Will Our Children Survive in the Real World

Every generation tries to make up for some perceived deficiency that they had as a child, be it money, self esteem, or... what are trying to make up for now? Schools are banning hugs, yes hugs. Their reasoning is simple yet invalid, they say that touching leads to violence, Principal Deborah Hernandez said "You get into shades of gray," And that "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.' . Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Did I just hear the slippery slope fallacy in ten words or less? Have we gone too far this time? Did I just hear 'you can take my freedom, but you may never take my safety.'

When parents wanted to give their children everything, every new toy, a new car, spending money, to make up for not having much when they were a child, we ended up with a generation of fiscally irresponsible adults. We didn't teach them because it was to hard for us as parents to say "no." We took the easy path. Now, big surprise, because we didn't teach, they never learned. Kids that never learned to budget became adults that couldn't budget.

Then, parents decided that we had to defend our kid's 'fragile self esteem.' So, you didn't like it when your football or basketball coach yelled at you, or asked if you wanted to grow up to be a loser. You felt your teachers pushed to hard when they told you that you had to learn you multiplication table. And, I bet you hated it when your father told you that 'the world needs ditch diggers too'. Too bad, it's called tough love and it is completely necessary.

We gave our kids participation trophies, forbade criticism, comparison, and the use of the word lose. Does your boss refrain from criticizing you? No, in the real world there are winners and losers, win the job or lose the job. We get promotions or raises based on merit, on performance reviews not participation reviews. By raising kids that win regardless of effort, we have raised a generation of entitlement. We have destroyed their work ethic. In our misguided attempt to make them feel good about themselves, we taught them laziness. Effort doesn't matter, everyone is equal. Yeah, we are all 'created equal,' but some of us just work harder, and become better.

Now we ban touching in schools. have we gone too far? Is our kids' safety worth their freedom? As parents our job is not primarily to provide, or protect, but to prepare. Did this generation get beat up on the play ground one to many times? Over-providing safety, like with money and self esteem, is taking the easy road, it's failing to prepare our kids for life. Again our misguided attempts to make things better will just bring more consequences.

We should be teaching morality, ethics, and the ability to know right from wrong. But, if we try to teach them they might make mistakes. So, we can't allow them the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them? If we don't teach the difference between right and wrong, they will never know the difference.

We are doing our children a great disservice by being too weak or too busy to teach. Fiscally irresponsible or entitled is one thing, but nihilism and amorality are another thing entirely. We must teach our children right and wrong, morality and ethics. Kids can't survive in our society without it, or to risk my own slippery slope, our society can't survive without it.

So, I beg you, don't ban touching, ban violence. We should have learned by now that not letting them walk 'cause they might fall doesn't work out the way you want it to. They have to fall to learn balance. They have to toe that line to learn where it is. Protecting their safety and taking away their freedom only serves to take away learning opportunities. How can this come from the same country that gave us "give me liberty or give me death" and "nothing to fear but fear itself."

Take away recess, you get overactive kids. Take away responsibility, you get irresponsible. Take away morality, you get sociopaths. We always have such good intentions, unfortunately we all know where that leads.