Parenting Gen Z and Beyond

Parenting is difficult.

When someone asks me how is parenting I almost always reply, “parenting is like walking on a tight rope.” You move slightly left you will fall, you weigh little bit more on to your right and you will go down.

Nothing you do can ever be absolutely right in parenting. Whatever or however best a parent does will still fall short on some parameter of raising them right and that is what makes parenting the most difficult human endeavor. Just think of it. You pay little less attention and somethings can go under looked, you pay a little more attention and you may not give them sufficient chance to be independent. You care a bit less and they may feel unloved and you care too much and they may feel suffocated. The list of a parent’s mostly unintended, big and small failures never ends.

And it’s been like this always. In every age, era and generation. Relationship between birth givers and their offsprings has always been a difficult one. Not just because it’s almost impossible like difficult to gauge another mind’s needs, especially a young mind that can’t even fully express those needs and furthermore when the growth of that being depended upon the fulfillment of those very needs you were solely responsible to fulfill. As ordinary adults who are mostly struggling with their own needs become parents failing in understanding and meeting the new person’s needs is possible and understandable. Rather failing as parents was and is inevitable and has always been an important cursor of human mind’s development and evolution.

Though most previous generations don’t admit it because parents were always ought to be revered. They were like our walking and visible Gods on earth and why not. They gave us our precious lives. So children were always supposed to be eternally indebted to their life givers and it was unimaginable for them to have any differences with the Godlike parents. This denial was a part of the previous generations’ upbringing as well as entire existence.

That made parenting in older generations seem easier and less challenging as children never acknowledged the many issues. Though what happened to those generations grown up psychology is another matter and worth considering which we will do later. But everyone thinks those times were good. Children listened, obeyed, feared, worshipped, lived in awe of their parents. Such good times they were.

And now. The world we live in now, birth givers aren’t really adored rather are questioned for their actions, choices and even their lack of them and thus parenting seems like a difficult job.

The biggest difference in parenting then and parenting now is that in the previous ages children were mostly born for the sake of reproduction. People like our great grandparents and grandparents got married and to almost complete strangers, mated because that was their duty and reproduced their species. Girl after boy or girl and then again and again. Not for any specific reasons like I want to raise a beautiful girl or a brave boy or I wish to have someone to live for. But mostly to reproduce mindlessly a brood choosing whose names might not get spared a lot of thought or effort.

Until baby boomers generation this was the norm. Get married and give birth. How much those offsprings would really expect or demand? Not much. Because they weren’t born or brought up as individuals, they were lambs in a herd who grew up to be the lame sheep which followed the rules of the family and society. Many times the lambs got sacrificed in the name of fulfilling and upholding family needs, wishes, prestige, standing in the society. The lambs obeyed and hence were the good children.

In the past two generations humans (or the sheep) stopped reproducing lambs and human offsprings started being born who could think individually, speak their minds and ask logical questions. And why not? Their birth was planned, names were chosen after months’ deliberations, genders were preferred or even selected in some cases, births and birthdays were celebrated, schools were carefully chosen, extracurricular activities given extraordinary importance, careers carefully selected and unreservedly spent on. They are born princes and princesses and unknowingly for their still somewhat sheep-ish parents the unexpected and unprecedented has happened and they are clueless how to respond and worst they are reacting without an idea of how to deal with the new reality.

And when they are not able to deal they blame the children of these new generations. They call them selfish, self centered, aggressive, assertive, impolite, rude, ill mannered, impatient, demanding, entitled, lazy, indulged and much more. Are these latest born children really all that bad and if yes why they aren’t like their humble, meek, suppressed predecessors? Why it’s so difficult to bring up kids now when they are just one or two and not half a dozen? Why despite over providing them their parents aren’t receiving the kind of reverence was expected of a little one?

There are many questions that people today wonder about. Good news is there are answers and those answers are the solutions as well. I believe, “Acknowledging a problem is always the first solution.” So this generation parents agreeing that parenting the latest generation ‘Generation Z’ is tough and help is required is the first step towards the solution. Continue reading and you shall find most of the answers.