Marcia Sirota's Blog, page 34

The Most Important Thing Commencement Addresses are Neglecting to Tell New Grads

For those of you in your last semester of college or university, it’s spring and you probably feel like celebrating. You’ve spent the past few years working hard (or maybe not that hard) and you’re looking forward to a break from classes, papers and exams.

Perhaps you’re planning a summer vacation. Or maybe, you’re doing some serious thinking about your future and your next steps toward a brilliant career.

Graduation ceremonies will soon be taking place all across Canada and the US. Young people will be donning their caps and gowns and receiving their diplomas. Commencement addresses will be made.

Sadly, many of the people who’ll be giving these addresses won’t be telling you the most important thing you need to hear.

Yes, they’ll congratulate you on your accomplishments. Maybe they’ll even mention how things are tough out there and how you’ll need to be prepared for a significantly more competitive marketplace.

The most important thing they aren’t telling you is that your attitudes, expectations and habits are to a great extent what will make you or break you in your future working life.

And frighteningly, the people giving these commencement addresses aren’t letting you in on the difficulties you’ll face if you’ve developed counterproductive attitudes, expectations and habits from having been raised by helicopter parents.

What most (if not all) of these speech-givers aren’t saying is that if you’ve grown up with parents who overprotected you, did too much for you, and made you feel like everything was coming to you, you’re going to be at an even greater disadvantage than the average graduate in today’s marketplace.

The current research shows that Millenials earn less than their parents did. A 2013 article by J. Maureen Henderson, in Forbes Magazine  says that, according to the Progressive Policy Institute,  annual “earnings for college grads have declined by $10K since 2000.”

Ms. Henderson writes about how, “according to the American Psychological Association, millennials are the most stressed generation, with a sobering 52% claiming that anxiety was causing them sleepless nights.”

In a May 2017 article about helicopter parenting that I wrote for Huffington Post, I quote a study by the Journal of Child and Family Studies, which found that “college students who experienced helicopter parenting reported higher levels of depression.”

In her article, Ms. Henderson quotes a study from the University of Waterloo’s Professor Markus Moos, who found that “a young person ‘with the same degree, the same job and the same demographic profile is earning less today than they were in the 1980s’ and that reality applies to both white-collar office jobs and those in the service industry. ”

Ms. Henderson also quotes Professor Moos as saying that young people “have to realize, given the findings in the study” “that they’re actually going to have a slightly lower standard of living than their parents.

A January 2017 article in USA Today  stated that “millenials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated.”

Worse yet, the article states that although “education does help boost incomes,” “the median college-educated millennial with student debt is only earning slightly more than a baby boomer without a degree did in 1989.”

It’s clear that these are challenging times for young grads, but the situation is made worse when these grads have parents who’ve been hovering around them, doing too much for them and over-protecting them for their entire lives.

So, if you’re a new grad, what does this mean for  you? It means that you’re going to have to work that much harder and smarter in order to simply equal your parents’ level of financial success.

If you don’t want to be left behind in the dust,  you’re going to have to examine the attitudes, expectations and habits you’re bringing to your work life.

If you’re a child of helicopter parents, the future will be even less rosy than it is for your peers, unless you start making some significant changes, right now.

Many young people who were raised by helicopter parents have an attitude of  overly-entitlement. They don’t think that they have to be held accountable for their actions and they expect great success with minimal effort.

They think that they can do what they want without having to face any real consequences and they tend to avoid significant challenges and hard work.

If you want to be competitive in the new marketplace, you’ll have to bring your A+ game, which means adopting a humble attitude and recognizing that there won’t be any success without serious effort.

You’ll need to be willing to make sacrifices, take responsibility for your actions, and see that there are consequences to every one of your choices.

If you were unfortunate enough to have been raised with helicopter parents,  you’ll have that much more catching up to do if you don’t want to be a statistic of the current trend of downward social mobility.

Whatever you might hear at your graduation ceremonies, if the speakers don’t talk to you about the pitfalls of helicopter parenting, they’ll be doing you a huge disservice.

The way things are today, you can’t afford to be a graduate who isn’t aware of how your attitudes, expectations and habits are going to affect your chances of achieving success in the workplace.

You simply can’t afford to recognize the impact that helicopter parenting has had on how you move forward in your work life.

It might not be so pleasant to hear a commencement address that offers you these hard truths, but anyone who stands up at the podium and shares this information with you will be doing you an enormous favour.

The fact is that without this knowledge, your classmates with better attitudes, more realistic expectations and more productive habits are going to pass you by on their way to getting the largest slice of the pie.

On the other hand, armed with this knowledge, you’ll be better prepared for the workforce than the vast majority of current grads, and most especially, those who were raised by helicopter parents.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. July is all about giving up victim-mentality and embracing your inner warrior.

Listen here to my latest podcast. Nicholas Lovell, author of The Curve,  talks about making money in the free economy.

 

The Six Ways We Avoid Our Genuine Emotions

Our emotions are important signals for us. They give us information about ourselves, other people and the world. When we shut ourselves off from these feelings it’s as though we’ve eliminated one of our senses; even worse, in fact.

