Pro-Family Psychologist Says Permissive Parents Put Kids At Risk
by Mary Rettig
August 15, 2005
(AgapePress) - Focus on the Family vice president and psychologist in residence Dr. Bill Maier says a major problem affecting young people in contemporary society starts right at home. He contends that "pushover parents" are one of the most detrimental influences on American kids today. According to Dr. Maier, pushover parents are those moms and dads who indulge their children or say they are allowing them to "find their own right path," rather than disciplining them and teaching them moral principles and scriptural truths. Ignorance is one reason for the phenomenon, he says, but other explanations abound, including guilt.
"You have situations where you have two-parent working families -- parents working long hours, their kids in daycare, and they have no time for their children," the pro-family psychologist says. Because of that, he explains, these parents have "a limited number of minutes each week that they're spending with their kids, and in those minutes, they can't say no."
And very often these overly busy mothers and fathers do not want to say no, Maier asserts, because they feel guilty about the time they are not giving to their kids. So instead, he says, "they give them possessions to substitute for their time."
But another reason for pushover parents, the Focus on the Family vice president says, is that in some cases the parents themselves have never been taught -- or at least do not believe in -- moral absolutes. Such parents, he notes, "are ruled by this postmodern philosophy that says, 'Who am I to tell my child what they should do or what they should think or what they should believe? They need to find their own values.'"
Because of many mothers' and fathers' own lack of moral grounding or their relativistic approach to morality, Maier says, "there are many bad parenting philosophies out there, [such as] what's often referred to as child-centered parenting." That approach, he points out, "is based on humanism and postmodernism," and many parents who employ it do so because they are afraid of their children not liking them.
What these pushover parents fail to realize, Maier says, is that they are setting into motion a destructive cycle in their children's lives. He warns that parental unwillingness to set boundaries, if not corrected, will lead to out of control kids who grow up to be selfish, immature adults.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
