{"id":7596,"date":"2014-04-22T07:04:56","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T05:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/responsive.jozikids.co.za\/zaparents\/?p=7596"},"modified":"2022-06-22T12:52:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T10:52:24","slug":"new-age-narcissism-challenging-parenting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/parenting\/teaching-resilience\/new-age-narcissism-challenging-parenting\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we raising self-obsessed children?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think that many of us parents are focussed on giving our kids the best that we can afford and making them confident and independent, teaching them to always seek the best for themselves… but how do we know that we’re not raising our kids to be so self-involved and narcissistic that they forget about other people’s feelings and lives and just carry on thinking that the world revolves around them well past toddlerhood?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t profess to be a perfect parent; in fact the whole point of this piece is to express my fears of raising self-obsessed, disrespectful children. However, I do think that hubby and I try our best to teach our children the value of what they have and the importance of respect. Will that stop them from always focusing on number one when they reach adulthood? I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re raising our children in a society so different from the one we grew up in. Millions of people are part of online communities and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter that encourage self-promotion, aka showing off. \u00a0Taking selfies (photos of yourself) and posting them online are so popular that it was literally Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2013!<\/p>\n

Of course, one can argue that people have always been self-serving\u2026even if they are discreet about it. Even though you won\u2019t admit it, whenever you make a choice, one deciding factor is how it will benefit you or effect you. Does this make us bad or narcissistic? Maybe not so much, but I think that we are grooming our children, voluntarily or not, to live their lives based on what other people think of them and to prove to everyone else that they are better looking, smarter and more spectacular than anyone else.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a psychologist but I do think that I want confident children, but they should not be over-confident to the extent that they can\u2019t accept criticism. I want them to handle failure with grace but I don\u2019t want to raise them thinking that they are failures. And most importantly, I want them to love who they are without the need to prove their worth to anyone else or to feel the desire to change for other people.<\/p>\n

This article was originally written for Jozikids by Sholain Govender- Bateman <\/em>in 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n

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