We avoid our feelings for only one reason: because they have painful or upsetting implications. Children who grow up with abuse, neglect, trauma or other difficulties learn to associate feelings with suffering.

Feelings become frightening and overwhelming, so these children grow up avoiding their feelings, in order not to revisit their painful past.

The problem is that feelings are related to every part of our lives, and if we avoid feeling because we’re afraid to be overwhelmed by the pain of our past, we’ll miss out on feeling what we need to feel in our present.

We need to have our feelings today, as without them, we’re at a tremendous disadvantage. When we avoid our feelings, we become alienated from ourselves and no longer know who we are, what we want, or how to achieve our personal or professional goals.

As well, the things we do to help us stay out of touch with our emotions are creating problems of their own. These “side-effects” of our avoidance cause suffering, in their own right.

So what are the ways that we avoid our emotions? There are six things that we do to not know our feelings.

These are: Addiction, Distraction, Humour, Minimizing, Spacing Out and Stuffing Down.

1: Addiction. Many people say that addiction is a disease. I see it as a dysfunctional coping strategy around childhood hurts and losses. One of the functions of an addiction is to keep us from feeling the pain, hurts and losses of our past and present life.

Of course, everyone knows that addictions cause a lot of pain and hardship, relationship and work difficulties. We don’t benefit at all from avoiding our emotions in this way.

2: Distraction. If we’re trying to avoid our feelings, one thing we can do is distract ourselves with keeping busy, over-working, helping others, watching TV, reading books, over-intellectualizing or anything that takes up so much of our time, energy and attention that we can’t focus on our actual feelings.

When we’re so distracted, we’ll miss out on important things, like signs that our health is deteriorating, or signs that one of our children is in trouble.

We can miss out on marital issues or problems at our workplace. Being so distracted, we can float through our life until eventually a crisis comes along and smacks us in the face.

3: Humour. We can avoid our emotions by laughing off anything that might be too “heavy” or that might cause us to have a real feeling. We can make a joke of things, rather than face the discomfort of our feelings.

The problem with using humour to avoid our feelings is that we can make everyone else laugh at our problems as well, and be forever deprived of sympathy, understanding and support.

When we’re too prone to laughing off our own feelings, we can fall into laughing off the feelings of the people around us, who will be hurt and angry and see us as insensitive and uncaring.

4: Minimizing. If we want to avoid our feelings, we can minimize them to ourselves and to others. We can tell ourselves and them that these feelings are “no big deal,” or that they’re “in the past,” and therefore no longer able to affect us. Neither of these things are true, though.

When we minimize our feelings, the same thing can happen as when we laugh them away. We tell other people to not take our feelings seriously, and we risk being insensitive by minimizing the feelings of those around us.

5: Spacing Out. We can avoid our feelings by being “lost in space.” We can dissociate, never being fully present, in order to stay away from potentially uncomfortable emotions. We can get drunk or high, to do the same thing. Unfortunately, that means that we’re also never present for any of the positive parts of our lives.

When we space out, we can get into accidents, tripping over things or bumping into things as we walk, or worse, car accidents when we’re at the wheel.

We can miss important deadlines for handing in work or school assignments and we can forget to do important things, like take our medicine, lock the front door or blow out the candles before leaving the house.

6: Stuffing Down. This is a specific behaviour that over-eaters do. They eat in order to push their feelings back down to where they were coming from. It’s really part of the “addiction” category, but this way of avoiding emotions is so prevalent that it warrants its own category.

People who stuff down their feelings with food are deprived of their authentic emotional experience, and they become overweight, with all the social and health problems associated with this.

I think that it’s obvious by the above that we need to feel our feelings, even if they’re unpleasant or uncomfortable, because without them we experience a lot of even more unpleasant consequences, and as well, we’re deprived of essential information that will empower us to be our best selves and live our best lives.

Not having our feelings can result in emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression, when all this repressed pain has no-where to go as well as physical problems that come when pour bodies react to all the pent-up emotions (and these can include stomach aches, ulcers, rashes, even heart attacks and strokes).

We can have interpersonal problems, becoming passive-aggressive when all our held-in anger leaks out, or we can come across as cold, uncaring or insensitive, as I mentioned above.

We can trust that the more we feel, the less uncomfortable it will be, as we’ll adjust to knowing our emotions. Also, we can have faith that knowing our feelings won’t kill us or make us go crazy. In fact, it will enable us to make the best possible choices in our personal and professional lives.

We can all identify the ways that we avoid our feelings and the effects that this avoidance has on our life. We can get used to feeling and releasing our emotions, whether positive or “negative,” and we can live with open hearts, able to know ourselves and equally important, give and receive love.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. June is all about having a more meaningful summer.

Listen here to my latest podcast. Dr. Raj Ragunathan discusses the true meaning of happiness.

And watch my website for news of my upcoming Udemy courses on Being too nice, Dealing with narcissists, and Helicopter parenting.

The Twelve-Step Cure for Helicopter Parenting

It’s spring, and kids are graduating from University and starting their careers.Those young people whose parents raised them to be hard-working, responsible and self-directed are going to be at a huge advantage, compared to those who have helicopter parents or those who’ve studied at schools that act like helicopter parents.

