Parenting Tips to Help Your Children Survive Modern Life

'I Want It All — And I Want It Now!

Unless you were rich, chances are you didn't get everything you wanted as you grew up. You had to make choices about what you really wanted, and you didn't always get that.

You probably had to wait — for a birthday or Christmas, or until you'd saved up enough of your own money for what you wanted.

Credit cards, parents who can't or won't say 'No', relentless advertising, peer pressure, and a society that encourages materialism and instant gratification all make children and young people believe they need everything now or life isn't worth living. This isn't a good value set to grow up with because life isn't like that. Life doesn't owe anyone a living.

If your children grow up expecting they'll get everything they want, then sooner or later they're going to be let down. And it won't be by parents (who they think they can wrap round their little fingers), but by someone who isn't impressed with their attitude and who doesn't have to put up with it. It could be a hard lesson to learn by then.

It may be a challenge, but it's much easier to instill values that will help your children survive modern life while they're young. They may not like you for it at the time, but when they're older they will appreciate what you did.

Here are some tips:

It isn't good for anyone to get everything they want. Consider the child who wants dance,   swimming, and riding lessons. Is it reasonable to have all three? What pressure does this put on you as parents, financially, emotionally and time-wise? What happens when the next child demands their 'rights' and it's a different set of interests that mean more time and more money. You quickly become slaves to your children.

Then after just a few weeks or months the interest goes and something else becomes the 'must have'. All that time, effort and expense wasted.

Teach your children how to identify preferences, and make choices. Let them do one key activity, or at most two. If the activities are expensive ones, work out how they can make a contribution as a 'payback' — doing the dishes in return for riding or swimming lessons for example.

And don't involve them in activities as some sort of 'compensation' for the fact that you didn't get to do these things as a child. Your child is an individual with her own life; she can't — and shouldn't — be expected to provide you with second-hand access to the experiences you missed out on, unless she shows a genuine interest in them for herself.

Modern western society is often described as having a blame culture, which basically means that if something goes wrong, you find someone else to blame rather than recognize that it might actually be your fault. Examples are everywhere and have given rise to a whole new industry of lawyers whose sole purpose in life is to get compensation for 'victims' — suing the local council because someone didn't look where they were going and tripped off a curb, for example.

With children this can mean parents who question a school that wishes to punish a pupil for rule breaking, and I've even read about a parent who wanted to sue a choir leader because his daughter wasn't chosen to be the main singer, despite her not having the best voice!

What's going on here? Parents are making their children believe that they should get what they want whether they deserve it or not, and society is encouraging people to forget about personal responsibility because if something goes wrong somebody can always be found as a fall guy. But then everyone suffers — local taxes go up to cover contingency funds for compensation; schools stop letting children do perfectly normal activities in case they hurt themselves and the parents sue...

And what a Catch 22 you can get into: a school won't let children into the playground in summer without sunscreen (sensible); parents need to supply the sunscreen and also (for younger children) give permission for the teacher or other worker to apply it; a parent decides that 'no teacher is laying a finger on MY child' and refuses permission. The child sits forlornly in the classroom, watching all his classmates enjoying themselves in the sun, and not understanding why his parents won't let him play as well.

Now I'm not suggesting that there aren't times where the council doesn't fail in their responsibilities, and no-one would condone their child receiving physical punishment, but things have gotten totally out of context, and the damage this is doing to the values that children are learning today will take a long time to correct.

Make sure your children grow up understanding that life is all about making choices and taking responsibility for themselves, and give them the skills to do this successfully.

The world is a different place from when you were growing up, even if you're only in your 20's or 30's. The pace of modern life, and particularly the growth of consumerism and the 'me' culture, get faster all the time.

Children, particularly teenagers, feel the need to belong to the tribe, which means having the same clothes and accessories as their friends, with everyone usually trying to catch up with the kid whose parents are foolish enough to buy them expensive designer clothes and the latest cell phones.

It's really difficult to be different in this system, especially when you are punished for being so, either by ridicule or ostracism, or worse.

We all grew up with trends, and most of us tried to follow them and fit in with the crowd (the ones who didn't were always classified as 'weird'). My parents could never afford the most expensive or most sought after item, and I had to make do with something similar. My peers never made me feel like a second class citizen, a poor kid.

Not so now when, amongst otherwise sensible adults, there are waiting lists for expensive handbags, and many people seem to think the world will end if they don't buy the latest designer fashions every season, even if they don't suit their coloring or figure. So it's hardly surprising that so many young people are developing similar materialist attitudes.

