Parents who point out to their children an enormous amount of school activities, hours dedicated to homework that they swallow halfway through the afternoon, the need to make their children stand out in some of the hobbies we push them into?Childhood has its own crises and complications, but it seems that from adulthood, too, grains of sand are being deposited to make that carefree and seemingly unproductive way of life come to an early end.

The aim seems to be to form a generation of “elite children” , competent and equipped with a lot of skills and competences that are supposed to make their lives easier.

But this trend has very negative psychological consequences.

Checking up on childhood

Some people, when they go through existential crises, turn their gaze to the way children live life. It is not surprising; the creativity, the spontaneity with which they discover the simplest and most honest ways of acting at each moment, the gaze free of prejudice… seem to be a characteristic that we enjoy during the first years.

What happens with this childish spirit is, to some extent, a mystery. It cannot be firmly and absolutely certain what it is that makes this childish flame that once was in us gradually go out. However, in certain aspects it is not difficult to imagine possible reasons that explain what it is that kills people’s childhood , or that this abandonment of our way of life at a forced pace. It is not a biological process, but a learned and cultural one: the competitive spirit and the stress it generates.

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We are creating children with curriculum

It is clear that taking responsibility and starting in the very long term means that the lifestyle (and behaviour) of children cannot remain unchanged during the transition to adulthood. However, recently something is happening that did not happen before and that makes children less and less children at an increasingly younger age: the competitive spirit has entered the lives of the little ones .

It has its logic, though it is a perverse logic. In an increasingly individualistic society where social problems are disguised as individual problems, the same kind of messages are always repeated: “get a life”, “be the best” or even “if you were born poor it’s not your fault, but if you died poor it is”. There is a paradox that, in a world in which the place and family in which you are born are the variables that best predict the health and economic status you are going to have in adulthood, all the pressure falls on individual people . Also on the younger ones.

And individuals are forced to compete. How can happiness be achieved? By being competitive, as if we were companies, to reach middle age with a certain socioeconomic status. When should we start competing? As soon as possible.

The way to create children with a curriculum , prepared for the law of the jungle that will govern their adult life, has already been paved. And, if it is not stopped, it can mean the death of the possibility of enjoying childhood to the full.

Parents who overreach

Children who end up adapting to the lifestyle imposed on them by their parents are beginning to show signs of stress, and even have anxiety crises. Homework and extracurricular activity obligations introduce into children’s lives tensions endemic to the adult world, and in many cases they are difficult to justify without a stretch of the imagination about what might happen in the future.

This is relatively new and not always easy to detect, as some parents and guardians confuse the fact that children seem to reach the demanding targets set for them with an indicator of their state of health and well-being. Thus, school children between 5 and 12 years old may be performing reasonably well in tasks such as learning to play an instrument or mastering a second language, but in the long run they will suffer stress if the pressure is too high .

The symptoms of this stress, not always being very evident and not appearing serious, can be mistaken for a normal part of the process of forming competitive children. But the truth is that their quality of life will be compromised, and so will their tendency not to judge every experience according to its usefulness.

The way they enjoy their childhood will be overshadowed by aspirations imposed by their parents and which, in reality, are only sustained by what adults interpret as “signs of a successful life”. They are not so much concerned with the welfare of their children as with imposing on them an image of the ideal person, to whom all doors will be open.

Fear of failure

But the pressure and pushing children towards what is understood as success is only part of the story. The other is the rejection of what seems to serve no purpose , which brings no clear benefit, regardless of whether it is enjoyable or not. Investing time in being a child seems to be valued only as time to rest, relax and gather strength to return to what really matters: the preparation to enter the competitive world, the market of people.

Similarly, not being the best at something is perceived as a failure that should be hidden by devoting time and effort to other things in which he or she stands out more, at best, or by blaming the child in question for “not wanting to win”. The consequences of this are clearly negative: the activity is underestimated as a goal in itself and only the result is valued in comparison to the others .

Showing “weakness” in sports or in school performance is considered a reason for embarrassment, because it is interpreted as a symptom of possible failures that could be experienced in adulthood. This causes self-esteem to suffer, stress levels to skyrocket, and the child to feel responsible for not reaching goals that others have set for him or her.

Conquering Childhood Again

Even adults may be able to rescue for themselves many of the values and habits of childhood, so children have an even easier time enjoying it.

In order to contribute to this, parents and caregivers only have to adopt another attitude and embrace a type of priorities that do not have competitiveness as a reference . This process involves admitting that, although we adults seem to be more prepared than anyone else when it comes to living life, children are the true specialists in their way of experiencing childhood. Redundancy is worthwhile.