Frighteningly, our schools, from elementary, to high school to college are being pressured by both parents and government bodies to pass students, even if they haven’t shown up to class, haven’t done the work, and haven’t learned the material.

Someone I know who teaches elementary school is appalled to see how many of the parents question every grade their kids receive, without wondering about the more important issue, which is whether their children are learning what they need in order to prepare for their futures.

An acquaintance of mine who teaches in a professional program at a college tells me that their post-secondary institution is being pressured to give its students an experience of “student satisfaction,” rather than a proper education.

When I talk to people who run businesses and are in the process of hiring, the stories of young people entering the workplace are shocking.

I hear about young people who are grossly unprepared, both in attitude and skill set, to perform the jobs they’re applying for.

I recently heard of a young man who was offered a summer job. It would be five or six weeks, six days a week, and he’d earn upwards of $3000. His mom refused to let him take the job, telling the prospective employer that it was “too much work.”

A young person I know of got their first job out of school. It was well-paying and had opportunities for advancement but they didn’t like the 45-minute commute. When they mentioned to their father that they were thinking of quitting, he went along with the idea.

These parents clearly love their kids but the way they’re showing it is backfiring, big-time, if they want to raise kids who are employable.

A young woman I know attended a two-year training program which prepared her for a great career in the entertainment industry.

The course cost close to $30,000, but even so, the young woman told me that many of her classmates were skipping classes and not handing in their assignments.

By the end of the two years, a fraction of the people who began the program ended up graduating, despite the fact that everyone had paid the full tuition in advance.

I wondered how the parents who were funding this costly program might be reacting to their kids not taking the program seriously.

Would these parents go ahead and fund another program, and another, in the hopes that their kid might eventually find something they felt more inclined to participate in? Is this the right message to send to a young person?

If parents and schools make it too easy for young people to shirk their work, it’s unlikely that these youth will ever be willing or able to do what’s necessary, in order to excel in their training or in their future jobs.

If a young person has had helicopter parenting and/or has graduated from a college that coddled them, how can they overcome these disadvantages and achieve success in the workplace?

It’s simple, if not easy. They have to learn the attitudes and skills that will make it possible for them to succeed.

I believe that there are twelve things a young person needs to learn if they want workplace success. They can learn these things, even if their parents and/or schools were too busy bubble-wrapping them to instill these essential lessons into them.

These twelve things are: 1: self-reliance, 2: independent thinking, 3: hard work, 4: perseverance, 5: frustration tolerance, 6: good learning habits, 7: rigorous thinking, 8: good judgment, 9: interpersonal skills, 10: conscientiousness, 11: humility and 12: integrity.

1: Self-reliance. Helicopter parents do too much for their kids, so they grow up overly dependent and unable to do things on their own. The kids need to learn how to trust themselves and believe in themselves, so that they can make their own decisions, solve their own problems and function independently.

2: Independent thinking. Helicopter parents do much of the thinking for their kids, so they grow up feeling uncomfortable thinking for themselves. The kids need to learn how to ask the right questions, analyze the data and make up their own minds about things.

3: Hard work. Helicopter parents make everything too easy for their kids, so they need to learn how to apply themselves to a task and complete it, even if it’s not easy. The kids need to appreciate how much confidence and mastery will come from working hard at tasks and accomplishing their goals.

4: Perseverance. Helicopter parents tell their kids that if something is hard, they can just give up. The kids need to learn that if something is hard, they have to try harder, and stick with it. That’s the only road to real success.

5: Frustration tolerance: Helicopter parents cushion their kids’ every fall, depriving them of all the learning opportunities that come from experiencing loss or failure. The kids need to learn how to fall down and pick themselves up, how to fail with grace and how to be a good loser.

6: Good learning habits. Helicopter parents do all the work for their kids, or tell them not to bother because something is “too hard.” These kids need to learn how to research a project, write a complete, grammatical sentence, finish an essay and prepare for and write a test.

7: Rigorous thinking. Helicopter parents spoon-feed their kids, making it easy for them to have lazy thinking. These kids need to learn the difference between facts and opinions, between what they wish to see and what actually is, and between scientifically-proven truths and things they’d prefer to believe but simply aren’t true.

8: Good judgment. Helicopter parents do too much for their kids so they fail to develop good judgment. They need to learn how to assess people and situations accurately, make good choices for themselves and keep out of trouble.

9: Interpersonal skills. Helicopter parents spoil their kids, so they grow up with an attitude of over-entitlement. They need to learn respect for others, tolerance of differences, recognition of hierarchies, patience, tact and strategies for coping with conflicts.

10: Conscientiousness. Helicopter parents make things much too easy for their kids. They need to learn the value of coming in every day, showing up on time, staying until the end of the day, taking appropriate- length lunch and coffee breaks and doing the work assigned to them, all without complaining.

11: Humility. Helicopter parents spoil their kids, making them feel superior to everyone else, including their superiors. These kids need to learn that they might be bright and talented, but they’re the lowest on the totem pole and have the most to learn. They need to learn to appreciate the wisdom and experience of their elders, and to listen more than they speak.

