What happens when a child is too dependent on the parent, or an adult to help them with many things? In all my years of assessing and dealing with families who had children that were not doing well at school, or had been diagnosed with some or other disorder, I noted that they had a number of common characteristics, which included the following:
- They tend to be impulsive.
- They only do what they enjoy doing and tend to get bored quite easily, usually giving up when the task at hand becomes too difficult.
- They may start a jigsaw puzzle, but then will ask a parent to come and help them if they have too much difficulty in finding the right pieces.
- They lack perseverance and as a result they tend to avoid challenges if they are unsure of the outcome. They might not want to swim a race because they don’t want to come last, they might not want to play a game in case they lose. Maths is a challenging subject, and in many cases a child often does not enjoy the challenge that maths presents. As a result, many kids will request help from a parent with their maths before attempting a maths exercise.
- They tend to have a fear of failure and don’t see the point of studying, because no matter how hard they try, they never seem to succeed.
- As they get older, this fear of failure manifests into a high level of anxiety before an exam, resulting in the child often giving up before they even start.
- They are afraid to risk and try anything on their own. So, it is the little things that we need to focus on, ‘the pleases’ and the ‘thank you’s’, and what they can do for themselves, they must do for themselves. Children are not born with manners, and so few young kids have manners these days. They are totally dependent on the parent to instil the correct values and morals into them.
So, what is the common thread? It’s the fact that these children are very dependent on somebody always being there to help them. It seems that few, if any professionals have observed this connection. As a result, and without our awareness, we are actually encouraging children to become helpless.
Dependent children have low self-esteem and low self-confidence, lack self-discipline, and often have difficulty in appropriately dealing with their world. This is purely as a result of ineffective parenting.
The world has shifted to the extent that the parents have been given the message to ‘be there for their child’ or what has been termed Compassionate Parenting.
In this day and age, parenting seems about an over-concern with the child’s feelings, keeping them safe, doing too much for them, protecting them and entertaining them.
Unfortunately, what we are in fact doing is teaching or encouraging dependency and helplessness, and impulsivity and this often leads to unacceptable behaviour as well as learning difficulties.
If you’d like to know more it is recommended that you enrol for Dr. Resnick’s 90 minute course ‘Rearing an independent Child’.
