Last night as I sat on my couch and watched the 60 Minutes story about parents becoming the school bullies I just felt sadness. When is this all going to stop? Will we ever find a way out of this mess? No one is winning or really getting what they want and it seems we are all getting angrier, more disillusioned and lonelier than ever.
One thing I can tell you above all else is that the parents of this generation really, really love their kids! I should know as I am one of them myself.
The question I have been trying to answer over the past 8 years after running 2 online parenting communities with 650,000 parents is how is it that a generation of parents who fiercely love and protect their kids in ways we have not seen before is resulting in a generation of children experiencing mental health issues like never before including suicide as the leading cause of death amongst our young people.
What is happening and where are we getting it wrong because the truth is we are getting it wrong and although everything in me says you can’t write that Sam, that’s not helpful for parents they already feel like victims and everyone is blaming them, they are going to stop reading this now because it’s not them (which includes me) it’s society and schools and the media doing it to us.
And this is the key to where I believe we are getting it wrong.
We have lost that sense of we are all in this together and have become an us and them society. A society that says every person for themselves.
I was reading an article the other day written anonymously by a mother whose daughter had died by suicide. She was talking about some of the shame around that and trying to process what had happened. She wrote these words that I will never forget:
“If it takes a village to raise a child does it take a village to kill a child”
Here’s the thing, this every person for themselves approach is not really working for us. We as humans are biologically wired to exist within a community and as the grown ups it’s our responsibility to show our kids what that looks like.
There is a generation of kids out there broken, scared, angry, experiencing levels of anxiety like never before, taking their own lives and they are our kids.
We can no longer bury our heads in the sand or point our fingers at who is to blame, we have to educate ourselves and find out what is going on so we can turn this around.
We live in a world of judgement, whether it be the reality TV shows we watch, our instagram or Facebook feeds, we have been wired to judge nearly everything we see or experience and that comes into how we parent.
The problem with judgement is there is a good and a bad which means someone is to blame.
When you walk this line of good or bad one of two things happen.
- You either tell yourself a story trying to process a situation which makes it was someone else’s fault OR
- You tell yourself a story that you are worthless and it’s all your fault which is also not helpful.
What is happening with our kids is actually no individual person’s fault it’s a village issue. The only way we are going to find our way through this is to stop approaching it as an us and them and to start getting on the same team.
If you are reading this and thinking … “things are out of hand these days, luckily I’m not one of those people”, the truth is you actually are. I say that because I am too. It’s all of us, it is the culture we live in and it’s become our norm and this has made us blind to who we are and who we are becoming.
I believe education is the key for us to find our way out of this mess. Education is not about judgement it’s about understanding. We as parents really need to understand what is happening to our kids so we can do something about it. Getting angry as schools and teachers and other parents gets us nowhere. It just teaches bad behaviour to our kids.
I’m not saying people or institutions are perfect and don’t need to be challenged on how they are approaching situations when it comes to our kids. I’m saying we have to be clear that we all need to get on the same team … our kid’s team!
We are the grown ups, we have the adult brains, it’s time that we start to educate ourselves about what is happening because our kids are suffering and as hard as this is to say … that’s on us!