12: Integrity. Helicopter parents make everything too easy for their kids. These kids need to learn the values of honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty and keeping their promises. In the workplace, soft skills like integrity, conscientiousness and emotional intelligence are often valued more highly than specific technical skills.

All of these things can be learned over time, even if a young person has had helicopter parenting and/or schools that overly coddled them. The bubble-wrapped young person can break free and make the changes necessary to eventually have a good job and a fulfilling career.

Keep following my website for announcements about my Udemy courses for parents, on how to give up helicopter parenting, and for young people, on how to recover from its effects.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. June is all about having a meaningful summer.

Listen here to my latest podcast. Dr. Raj Ragunathan discusses the true meaning of happiness.

 

Twelve Steps for Young People to Recover From Helicopter Parenting

 

It’s spring, and kids are graduating from University and starting their careers.

Those young people whose parents raised them to be hard-working, responsible and self-directed are going to be at a huge advantage, compared to those who have helicopter parents or those who’ve studied at schools that act like helicopter parents.

Frighteningly, our schools, from elementary, to high school to college are being pressured by both parents and government bodies to pass students, even if they haven’t shown up to class, haven’t done the work, and haven’t learned the material.

Someone I know who teaches elementary school is appalled to see how many of the parents question every grade their kids receive, without wondering about the more important issue, which is whether their children are learning what they need in order to prepare for their futures.

An acquaintance of mine who teaches in a professional program at a college tells me that their post-secondary institution is being pressured to give its students an experience of “student satisfaction,” rather than a proper education.

When I talk to people who run businesses and are in the process of hiring, the stories of young people entering the workplace are shocking.

I hear about young people who are grossly unprepared, both in attitude and skill set, to perform the jobs they’re applying for.

A young woman I know attended a two-year training program which prepared her for a great career in the entertainment industry.

The course cost close to $30,000, but even so, the young woman told me that many of her classmates were skipping classes and not handing in their assignments.

By the end of the two years, a fraction of the people who began the program ended up graduating, despite the fact that everyone had paid the full tuition in advance.

I wondered how the parents who were funding this costly  program might be reacting to their kids not taking the program seriously.

Would these parents go ahead and fund another program, and another, in the hopes that their kid might eventually find something they felt more inclined to participate in? Is this the right message to send to a young person?

If parents and schools make it too easy for young people to shirk their work, it’s unlikely that these youth will ever be willing or able to do what’s necessary, in order to excel in their training or in their future jobs.

If a young person has had helicopter parenting and/or has graduated from a college that coddled them, how can they overcome these disadvantages and achieve success in the workplace?

It’s simple, if not easy. They have to learn the attitudes and skills that will make it possible for them to succeed.

I believe that there are twelve things a young person needs to learn if they want workplace success. They can learn these things, even if their parents and/or schools were too busy bubble-wrapping them to instill these essential lessons into them.

These twelve things are: 1: self-reliance, 2: independent thinking, 3: hard work, 4: perseverance, 5: frustration tolerance, 6: good learning habits, 7: rigorous thinking, 8: good judgment, 9: interpersonal skills, 10: conscientiousness, 11: humility and 12: integrity.

1: Self-reliance. Helicopter parents do too much for their kids, so they grow up overly dependent and unable to do things on their own. The kids need to learn how to trust themselves and believe in themselves, so that they can make their own decisions, solve their own problems and function independently.

2: Independent thinking. Helicopter parents do much of the thinking for their kids, so they grow up feeling uncomfortable thinking for themselves. The kids need to learn how to ask the right questions, analyze the data and make up their own minds about things.

3: Hard work. Helicopter parents make everything too easy for their kids, so they need to learn how to apply themselves to a task and complete it, even if it’s not easy. The kids need to appreciate how much confidence and mastery will come from working hard at tasks and accomplishing their goals.

4: Perseverance. Helicopter parents tell their kids that if something is hard, they can just give up. The kids need to learn that if something is hard, they have to try harder, and stick with it. That’s the only road to real success.

5: Frustration tolerance: Helicopter parents cushion their kids’ every fall, depriving them of all the learning opportunities that come from experiencing loss or failure. The kids need to learn how to fall down and pick themselves up, how to fail with grace and how to be a good loser.

6: Good learning habits. Helicopter parents do all the work for their kids, or tell them not to bother because something is “too hard.” These kids need to learn how to research a project, write a complete, grammatical sentence, finish an essay and prepare for and write a test.

7: Rigorous thinking. Helicopter parents spoon-feed their kids, making it easy for them to have lazy thinking. These kids need to learn the difference between facts and opinions, between what they wish to see and what actually is, and between scientifically-proven truths and things they’d prefer to believe but simply aren’t true.

8: Good judgment. Helicopter parents do too much for their kids so they fail to develop good judgment. They need to learn how to assess people and situations accurately, make good choices for themselves and keep out of trouble.

9: Interpersonal skills. Helicopter parents spoil their kids, so they grow up with an attitude of over-entitlement. They need to learn respect for others, tolerance of differences, recognition of hierarchies, patience, tact and strategies for coping with conflicts.

