Book #60: The Me, Me, Me Epidemic by Amy McCready

I bought this book around my birthday last year because I am of course interested in the idea of raising independent kids. I loathe the image of helicopter parenting and try really hard to examine my parenting style to make sure I don't do that (although it's hard not to helicopter when your kids are toddlers). This book goes through all sorts of different tactics you can use to help your children not become entitled or assuming that they should be handed things without doing any work, or praised for everything they do. It talked about having them do chores, experience consequences, having reasonable expectations for them, and dealing with allowance and teaching them life skills. All in all, it really is a good book with great resources. I did kind of feel like a lot of the things she talked about were a big DUH, like "You don't have to give in to your toddler or teenager when they're throwing a fit about something they want" and "Don't rescue them when they make stupid mistakes." I mean, they seem obvious to me now, but I am SURE that once my kids get older and head off to school and have a lot more opportunities for making mistakes it will be harder for me to remember those principles. I WANT to do that though. And I do think the techniques that McCready writes about in these chapters will be useful. I feel like I do already use a lot of them either from common sense or from already knowing about them--when you live in a big family environment and have the big family mindset, you automatically don't cater to kids as much as some other people might, I guess.

Several of the things that stood out to me in the book as useful:
-a list of tasks and jobs that kids should be allowed to learn and work on at different ages
-how to set up appropriate consequences for actions (whether natural consequences or ones that you develop)
-the whole chapter on allowance seemed awesome and I am going to have Tommy read it because we have been debating about what to do for Dane with allowance lately
-teaching kids how to hold conversations and be respectful of others while talking to them

The thing that struck me a lot as I was reading it is that I was and am very entitled. My parents were great at having us work and not giving us everything but I DEFINITELY was pretty entitled and had the idea that everything should work out. I had a lot of shockers when I was in college (like oh yeah, I don't know how to do a lot of things, and I'm not great at managing money, etc.), so it shows that nothing will teach you like experience. No matter how well you do, kids will probably have a lot of things to still work out once they leave home. So that's a good thing to keep in mind--nobody is going to be a fully functioning adult the minute they leave for college. But it's definitely better to get them on the right track using these sorts of tactics.

I didn't LOVE this book because so much of it seemed a little too obvious to me, but I do think it is one I should re-visit every few years to get these specific ideas. I'm glad I bought it and we will have a copy of it.