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(March 9, 2004) -- Child psychiatrist Robert Shaw of Bolinas, California can make your hair stand on end with his tales of bratty children - screaming in the supermarket, refusing to obey their parents, closeted with their video games and refusing even the slightest attempts to be socially civil.
He has written about these children - and indicted their parents - in a new book called "The Epidemic," subtitled "The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children."
He's not just being cantankerous.
He thinks parents should be alerted to a cultural shift that has led them to raise disaffected, isolated children whose manners are a turn-off to adults and whose lack of empathy and feelings of self-worth make them miserable and friendless and even worse.
Worse?
How about becoming agents of evil, like the two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., who slaughtered 12 fellow students and a teacher, which Shaw sees as the ultimate outcome of neglectful parenting.
"When Columbine happened, I asked myself how it could come to be that children from comfortable, even privileged, families could do such a deed," Shaw says. "I thought of their isolation, their alienation, their extreme disaffection; I asked myself how parents could create two young people like that." To answer his question, Shaw made a list of the 15 things a parent might do to turn out killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And when he looked at his list, he had a sudden realization: "This is our current pattern of child-rearing."
Since the '60s, when permissiveness became the norm ("a life free of constraints is a happier life"), Shaw says parenting has swung away from the essentials children need: assiduous parent-to-child bonding, a structured environment in which rules are laid down and values passed on, and protection from the electronic media (which has become a substitute for human interaction and a sure-fire purveyor of empty materialism).
Many parents have let their children grow up undisciplined - too busy with their careers or too tired to give children the attention they deserve, Shaw says, often reluctant to set and enforce rules because of the tantrums and upset that might ensue.
The result? Tyrannical children, unhappy households, a society that neither nourishes nor enjoys its youth.
"Large numbers of children," he writes in his book, "are no longer developing the empathy, moral commitment and ability to love necessary to maintain our society at the level that has always been our dream."
The trouble begins, Shaw believes, in lack of bonding between parent and child. The relationship between mother and child "is the single most sacred thing in our culture. There is no more a substitute for this interaction than there is for food."
To that end, he urges mothers to bond early and to reinforce that bonding throughout a child's early life. He tells mothers to find a substitute for 8-to-5 employment, making sure their children have consistent, reliable mothering.
Work at home, he suggests; utilize a grandparent if you have to be away; trade child-tending time with other working mothers (you take her kid; she takes yours).
He says day care is "a social experiment that hasn't worked the way we had hoped."
A study by the National Institutes of Health "suggests a more elevated number of behavior disorders in children who are in day care more than 10 hours a week."
Over-use of day care indicates that many parents treat their children as "accessories," Shaw says. "Parents become so disengaged they don't even know what their children need."
"I understand that some parents may have to use day care," he says, "but I don't recommend it."
Teachers can testify to the results of neglectful parenting; "they find children increasingly ineducable. Many have no self-control, no focus, they can't postpone pleasure, they are not ready to do work."
As a result, curriculum is being "dumbed down" in the schools, Shaw says. "Achievement tests are being postponed."
He insists that parents must make the effort to set rules and stick to them, no matter how hard they are on the parent or how frustrating they may seem to the child.
A child should learn to handle frustration, in order to adapt to society later. If a parent puts a child to bed, then picks him up if he cries, the child may fail to build the inner structure necessary to handle frustration of any kind.
Later in life, when a child comes up against a wall, Shaw says, "he breaks down. For a child who feels entitled, it's the end of the line." The worst result is what happened at Columbine: a teen will "go get the gun."
To Shaw, the Columbine tragedy is the ultimate sign of disengagement: "The two killers had no one significant in their lives to whom they could talk about their difficulties and their anger."
Shaw laces his comments - and his book - with anecdotes about unruly children he has known: A child is told not to jump on the wicker settee and promptly does so; the mother chides him, "so he jumps with his hiking boots onto the nearby silk chair."
"The joy of parenting is vanishing," Shaw says. "Most parents don't look happy to me when they're with their kids."
The insidious thing about the current child-rearing culture is that parents now think poor behavior in their children is "normal."
"A 12-year-old child talking on a cell phone all day long looks normal," Shaw says. "A generation ago, children had structure to their days. Their parents insisted they do homework."
Today's parents are afraid of their children because their children so freely throw tantrums - "you're not my mother anymore" - or exhibit disgust if told to do chores.
Shaw allows that not all children are brats, not all parents are permissive. When he sees a happy family with well-behaved children in a restaurant, he is likely to take time to congratulate them.
Shaw, 77, has been practicing since 1957, first in New York, where he was head of Family and Children's Mental Health Services for the entire South Bronx, and later in Berkeley, where he again headed the mental health program for children and families and later developed with psychologist Judith Shaw, his wife, the Family Institute of Berkeley. For the last six years, he and Judith have lived in Bolinas; they continue to practice in Bolinas and Berkeley.
He is the father of four children, whom he says brought him nothing but joy (excepting those moments all parents share, when kids test authority or vie for supremacy over their siblings).
His book has won wide attention and praise: Psychiatrist Carol Eagle, former professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says, "This book will stay with you from your child's conception through adulthood and then be passed on to your children's children."
In his book, he deals with a number of contentious issues:
- "Down time" for children and teenagers: He thinks today's children don't get enough of it. Down time is valuable for children to absorb experience and to grow from it. Too many children are overprogrammed with outside activities, often designed to "get the child into Harvard." Time a child spends lazing on a backyard swing "can be much more valuable than any lessons Harvard can teach him."
- Dosing of children for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder): He says the classroom misbehavior of most children is the result of poor parenting. He says 90 percent of children labeled ADHD (and medicated for it) have been misdiagnosed.
For parents who recognize their children in the sulky, selfish, sassy young people he describes in his book, he has advice on how to right what obviously has gone wrong:
- Provide a strong, loving, bonding experience with your child. That includes talking to your child, holding your child, reading to your child. If your child learns to love and respect you, the child's aim will be to obey you and please you - be a willing partner in the life of your family.
- Provide a "measured and gradual separation experience" - helping children learn to live on their own. Overprotection can be harmful, too.
- Attend to your child's moral training. "If you don't pass on your values to your children, they'll get them from some other place."
- Provide down time for children to grow.
- Protect your child from the electronic media. "Children get addicted very early, often from being propped in front of the TV while eating breakfast." By allowing too much TV, "you remove the child from any need to be creative or from having the practice of human dialogue. The child doesn't learn how to play and becomes instead a passive absorber of entertainment."
Shaw adds, "Children who resort to TV, video games and cell phones are deprived of the joys of connection to other people. The greatest happiness in life comes from relationships with one's spouse, children and friends. And that's being lost.
"Parents will do anything to get their children into Harvard, but not to change their lifestyles to teach their children how to love."
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