10: Conscientiousness. Helicopter parents make things much too easy for their kids. They need to learn the value of coming in every day, showing up on time, staying until the end of the day, taking appropriate- length lunch and coffee breaks and doing the work assigned to them, all without complaining.

11: Humility. Helicopter parents spoil their kids, making them feel superior to everyone else, including their superiors. These kids need to learn that they might be bright and talented, but they’re the lowest on the totem pole and have the most to learn. They need to learn to appreciate the wisdom and experience of their elders, and to listen more than they speak.

12: Integrity. Helicopter parents make everything too easy for their kids. These kids need to learn the values of honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty and keeping their promises. In the workplace, soft skills like integrity, conscientiousness and emotional intelligence are often valued  more highly than specific technical skills.

All of these things can be learned over time, even if a young person has had helicopter parenting and/or schools that overly coddled them. The bubble-wrapped young person can break free and make the changes necessary to eventually have a good job and a fulfilling career.

Keep following my website for announcements about my Udemy courses for parents, on how to give up helicopter parenting, and for young people, on how to recover from its effects.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. June is all about having a meaningful summer.

Listen here to my latest podcast. Dr. Raj Ragunathan discusses the true meaning of happiness.

Good Parents Give Their Kids These Six Things

Parenting is one of the hardest thing in the world to do. That’s why it never hurts to be reminded of a few basic truths.

The fact is, children need six things in order to grow up healthy, happy and best able to succeed in life: love, guidance, limits,  protection, validation and respect.

Children need love, of course, but not so much that they’re smothered. They need to be adored but they also need to learn accountability and autonomy.

Kids need to feel that they’re special, but not so special that everything they do is okay. They need to see that their parents can love them but also disapprove of their actions on occasion.

Children need guidance, but parents ought not to be so directive that the kids never learn to think for themselves.

Kids need to be able to try things, mess up, and learn from their mistakes. They need to experience disappointment and failure in order to learn, grow, and develop character.

Children need limits, so that they can distinguish right from wrong and understand what’s expected of them. Saying “no” to a child helps build character, as well as frustration tolerance.

Kids need to be listened to and responded to in order to feel validated, but parents still have to be in charge so that their children develop appropriately.

Children need guidance in order to become their best selves. They have to learn good work and study habits and understand the value of hard work, persistence and dedication to everything they do.

They need to be taught personal responsibility and accountability, so that they can learn from their mistakes and grow as individuals.

They need to learn compassion for other living things and a sense of responsibility for their family, community and planet.

Kids need to learn how to play fair and follow the rules of their society, so that people will want to play with them when they grow up.

Children need respect, because this is the foundation of their self-worth. Their feelings need to be respected, as well as their opinions, their wishes and their bodies.

This doesn’t mean giving them everything they want or letting them do anything they want, but it does mean always thinking about what’s best for them.

Children need to be protected, both from their own impulses and from the world. This will also enable them to learn how to care of themselves.

Children need to see their parents standing up for them, defending them and keeping them safe from harm. This will make them feel worthy and deserving of protection.

On the other hand, children don’t need to be so over-protected that they’re spared from any consequences of their mistakes or allowed to get away with just about anything. Parents need to balance protection with their kid’s need to learn basic life lessons.

Overly protective parents cripple their children emotionally or turn them into selfish young adults who think that they can get away with any type of bad behaviour.

When parents give their children the above six things, the children will grow up with good self-esteem, a sense of confidence, plenty of self-respect and good self-care.

As a parent, it never hurts to think about how you’re parenting and to make the occasional adjustments. Increasing the appropriate love, limits, guidance, protection, validation and respect you give your kids can only be beneficial for them.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. June is all about having a meaningful summer.

 

Helicopter Parents Raise Kids Who Are Unemployable

Helicopter parents are in the news a lot these days. These are the parents who  can’t stop hovering around their kids. They practically wrap them in bubble wrap, creating a cohort of young adults who struggle to function in their jobs and in their lives.

Helicopter parents think that they’re doing what’s best for their kids but actually, they’re hurting their kids’ chances at success. In particular, they’re ruining their kids’ chances of  landing a job and keeping it.

Helicopter parents don’t want their kids to get hurt. They want to soften every blow and cushion every fall. The problem is that these over-protected kids never learn how to deal with loss, failure or disappointment – inevitable aspects of everyone’s life.

Over-protection makes it nearly impossible for these young people to develop frustration tolerance. Without this important psychological attribute, young people enter the workforce at a great disadvantage.

Helicopter parents do too much for their kids, so the kids grow up lacking a healthy work-ethic, as well as basic skills. Without this work-ethic and these necessary skills, the young person won’t be able to accomplish many of the workplace tasks expected of them.

Helicopter parents over-protect their kids and deprive them of any meaningful consequences for their actions. As a result, they miss out on the opportunity to learn valuable life lessons from the mistakes they make; life-lessons that would contribute to their emotional intelligence.

Helicopter parents protect their kids from any conflicts they might have with their peers. When these kids grow up, they don’t know how to resolve difficulties between themselves and a colleague or supervisor.

