Have you ever noticed that some children don’t ever want to grow up and others can’t wait to?  In my observation,  the pattern that emerges is children who are overly doted upon in ways the please them are often the children who don’t want to grow up.  This may look OK or not too harmful at first.  After all, look at what a good mommy or daddy is making sure Jack and/or Jill’s needs are met.

The economy benefits when Daddy, Auntie, Grandma, or whoever spend to little Johnny’s heart is content.  The problem is that apparent satisfaction that Johnny displays is far from content and usually dissipates into another tirade for something else that he wants.

Another difficulty is Mommy, Uncle, Grandpa, or whoever isn’t meeting Jack or Jill’s needs at all.  They are meeting their own needs. Isn’t this the greatest temptation of parenting, to try to fix or get what we didn’t in our lives through our children’s?  Whoa now,  that’s subconsciously selfish and misguided.  If we were going to stoop to name calling we’d yell parentification!

But that’s name calling.  And that’s mean.  Look we all suffered from some sort of disappointment, failure,difficulty or life growing up.  In no way do I want to discount any pain you experienced growing up.  That would express indifference which is just as wrong as name calling.

What I’m after is we need to stop justifying the wrong approach most of us are taking to get our needs met.  No, it’s not providing us the happy heart that we think it is.  It’s insanity according to Albert Einstein.

Rather what I’m advocating is that you examine your heart. The motivation behind what powers an individual varies. It is as different as the individual him/herself. To complicate this, It’s a  hard knock life! Because of it we may have ourselves deceived into thinking that we’re doing something for someone’s good when we’ve really deceived ourselves.  Now that we have the diagnosis of what’s wrong, let’s get the right prognosis!