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Parents do a lot of things that can ruin their children.  I can say this because I am a parent.  I’m also allowed to say this because I have been a middle school teacher for over 24 years.   

As I see it, these are the three most common mistakes many parents make:

(1) Parents treat their children as adults

Somewhere along the line, child-rearing “experts” convinced many Americans that treating our children like adults would be a more effective way to help them mature to become better functioning adults.  Many parents today love to proudly proclaim that they “share everything with their children.”  In their effort to treat their children as equals, parents often allow their offspring to participate in making decisions in which the child is much too young to understand the consequences.

Every spring, I hear of parents of my middle school students who tell me they are allowing their kids to make their own decision as to where they would like to finish off their middle school years.  Because I am at a private, parochial school with stricter rules regarding dress and behavior, many students choose to move to the public school where they believe life will be easier for them.  The parents agree and off they go.

This week I had a parent meeting regarding a student who is showing the beginning signs of academic and social problems in school.  Mrs. Mom stated unequivocally that she and her husband had a very open relationship with both of their children. 

“We tell our children everything,” she said, feeling that this openness created a tighter bond between parent and child.  She soon followed that statement up with, “But we didn’t tell Evette that we were coming today because we didn’t want her to freak out!” 

How’s that for openness? 

This parent meeting came about when my teaching partner and I thought that perhaps one of our students was experiencing a processing issue in her learning.  After meeting with the mother, we wondered if the parents are placing too much pressure on her and she is crumbling underneath it all.  Which leads me to #2…

(2)  Parents put too much pressure on their children to succeed

Mrs. Mom said, “We tell our kids (aged 8 and 13) that they are going to need to get a college education, buy their own home, and depend solely on themselves to survive in this world.” 

As right as Mrs. Mom may be, dumping all of that responsibility on her children at her age is a bit much.  Children should really only be thinking, “Did I remember to do my spelling packet this week?”  Not “How much money do I have to save for a down payment?”   The amount of pressure Mrs. Mom has placed on her daughter is causing her daughter to buckle and produce sloppy, incoherent work.

Mrs. Mom assured us in the meeting that she makes sure her daughter understands that grades are very important and sees to it that Evette gets to the business of her homework as soon as she gets home each day.  As a teacher, I love to hear about parents being involved in their child’s education.  On the other hand, I cringe when I see how too much involvement has crushed a child. 

Evette is a hard-working, self-motivated learner.  She is a serious student and dreams of becoming a children’s author.  Though she struggles with sentence structure and fluency in her writing, the pressure from mom to achieve the highest grade has successfully wiped out her passion for writing.  She has begun to produce work that is only done to completion, not done for personal satisfaction.

(3) Parents smother and overly protect their children (Read my column on “Helicopter Parenting”)         

While Mrs. Mom is busy sharing openly with her daughter and presenting information best left for adults to ponder, she is also keeping her daughter on a tight leash.  Mrs. Mom claimed that the rest of the 8th grade parents were far too lenient with their children and were making a mistake letting them walk to the local coffee/ice cream shop across the street after school. 

“There are children being abducted out there!” Mrs. Mom said.  “It isn’t safe for these kids to be walking around.  Evette will not be going with those kids very often, I tell you!”

While all parents need to be aware of and plan for the safety of their children, they also need to allow their children to experience new things in order to let them mature and learn responsibility and self-reliance.  Mrs. Mom was putting her fears of what she hears on the news and reads in newspaper on her daughter.  The daughter in turn, has become afraid of her own shadow and is reluctant to speak out and trust anyone, even her own classmates and some teachers. 

I am all for making our children aware of the dangers that are out in the “real world”, but know that we need to draw a balanced line between caution and outright fear.

Margaret Andersen is the mother of three teenagers and is a middle school teacher somewhere in the Midwest.  She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist. For more Margaret Anderson articles, click here. 

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