Taking responsibility for my part of the problem makes a difference. Humility signals that I’m asking God to work with me instead of expecting Him to solve my problems for me. Which means we have a relationship. And that’s good.
Harlem responds to bomb threats
Mrs Gloria Epstein of New Rochelle, NY was quoted in a recent study, “Michael junior had just turned four. My husband Michael senior and I hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Little Micky was such a loveable baby, you know what I mean? Then he started doing crazy stuff, running about, yelling, breaking things, fighting with his sister and giving us Chutzpa. He took to writing on his walls with felt pen and every toy we gave him lasted only days before it ended up in the garbage. We took him to our therapist hoping it would be something normal like ADD and Micky could take medication and we could get back to being normal family. The doctor told us that little Micky might be suffering from a recently diagnosed condition called, B.O.Y.
We were devastated. When we decided to become parents we never dreamt in a million years that we would have to contend with something as horrific as this!”
Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein: Is Your Child a Sufferer . . . Are You?.
Or: Can you keep your child a child?
From an old column of Peggy Noonan’s – which was quoted by James Taranto in yesterday’s Best of the Web Today:
I love some of these children. Some of them have been my son’s friends and in my house since preschool–and I want to hug them when I see them. Some are so kindhearted that they bring tears to your eyes. Some of them are deep inside good and mean to do good in the world. A handful of them are brave, too, and have had a lot to put up with in their parents.
But some of them are victims of the self-esteem movement. They have a wholly unearned self-respect. No, an unearned admiration for themselves. And they’ve been given this high sense of themselves by parents and teachers who didn’t and don’t have time for them, and who make it up to them by making them conceited. I’m not sure how this will play out as they hit adulthood. What will happen to them when the world stops telling them what they have been told every day for the first quarter century of their lives, which is: You are wonderful.
Maybe it will make for a supergeneration of strong and confident young adults who think outside the box . . . and proceed through their lives with serenity and sureness. Maybe life will hit them upside the head when they’re 24 and they get fired from their first job and suddenly they’re destabilized by the shock of not being admired. Maybe it will send them reeling.
I always want to tell them: the only kind of self-respect that lasts is the kind you earn by honestly coming through and achieving. That’s the only way you’ll make a lasting good impression on yourself.
Reeling…let’s send The Current Occupant REELING into his next adventure, shall we?
