Do not blame the teachers.  Do not blame the public schools.  If you are not a tiger mother or father and consider yourself to be an average American parent concerned about the self esteem of your child/children, look in a mirror and blame the person you see in the glass for what you are about to discover from this post.

The articles I will refer to in this post will help explain the point I want to make. The first piece I’ll mention was posted on PJ Media and although I disagree with many of the posts I’ve read on this Blog, since it is obvious the site is biased toward conservatism and the GOP, for once I agree with PJ Media’s Daily Digest in The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn.

PJ says, “The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability.”

It all started with the self-esteem parenting movement, which I have ranted about before in previous posts. PJ says and I agree: “Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn… The emphasis on feeling good… prevents rather than encourages the real satisfactions of learning.”

I recommend clicking on PJ’s link above and read the entire post.

In addition, I believe that the decline in traditional marriage and the traditional family that is often the foundation and strength of a nation is also the result of the self-esteem movement, which leads me to the next article I’m going to refer to.

In The Stranger in Your Family, AARP Magazine (April/May 2012 issue), Meredith Maran reports on the rise in parent-child estrangements. In Maran’s piece, San Francisco psychologist Joshua Coleman, PhD. blames what’s behind such family fractures on a me-first mentality that he says is weakening parent-child relationships.

When Coleman launched a six-session seminar on intergenerational conflict, he expected that about 50 parents might sign up. Instead, he got 400.  He says, “Little binds adult children to their parents these days, beyond whether the relationship feels good to them.”

Remember, “feeling good” is the foundation of the self-esteem parenting movement, which leads me to the next article. Jonah Lehrer writing Group Think, The brainstorming myth for The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) reports, “The thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail.”

Continued on May 22, 2012 in The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

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Discover The Self-Esteem Train Wreck