Remember the pressure that comes at Christmas as manufacturers fall over themselves to get maximum media exposure for their products? Remember the queues of people waiting all night to get the latest electronic gizmo or Harry Potter book, because if you haven't read it within 12 hours of publication you just aren't 'in'?

Call that a life? It's a treadmill! And it inevitably leads to disappointment, especially when your child isn't one of the chosen few.

But look at it from another angle: the child who does get everything, whose parents lavish money on them at any whim don't grow up with a good set of values. The same applies to children who experience fame and fortune before they are mature enough to cope with it, and without the support mechanisms they need to survive. Look at Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson...

They believed they had it all (and they did, financially at least). But what sort of a life has it led to? What sort of values do these 'celebrities' espouse? What sort of impression do they give to young people growing up today?

Then think about Warren Buffet, one of the world's richest men. When his children needed money to buy a house, he gave them a loan. Not a gift — a loan. Think about business men and women who bring their children into their company — not at management level, but at the bottom, learning the basic jobs, earning the standard wage for the job they're doing, and working their way up to greater responsibility and rewards.

These people could have chosen to give their children everything they asked for, to lavish money on them, but they knew this wasn't the way to give them a good start in life. Sure, the children may have felt aggrieved when told to pay back a loan or report to the factory foreman on Monday morning, but they learned valuable lessons by doing so.

Too much on demand, with no responsibility attached, is very bad for anyone. It's hard for your child to be different, to feel they don't fit onto the tribal group. To survive they need the self esteem and confidence to deal with peer pressure, and this is something you CAN give them. It doesn't cost money, it costs time, energy, patience and love.

The real world isn't populated by people giving you Facebook style virtual hugs and presents. It's a place where you have to give, usually before you can expect to take. This is especially true in the workplace.

Young people leaving education these days often think they can walk straight into an interesting, well paid job when it's far more likely they'll be expected to start somewhere closer to the bottom, learning basic but essential tasks and earning far less than they want to. Unless they learn to accept this they will find it difficult to deal with, which could lead to them being dissatisfied with everything within their skill and experience level.

It doesn't mean they will stay at the bottom, but much like the children of wealthy business owners, they should expect to prove their ability and their worth to an employer. Even the youngest internet millionaires put in an awful lot of hours getting the basics in place, doing the boring stuff, before they made it big.

And the boring stuff often includes the important building blocks for success, so if you don't give it the attention it needs, the chances of big money are that much less. In fact learning ways to make the boring stuff quicker and easier to do (but with just as much attention to detail and quality) can be a good way to success!

Encourage your child to get a part-time or holiday job so they get some real experience of what it's going to be like in the working environment. If they can't find one, set up a system where they do chores in the house and garden in return for an allowance. But make it real: there need to be standards and expectations, and if these aren't met, they don't get paid. There's no point in giving them an easy experience for what isn't always an easy world.

Life is not a bowl of cherries, or if it is there are nasty, sour ones in amongst the plump, sweet ones, and you don;'t always get to see which one you're picking.

Life will — and should have disappointments. Failures and disappointments are the things that make us strong, that give us much of our character and ability to bounce back in the worst of situations. Read the biographies of most successful people and you'll find there are a string of failures in the background. Walt Disney went bankrupt several times before he achieved success with Disneyland.

What matters is that these people didn't give up when they failed. They took a step back then started off again.

The same applies to rejection. Colonel Sanders was rejected over 1000 tines before he got someone to believe in his fried chicken recipe. George Lucas took 4 years to find someone willing to back his Start Wars script. They didn't give up, they kept looking for someone else to approach, confident that one day they would get a 'yes'.

Many educators have moved away from the idea of winning or losing, of success or failure, by discouraging competitive sports or making sure everyone gets a 'prize'. In the film Love Actually, a child gleefully tells her mother she is First Lobster in the school nativity play. Mother is surprised to learn that, not only were shellfish present at the birth of Jesus, but there was more than one lobster...

If your child grows up with the impression that they should always be automatically included in things without having to show their worth, or that they should always succeed, they will have a very poor start in life. Better that they should learn that you win some, you lose some. Then they can decide what is important for them to win, and focus their attention on making it happen.

Most of the suggestions here don't involve money. A child needs to develop a strong self image, with the confidence and motivation to identify what they want from life and go after it.

It's all too easy to use money as a comforter, especially when things don't go right, but your child will benefit far more from your time, patience, support, understanding and unconditional love than from your money.