People solve problems by trying things, making mistakes, learning, and then trying again. This process builds confidence, competence and self-worth. Helicopter parents prevent their children from developing all of these important attributes which are necessary for career success.

Helicopter parents think that their kids should win at everything. Everyone who competes in a sports meet should get a trophy. Everyone should get a passing grade, even if their assignment is overdue or poorly-conceived.

In a functional workplace, there’s only one winner of a competition, and only high-quality work is rewarded. If children grow up thinking that no matter what they do, they’ll win, they won’t realize that they actually have to work hard in order to succeed.

These spoiled young people will be devastated when they keep losing competitions, blowing interviews or getting fired from their jobs. They won’t understand how much effort is actually required in order to be a winner in the work world.

These young people lack competence and agency from never having had to work through a problem or complete a project all by themselves. They expect others to do these things for them, just as their parents always have. In essence, they can’t think or act for themselves.

 

Helicopter parenting instills a set of bad attitudes in kids. They grow up with great expectations of success, unrelated to how much time or energy they invest, and they feel deserving of preferential treatment – neither of which go over well with their colleagues or bosses.

In a job interview, prospective employers might be put off by the overly-entitled attitude of a young person, or be alarmed by their lack of basic skills.

The young person’s general aura of ignorance and incompetence, combined with expectations of immediate and substantial rewards unrelated to performance are likely to be the kiss of death in any interview for a good position.

When parents decide to accompany their 20-something offspring to a job interview, it undermines any confidence a potential employer might have in this potential employee. “Why,” the employer might ask themselves, “would a job-seeker need to bring their Mommy or Daddy along on an interview, unless this young person was more child than adult?”

Even in smaller ways, helicopter parents cripple their kids. The adult child of helicopter parents will take their coffee break and then walk out of the break room, not having cleaned up their mess or washed out their cup. You can see how this will foster resentment among their colleagues.

These young people expect “someone” to clean up after them, in the same way that their mess was always cleaned up when they were kids. They don’t see that there’s no-one following them around anymore, cleaning up their messes, whether physical, interpersonal or professional.

In a WebPsychology article by Barb Nefer, “millennials are getting hit hard by depression. One in five young workers has experienced on-the-job depression, compared to only 16 percent of Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers.”

Nefer goes on to say that according to “a white paper from Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, millennials have impaired functioning on the job and higher rates of absenteeism, as well as more conflict and incidents of getting written up,” all of which “can impede job performance.”

According to an article by Brooke Donatone in the Washington Post, a 2013 entry in the “Journal of Child and Family Studies found that college students who experienced helicopter parenting reported higher levels of depression.”

The Washington Post article goes on to say that “intrusive parenting interferes with the development of autonomy and competence. So helicopter parenting leads to increased dependence and decreased ability to complete tasks without parental supervision.”

It’s clear from the above articles that helicopter parenting is contributing to a growing rate of depression among young people as well as an inability to function optimally in the workplace.

If you’re a parent who  wants your children to have career success as adults, you need to be aware of any tendencies toward helicopter parenting in yourself and your co-parent.

Loving your child means guiding them, protecting them and supporting them. It doesn’t mean smothering them, over-protecting them or doing so much for them that they never learn to think on their feet, cope with challenges or deal with disappointment and failure.

The most loving thing you can do as a parent is take a step back and let your child fall down, flail about and figure things out on her own. Sometimes the best way to “be there” for your kid is not to be there for them. This is how you enable them to develop confidence, competence, self-worth and emotional intelligence.

Young people today need parents who support them in becoming functioning adults. This means less hovering and bubble-wrapping of kids and more empowering them to do things for themselves, figure things out for themselves and learn how to cope with difficulties, all by themselves.

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Helicopter Parents Are Ruining Their Kids’ Chances of Landing and Keeping a Job

Helicopter parents are in the news a lot these days. These are the parents who  can’t stop hovering around their kids. They practically wrap them in bubble wrap, creating a cohort of young adults who struggle to function in their jobs and in their lives.

Helicopter parents think that they’re doing what’s best for their kids but actually, they’re hurting their kids’ chances at success. In particular, they’re ruining their kids’ chances of  landing a job and keeping it.

Helicopter parents don’t want their kids to get hurt. They want to soften every blow and cushion every fall. The problem is that these over-protected kids never learn how to deal with loss, failure or disappointment – inevitable aspects of everyone’s life.

Over-protection makes it nearly impossible for these young people to develop frustration tolerance. Without this important psychological attribute, young people enter the workforce at a great disadvantage.

Helicopter parents do too much for their kids, so the kids grow up lacking a healthy work-ethic, as well as basic skills. Without this work-ethic and these necessary skills, the young person won’t be able to accomplish many of the workplace tasks expected of them.

Helicopter parents over-protect their kids and deprive them of any meaningful consequences for their actions. As a result, they miss out on the opportunity to learn valuable life lessons from the mistakes they make; life-lessons that would contribute to their emotional intelligence.

Helicopter parents protect their kids from any conflicts they might have with their peers. When these kids grow up, they don’t know how to resolve difficulties between themselves and a colleague or supervisor.

