they do not use corporal physical punishment on people who would dare hurt their sisters, they are somehow going to grow up a pansy. These messages would confuse a Rhodes Scholar, yet this is the message that we unwittingly send to our kids every single day, and we do it without thinking that somehow this is a mixed massage at best, and a dangerous message at worst, trying hard to not think about how confusing these same messages were for us when we were kids.
Lest We Forget
When we are kids we believe that what is happening right now and in this moment is forever, that the way that we feel, good or other than good, is how things will always be, and what we cannot think about at that point is that we are not aware of how true that thinking or those thoughts are. We forget a lot of what happens to us as kids, forget the feeling that we got from one particular event or another, but when our own kids go through what they will very quickly we begin to remember the shards of our lives that caused us to be scared of what or who we are scared of, caused us to form thought patterns which would later govern our lives and forgot that the things that made us uncomfortable as kids are still those same things that make us that way now - it is what we are doing with those thoughts and those feelings that make or break us now.
We do not realize it then what we see as bad as being the thing that will haunt us for the rest of our lives or at least long enough that those demons which have been so prevalent in our lives still live within us and are what make us do or say what we will. We cannot hope to stop the madness that is the lives of our youth these days if we are not willing to also look back at where we have been and what it was that tried hard to suffocate our spirits and crush our souls, even as those actions taken against us were and still are, in a lot of cases, the things which guide us now.
We cannot choose to forget the painful things that we have each gone through and we cannot expect to not repeat those things over and over again with our own kids unless and until we are willing to address the demons and call them all out by name.
We will not get our kids past the idea that who they are is fine and dandy, and to hell with everyone else, unless and until we also ultimately come to the acceptance that the demons live because we let them. We can go on hating our demons, allow those demons to take residence in our minds and in the lives of our children, or we can love the demon, see where it is that it hurts so badly, and remember at that point that it is not a demon which we are looking at but our very selves.
Only Love kills the demons, guys...
I Love You All !!
ROX
We give them all the tools they need to be all they can be in life, but we do so without realizing the things that we have given to our children in its entirety...yes, even the bad stuff
We are who are responsible for the bullying problem in society today - us, the parents of the kids who we hear about on the news each day who push and hit other children or who, on the other side of that spectrum of violent behaviors, bring firearms to school and blast away at a population of people who also came from someplace where it was not ok to be imperfect, not ok to have an opinion, not ok to be young and new and have an imagination and most of all, not ok to be who you really are.
We want good kids, and we think and believe that we have to be punitive in the manner in which we teach them right from wrong. There is such rampant abuse happening in our midst these days and the only answer to the silent call to rise up and save our kids is to make sure that upon our rising up to save them that we do not in the process end up wrecking anyone else. This is the challenge for us. We want to better our world through not being awful to people but we are not sure where to put up the boundaries which will keep us safe from the monsters which live in the closets in our minds. We want to make sure that we never hurt and that our own kids never hurt, and even as we know that this is a fleeting notion at best, still, we try.
We try hard to shield our little girls from heartache by telling them that boys are bad for them and then we wonder why it is that these same daughters grow up to seek the attention of men who are bad to them. We try hard to instill into our sons that it is never ok to hit or push anyone, namely a girl, and in the same breath that we tell them not to hit people or to cause pain to others, we threaten them, even silently, with the idea that if they do not use corporal physical punishment on people who would dare hurt their sisters, they are somehow going to grow up a pansy. These messages would confuse a Rhodes Scholar, yet this is the message that we unwittingly send to our kids every single day, and we do it without thinking that somehow this is a mixed massage at best, and a dangerous message at worst, trying hard to not think about how confusing these same messages were for us when we were kids.
Lest We Forget
When we are kids we believe that what is happening right now and in this moment is forever, that the way that we feel, good or other than good, is how things will always be, and what we cannot think about at that point is that we are not aware of how true that thinking or those thoughts are. We forget a lot of what happens to us as kids, forget the feeling that we got from one particular event or another, but when our own kids go through what they will very quickly we begin to remember the shards of our lives that caused us to be scared of what or who we are scared of, caused us to form thought patterns which would later govern our lives and forgot that the things that made us uncomfortable as kids are still those same things that make us that way now - it is what we are doing with those thoughts and those feelings that make or break us now.
We do not realize it then what we see as bad as being the thing that will haunt us for the rest of our lives or at least long enough that those demons which have been so prevalent in our lives still live within us and are what make us do or say what we will. We cannot hope to stop the madness that is the lives of our youth these days if we are not willing to also look back at where we have been and what it was that tried hard to suffocate our spirits and crush our souls, even as those actions taken against us were and still are, in a lot of cases, the things which guide us now.
We cannot choose to forget the painful things that we have each gone through and we cannot expect to not repeat those things over and over again with our own kids unless and until we are willing to address the demons and call them all out by name.
We will not get our kids past the idea that who they are is fine and dandy, and to hell with everyone else, unless and until we also ultimately come to the acceptance that the demons live because we let them. We can go on hating our demons, allow those demons to take residence in our minds and in the lives of our children, or we can love the demon, see where it is that it hurts so badly, and remember at that point that it is not a demon which we are looking at but our very selves.
Only Love kills the demons, guys...
I Love You All !!
ROX
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