Children without knowing failure

Students of Gwangmyeong Elementary School make heart shapes with their arms, expressing their love for their parents in celebration of Parents' Day on May 8 at a traditional market in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province.
/ Korea Times

‘Overprotective parents can lower psychological resilience of young people'

By Park Jin-hai, Yoon Sung-won

Lee Kyung-jun, a third-grader at a pricy alternative school, is a dear boy only to his parents. The chubby child, who has a problem with anger control, goes wild whenever his demands are denied by either his teachers or friends.

Recently, when his friends said that there was no space for him in the back seat of his friend's mom's wagon, he lost his temper. This time, he brought out a cutter knife he picked up in the woods and made strips of scratch marks on the vehicle's door.

"I went speechless over what the child did. It is one thing for a child to get angry and express his feelings with words. But a child actually carrying out a violent act in real life is quite another," said the mother of the damaged wagon.

"What was more surprising than the child's act was his mother's reaction, though," she added. The mother did not apologize for her son's behavior, but instead blamed the other children for blocking the boy's entry into the vehicle and wondered aloud how hurt his son must have been to respond in such an extreme way."

The "little emperor" syndrome ― a reference to a brigade of highly pampered and spoiled children triggered by the China's one child policy ― is also seen here as the age of women giving birth gets higher and the birthrate hits new lows.

A jobseeker looks at a bulletin board plastered with job openings in this file photo. / Korea Times

Those children, who never experience failure in their young lives, get a rude awakening when they grow into their 20s and find as they look for work that the world does not revolve around them. They find the fierce competition in the job market even more difficult and daunting.

Park, 29, is one of many longtime jobseekers who confessed that failure to find a job gave him an opportunity to sincerely look back at how he has lived his own life, probably for the first time.

"It has been five years since I started to seek a job. Looking back, I was full of so-called ‘unwarranted self-pride' and arrogance," Park said. "I think I believed I could achieve anything I meant to get once I wanted it, but I didn't imagine that getting a job could be more difficult than any other competitions or trials I have faced in my life."

Park said it was when he realized there was no major ordeal in his life; his parents both had enough income, he could get not-so-bad school records in his teenage years and he could even serve his military obligation in a relatively favorable environment where he was allowed to have some privacy without harassment from his seniors.

"But as I had to see hundreds of companies eliminating me from recruiting in the document-examination stage, I felt so frustrated that I came to wonder how many wrong choices I made and if I still have time to amend them," he said.

After he entered college, he studied his major, spending time on club activities and travel rather than for deliberating about his future career or acquiring skill-qualification certificates because he had dreamed of doing such things since he was younger, Park said.

"Some may blame the country for being incapable of addressing the youth unemployment issue. But I don't want to because now I think I was naive and lacked a sense of reality," he said.

Seong Jin-suk, 39, has never had a proper job and lives with her family in Seoul. She graduated a well-known university in Seoul with good grades. She said that her father was the "best" father of all, deciding the smallest things for her, from where to dine to which university to go and which major to study.

While attending university, she received allowances as well as rent from her parents. When she applied for jobs a couple of times and failed to land then, she concluded that she not the kind of person to have a job.

"Instead, I decided to spend less. I would go to a restaurant and play piano for some time and get some gifts in exchange from the owner," she said.

Kim Ju-hee, a child psychology professor at Sookmyung University, says that overprotective parents usually lower the psychological resilience of their children, which may trigger many social problems.

She said psychological resilience is like an "emotional spring" that brings a person brings back to normal after he or she experience hardships.

"Those children, who are used to being at the center of the attention, tend to easily stressed out and fall into despair when their demands are denied," she said.

"It churns out youths who give up job-seeking activities and become ‘cocoon' children, living with their parents under their protection. In worst cases, they cannot withstand the reality and commit suicide," Kim said.

"The escalating youth suicide rate shows that they cannot cope with stressful situations. Thus, as simple an incident as a lower-than-expected grade can actually trigger a child to take his own life," she added.

The youth unemployment rate, which stood at 8 percent last year, rose to 10.9 percent in February, the highest figure in the last 14 years. The rate for the 25-29 age bracket, consisting mostly of college graduates, was 9.8 percent, up from 8 percent a year earlier, according to a data from Statistics Korea.

Furthermore, government research showed that the number of economically inactive youths exceeded 5.4 million as of late last year, with the youth employment rate standing at 39.7 percent, down from 43.4 percent in 2000. It was more than 10 percentage points lower than the OECD average of 50.9 percent.

Kim said parents who do everything can to protect and provide for their children does more harm than good. "Too many parents today are overly engaged in their children's lives. They make an environment that their offspring can feel triumphant in at all times, believing that it will boost their children's confidence. But, in reality it deprives them of the opportunity to fail and rise above those failures."

She said that recently the RQ, the resilience quotient, has shed new light on educators and parents.

"Although parenting cannot be held single-handedly responsible for the emotionally fragile and economically inactive youth population, it definitely deserves a lot of the blame for the current social phenomenon," she added.

"Belated may it be, it is fortunate that more people recognize that good parents are ones who give emotional support with patience, rather than jumping directly into the problems their children face," she said.