Some parents are a child’s most crippling learning impediment
Some of you aren’t going to like this. Here we go… I have been a professional martial arts instructor for over 50 years. In that capacity, I have experienced a lot of things. One of the most consistent and harmful things that I have experienced, and still experience, are well-intentioned parents with bad parenting habits.
The interesting thing is that bad habit parents are the ones that scream the loudest with righteous indignation when you bring a shortcoming to their attention. They are the ones who demand that management take steps to punish an instructor for sighting a flaw in their behavior that makes it impossible for him or her to do their job while at the same time bad mouthing to anyone that will listen how the program doesn’t work because of bad instructing or “to much work for them to do”.
I once had a parent corral me and my instructors after a class at a public school that we were teaching at in D.C. and ask me “Who the hell do we think that we are demanding to see her child’s report card when she gets it. You are not her parents”.
Another time at a daycare center, where I was teaching a school-age kid when I asked a child why her daily “To-do List” was not signed by her parent the child said, “My mom said that “she doesn’t have time for this foolishness”.
Those are two of the more blatant, and unusual, sabotage enactments perpetrated by a couple of parents. The more subtle, common, ongoing ones include (I swear I get some of these every session): Hearing me tell a child to say “yes sir or ma’am” at home and not having the child do it; signing the “to-do list” in the waiting area instead of at home on completion of the task; helping a child get a badge by fabricating and saying that a child is doing something when he or she is not; leaving a child to figure out their class card by themselves; not helping a child to understand the meaning of words in the student pledge and live up to them; constantly bringing a child to class late; tying a child’s belts wrong and sending them to class; not making sure that a child’s uniform is on right, and not making sure that badges are put on a child’s uniform expeditiously.
Here’s the Paradox: Every one of those things hurts a child’s self-esteem, discipline, attention to detail, sense of value, pride in self and what they are doing, and more! (The very benefits that parents sign their child up for.)
Every straight-thinking parent has heard and agrees with this axiom, “Children are not born racist, they are taught to be racist.” Here is an axiom that, probably, no one has ever considered, “children are not born predisposed to have bad grades, have bad social and work habits, or grow up never able to realize the benefits that success can bring, they are trained to fail. Trained by whom? Their parents.
In the society that we have created the wealthiest amongst us understand this. They know that they either do not have the time or patience to instill in their child the skills that will ensure that they continue to carry on a legacy of success so what do a lot of parents do? They send their child to top-notch sleep-away schools or a military school where success skills like discipline, attention to detail, perseverance, and academic excellence are drummed into them from sunup to sundown unadulterated by flawed parenting. On the other side of the coin privileged few parents can send their child to a martial arts class and get the same results for their child as the super-rich, but most must learn to aid in the process.
I hope that this article leads to the kind of self-reflection that will end in aiding in the development of what is best for the child.
May you have everything that you want and want everything that you have.