People solve problems by trying things, making mistakes, learning, and then trying again. This process builds confidence, competence and self-worth. Helicopter parents prevent their children from developing all of these important attributes which are necessary for career success.

Helicopter parents think that their kids should win at everything. Everyone who competes in a sports meet should get a trophy. Everyone should get a passing grade, even if their assignment is overdue or poorly-conceived.

In a functional workplace, there’s only one winner of a competition, and only high-quality work is rewarded. If children grow up thinking that no matter what they do, they’ll win, they won’t realize that they actually have to work hard in order to succeed.

These spoiled young people will be devastated when they keep losing competitions, blowing interviews or getting fired from their jobs. They won’t understand how much effort is actually required in order to be a winner in the work world.

These young people lack competence and agency from never having had to work through a problem or complete a project all by themselves. They expect others to do these things for them, just as their parents always have. In essence, they can’t think or act for themselves.

Helicopter parenting instills a set of bad attitudes in kids. They grow up with great expectations of success, unrelated to how much time or energy they invest, and they feel deserving of preferential treatment – neither of which go over well with their colleagues or bosses.

In a job interview, prospective employers might be put off by the overly-entitled attitude of a young person, or be alarmed by their lack of basic skills.

The young person’s general aura of ignorance and incompetence, combined with expectations of immediate and substantial rewards unrelated to performance are likely to be the kiss of death in any interview for a good position.

When parents decide to accompany their 20-something offspring to a job interview, it undermines any confidence a potential employer might have in this potential employee. “Why,” the employer might ask themselves, “would a job-seeker need to bring their Mommy or Daddy along on an interview, unless this young person was more child than adult?”

Even in smaller ways, helicopter parents cripple their kids. The adult child of helicopter parents will take their coffee break and then walk out of the break room, not having cleaned up their mess or washed out their cup. You can see how this will foster resentment among their colleagues.

These young people expect “someone” to clean up after them, in the same way that their mess was always cleaned up when they were kids. They don’t see that there’s no-one following them around anymore, cleaning up their messes, whether physical, interpersonal or professional.

In a WebPsychology article by Barb Nefer, “millennials are getting hit hard by depression. One in five young workers has experienced on-the-job depression, compared to only 16 percent of Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers.”

Nefer goes on to say that according to “a white paper from Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, millennials have impaired functioning on the job and higher rates of absenteeism, as well as more conflict and incidents of getting written up,” all of which “can impede job performance.”

According to an article by Brooke Donatone in the Washington Post, a 2013 entry in the “Journal of Child and Family Studies found that college students who experienced helicopter parenting reported higher levels of depression.”

The Washington Post article goes on to say that “intrusive parenting interferes with the development of autonomy and competence. So helicopter parenting leads to increased dependence and decreased ability to complete tasks without parental supervision.”

It’s clear from the above articles that helicopter parenting is contributing to a growing rate of depression among young people as well as an inability to function optimally in the workplace.

If you’re a parent who  wants your children to have career success as adults, you need to be aware of any tendencies toward helicopter parenting in yourself and your co-parent.

Loving your child means guiding them, protecting them and supporting them. It doesn’t mean smothering them, over-protecting them or doing so much for them that they never learn to think on their feet, cope with challenges or deal with disappointment and failure.

The most loving thing you can do as a parent is take a step back and let your child fall down, flail about and figure things out on her own. Sometimes the best way to “be there” for your kid is not to be there for them. This is how you enable them to develop confidence, competence, self-worth and emotional intelligence.

Young people today need parents who support them in becoming functioning adults. This means less hovering and bubble-wrapping of kids and more empowering them to do things for themselves, figure things out for themselves and learn how to cope with difficulties, all by themselves.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. May is all about positive parenting.

Is Your Style of Relating Successful or Problematic?

In working with people for over twenty-five years, I’ve discovered something about the way that people relate to each-another. I’ve identified four styles of human interaction. Two of them work really well to create positive personal and professional relationships. The other two are more problematic.

If you want to be happy and successful in your relationships, you’re going to have to learn which of these styles of interaction you’ve been using and exchange the problematic ones for the ones more likely to succeed.

What do I mean by four styles of interaction? I’m describing the ways that people relate to one-another based on what’s driving them internally and how much awareness they’re bringing to their relationships.

The more aware you are of yourself and other people, the more empowered you’ll to be to make use of the more successful styles of interaction.

Some people are lucky enough to have naturally adopted successful styles of interaction. For everyone else, these can be learned. More importantly, the problematic styles can be unlearned.

The four styles of interaction I’ve identified are: Empathetic, Transactional, Strategic and Reactive.

Empathetic: This style of interaction comes out of the desire to connect to other people. People who use the empathetic style of interaction have an open heart and are in touch with their emotions. If this is you, you’re sensitive and the way you deal with other people is driven by your empathy.

The empathetic style works well because it enables you to get close to others. People feel that you care and they respond accordingly. In the empathetic style of interaction, everyone feels seen and heard and it’s easier to build trust. With empathy driving your interactions, people see you as safe, warm, present, emotionally available, and easy to be around.

Transactional: This style is driven by need. If you use this style, the underlying message goes something like this: “I’ll do something for you, and then you’ll do something for me.” Codependent relationships are an example of transactional interactions; as are relationships based on people-pleasing.

