Issue No. 74

I firmly believe that the previous generation, the generation of our parents, had to endure a lot of hard work for little reward. When they finally had us, they wanted us to experience an easier life. This desire is what most parents want for their children. As a result, every generation aims for their children to do less work for more reward. What could go wrong, right?

Obviously, not everyone in our generation has a considerably easy life. However, I’d wager that most have easier lives than their parents did at the same age. My parents, for example, could only finish high school. They came from poor families. My grandmother, my mom's mother, couldn’t even go to school. She didn’t know how to read because she started working at the age of 8, selling vegetables. When I was in primary school, I remember my grandmother asking me to teach her how to read and write.

This parenting strategy of wanting the next generation to have an easier life might seem beneficial in hindsight, but it can be destructive in the long term if not implemented properly. The main issue is that parents who do this tend to outsource parenting at the expense of the child's self-esteem development.

For example, many children nowadays find comfort in their devices, whether a tablet or a phone, even at the early age of 5. Just look at the YouTube channels for Cocomelon and Mother Goose Club and check the views on each video.

You’ll see some videos with up to 10 million views, and some even reaching 80 million. For perspective, "Gangnam Style," a popular K-pop song played on almost every device globally, was released in 2012, which is 12 years ago at the time of this writing. It has accumulated 5.5 billion views up to now. That's a lot. Almost every adult must have listened to it. And then you hear about Pinkfong's "Baby Shark," released only 8 years ago. Do you know how many views it has? 14 billion. That’s 14 with 9 zeros. Who watches these? Not adults.

Parents outsource entertainment and play to these devices because they are busy with work. That’s understandable because, as I said, parents want an easier life for their kids. However, parents are not always right. Remember, those parents with only one child are just first-time parents figuring out how to do it. How can they know what's best for a child they started raising only a few years ago?

The problem with outsourcing parenting is that these children not only develop a dependence on these devices but also learn to seek easier paths to reward. That’s where the disconnect happens. Parents want children to receive rewards quickly and easily to make their lives easier while simultaneously sabotaging the very foundation of their self-esteem development. When these children grow older, they will seek the easier paths in life and not learn how to handle failure. They will be afraid to fail. And when they do, they will feel entitled to the reward and may resort to neurotic reactions. We see this with Gen Z’s "quiet quitting" in the workforce. They feel entitled to a very high salary with less than one year of experience. When they don’t get it, they quit and find another company, losing the chance to learn along the way. In 10 years, they may have had 10 jobs without actually advancing their careers. I’m not saying you should stay with one company for a very long time without a salary increase, but as a young adult, you need to first learn about the business world before you demand a return. In today’s world, young people want the return first before they put in the effort. Why? Because their parents taught them the easy life.

This is what I meant by parents sabotaging their child’s self-esteem. When these "iPad kids" grow up, they don’t know how to do anything. Their parents outsourced the things that matter in life. Cooking is outsourced to packed lunches that only need a microwave or food delivery. Cleaning is outsourced to maids or robot vacuum cleaners. Entertainment and play are outsourced to gaming consoles, computers, and devices. I even saw a YouTube video of kids roleplaying having parents inside Roblox with other kids.

I remember a previous coworker. She was 30 years old and still didn’t know how to cook anything but an egg and a hotdog. I asked how she could manage every day. She said she just buys food from restaurants, delivery apps, or convenience stores. Keyword, "convenience" store. Everyone wants convenience today. There’s nothing wrong with it if you don’t seek it all the time. But if you’re eating microwave food every single day, I think you should question your life choices. Are you also going to serve microwave food to your kids when you become a parent? She asked me why the guys she meets on dating apps don’t want anything serious with her. I told her that in a relationship, you take care of each other. It’s a partnership. If you don’t know how to cook and take care of yourself, what do you think that signals to the other person? It signals that you will also not be capable of taking care of his needs. You must first learn to care of and love yourself before you do that to other people. We cannot provide what we do not have in the first place. She was silent.

I am fortunate that even though my parents wanted me to have a better life, they did not steal the lessons of life from me. They let me explore the world, fail, get hurt, and recover by myself. My grandmother, for example, would have me and my brother clean the entire house before we could watch TV. She would wash our clothes, but we had to iron them before putting them away. By age 10, we learned how to cook. By age 15, we learned to sew, use carpentry tools, garden, raise animals, treat our wounds from rough play, confront our bullies, and build our own toys using paper, scrap metals, and wires. When I finished building my own toy, successfully cross-pollinated two plants in our garden, or fixed my trousers with my not-so-perfect sewing skills, all I could say was, "I did that."

Could our parents do those things for us? Couldn't they just buy us toys? Absolutely. We had a lot of toys too. But those toys came after the hard work we had to do. They were earned. That’s how my brother and I developed our self-esteem. By learning to do things ourselves, we learned that we could solve any problem by ourselves whenever possible. Of course, at times, we also needed the assistance of other people, but what our childhood taught me is that I can learn to do it by myself.

That has been my mindset ever since. People are often surprised by my many hobbies or projects. That’s where I trace it back to. I developed self-esteem because I had the freedom to explore it. Self-esteem, and confidence for that matter, are not developed by having abundant resources. They are developed through exploration and failure. When you try something and fail, then try again and get a better result, that's when you develop the sense that you are capable of incremental change toward a specific goal. Did you develop confidence before doing it? No. You developed it along the way.

Most people today don’t think this way. They think confidence comes before action. How can you be confident about something you haven’t tried before? Can an airplane pilot be confident in flying a plane before learning how to fly one? Absolutely, but you wouldn’t want that pilot to fly your plane, would you? Experience comes first before confidence develops.

In the future, when you become a parent yourself, don’t sabotage your child’s development. Let them learn the realities of the world—both the difficult and the easy. Provide them with the tools they need but let them explore them on their own. Be there for them when they need assistance but encourage them to push beyond their limits until they realize they can do more. I’m not a parent yet, but I have learned from observing and hearing stories of parenthood that an easy life usually leads to a hard one.

Until next week,