We cannot protect our children from life. Therefore, it is essential to prepare them for it. Feeling sorry for children is one of the most seriously damaging attitudes we can have. It so greatly demonstrates to them and to ourselves that we lack faith in them and their ability to cope with adversities.
Interpretation
We must teach children to handle life's challenges instead of shielding them from difficulties.
Rudolf Dreikurs emphasizes the importance of preparing children for the realities of life rather than overly protecting them. He argues that feeling sorry for children can harm their development, as it implies a lack of belief in their capacity to face and overcome challenges. By equipping them with the skills to manage life's adversities, we instill confidence and resilience in their character.
In practice
In a parenting seminar discussing childhood development.
When a child makes a mistake or fails to accomplish a certain goal, we must avoid any word or action which indicates that we consider him a failure. 'Too bad that didn't work.' 'I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.' We need to separate the deed from the doer.
I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.
College is something you complete. Life is something you experience. So don't worry about your grade, or the results or success. Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency.
Above all, those to whom the care of young minds has been entrusted should see to it that they respect both the smallest and largest animals as beings which, like people, have been summoned to the joy of life.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.
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