In the transactional style of interacting, people tend to exploit and be exploited. It ‘s a style that lends itself to power imbalances and bullying, since those who are trying too hard to please will often foster contempt and hostility in others. Politics and business can involve this type of interaction.

Those who’ve adopted a transactional style tend to end up on one side or the other of an abusive relationship. Narcissists, sociopaths and users have this style of interacting, as do those who are insecure and overly nice, pleasing and placating.

Strategic: People use this style when it’s not appropriate to be open or intimate with the other person; for example in a professional relationship (with a boss, colleague, teacher or coach) when it’s necessary to have more of a persona. It’s also a style for when you’re dealing with someone who isn’t that reasonable and/or needs managing.

In strategic interactions, you’re polite and ethical but you play to win. You keep your cards close to your chest and maintain your poker face. You think about who it is you’re dealing with and use what you know to your best advantage. You maintain your integrity but you don’t let anyone mess with you.

Reactive: In this style, people deal with each-other based on their past experiences. If you were hurt, rejected, abandoned, exploited or abused in the past, you’re more likely to use this style of interacting.

With this style, you deal with your current relationships, both personal and professional, as though the people you’re with today are identical to the people from your past.

This will create a lot of problems for you, both personally and professionally. Reactive interactions tend to involve a lot of drama and conflict, and they lead to unhappiness.

It should be clear from the above that the two best styles of interacting are the empathetic and the strategic ones. With these, you’re most likely to achieve success in both your professional and your personal relationships.

If your habit is to use the transactional or reactive styles of interacting, this is a good opportunity to look at why you interact in these ways and to make some positive changes moving forward.

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The Best Way to Connect With Others? Just Be With Them

People have become more and more alienated over the past several decades. We’ve gotten used to interacting with each-other based on a transactional model in which I do something for you and expect you to do something for me in return. Unfortunately, this point of view makes it increasingly difficult to form and maintain positive, empathetic relationships.

In my weekly women’s groups, one of the main things I teach is how to “just be” with each-other. The participants learn that analyzing, interpreting, entertaining, cheer-leading, educating or rescuing each-other are not the ways to create meaningful connections.

The group members practice sharing with each-other and giving empathetic feedback that avoids judgment, analysis and prescriptions.

The members learn to simply enjoy speaking and listening to each-other and discovering all the qualities they have that are unique and all the things that they have in common. The group members practice kindness and build empathy, and the groups quickly become cohesive entities that are greater than the sum of their parts.

In North America we have this idea today that relationships are about “doing” for one-another. We don’t realize that a better model is simply being together and appreciating one-another.

We can decide, however, to let go of the compulsion to do for one-another and begin to practice “just being” together. This doesn’t mean that we do nothing for one-another, but rather, understand that our relationships aren’t based solely on this model of “doing for.”

We’re going to be a lot more fulfilled in our relationships and we’ll feel a lot more connected if we give up our habit of doing so much for each-other and just learn how to be together.

When we shift our goal to just being together, many wonderful things happen: closeness grows, trust builds, understanding blossoms and when a real need arises, it’s naturally responded to. This won’t be because it’s what a friend or family member is “supposed” to do, but because it’s an outgrowth of the closeness people feel.

It takes an awful lot of energy to do, do, do for one-another, but it takes not a lot of energy to just be. We can use that extra energy to be more loving, more creative and to enjoy our lives more. Why not start practicing this new model of just being with one-another, today?

 

Six Parenting Traps That Will Turn Your Kid Into a Sociopath

How do parents turn their child into a sociopath? There are six parenting traps that together, will bring out the very worst in any child.

Parenting traps are behaviours that seem “nice” on the surface, so parents think they’re “good” for their children. They’re actually very bad for them.

1: No limits. Instead of setting clear limits and guidelines around their child’s behaviour, they completely indulge and/or enable the kid in being selfish, self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy, grasping, insensitive and/or uncaring.

2: No consequences. They fail to give the child any meaningful consequences for these bad attitudes and behaviours.

3: Inappropriate reactions. They minimize and/or find “cute” all instances of the child’s hurtful, selfish, impulsive, destructive, cruel or thoughtless behaviour.

4: No values. They fail to instill proper morals, ethics, compassion, empathy, kindness or self-discipline into the child.

5: Inappropriate “protection.” They protect the child from receiving any in-the-world consequences of their bad behaviour, including the child’s lying, conning,cheating, stealing, bullying and hurting animals or other people.

6: No perspective. They repeatedly tell the child, or indicate through their actions that the child is “special,” better than everyone else, and deserving of more than everyone else.

All of the above will lead to a child growing up believing that they’re superior to everyone else. They won’t care about anyone else, and they’ll feel like they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, in order to get what they want, without any consequences whatsoever.

If you want to be a truly loving, caring parent, be careful to avoid all of the above parenting traps. If not, you’re in part responsible for creating a monster.

Sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. April is about being more empowered in your relationships.

Listen here to my latest podcast. Author and psychologist Emily Esfahani Smith talks about how to live a more meaningful life.