Bad Child or Bad Parents

Someone once said, “There are no bad children, only bad parents.” The challenging thing about being a parent is that it does not come with a manual or handbook. Instead, parents simply have to play it by ear, wing it, and try to figure it out as they go along. More than often, they call upon what they learned from their parents.

In fact, there’s an old saying that goes, ‘The best payback for a bad child, is for them to become parents.”

But there’s also a twist to that, for many new parents do the exact opposite of what their parents taught them in order to ‘give their children an easier life.’

Many nowadays parents had a difficult time growing up. Their parents were perhaps not financially well off, they were very strict, often depriving them of basic childhood pleasures and freedoms, plus the rod that was never spared.

As a result, when those children become parents themselves, they try to over compensate and give their kids free rein to do whatever they want to do, with no restrictions. “I give my children whatever they want, they are not going to suffer as I did.”

As a result, those children grow up with a warped sense of reality, compounded by a sense of entitlement, as they feel privileged, and that the world owes them.

There are parents who do not allow their children to do any household chores whatsoever, because that was their reality while growing up. That child grows up with no sense of responsibility.

I remember as a child, I had to wash my dad’s car, shine his shoes, mow the lawn using a manual push mower, trim the shrubs, take out the garbage, wash whatever dishes that I used, go to the meat shop with a shopping list from my mother. Not so nowadays, as many mothers are vehemently opposed to their children doing any such activities.

As a result, we have a generation of children who have no sense of responsibility.

Talk to those parents about this and you’ll get a plethora of excuses. “Oh, he has school work to do,” “She’s studying and tired,” “Why should my children have to do any of that menial stuff?”

Do you ever wonder why so many children, way up in their thirties and even forties, still live with their parents?

Again, if you speak with the parents, especially the mothers, you’ll get a bag of excuses. “He can’t find a job that suits his skills,” “Every place she works they don’t like her,” “He’s waiting for the right opportunity to come his way.”

As sure as night follows day, those children will not do well in relationships, for their upbringing was so skewed and misguided that they do not know how to get along with a partner.

Compound this with the fact that the girls have no household skills. “How you mean you can’t cook, you can’t wash, you don’t know how to iron a shirt and can’t even string a needle?”

The same applies to men too, who grew up so dependent on their mothers that they are totally inept if and when they go out into the real world. They ultimately expect their woman to offer the same services to them.

“Listen, you don’t need me as a wife, you need a mother to take care of you.”

What is true, is that because of misguided parenting, we now have a generation of weak young men who are still attached by an invisible umbilical cord, and some selfish and needy young women who think that men owe them the world.

There’s the old story of the man about to be executed who bit off his mother’s ear as he chided her for not being strict with him and always allowing him to have his own way. Bad child or bad parent? 

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