BROADCASTS.com

b"With Allyson Hawkins Ward, Chief Executive NCAR at IBM, Author of Please Don't Come Home: (Except for a Visit); A Field Guide to Creating Independent Adults
It\\u2019s perfectly fine to hover over your child\\u2019s cradle, but it\\u2019s not okay when they\\u2019re eligible to vote and taking their LSATs.
Allyson Hawkins Ward's new book, Please Don't Come Home: (Except for a Visit); A Field Guide to Creating Independent Adults, is a must-read for parents who want to raise independent and emotionally healthy children.
As an executive coach, Allyson became aware of a problem when many of her coaching sessions designed to help clients with their careers ended up focusing on their high school or college-aged children unable to cope with life without being dependent on their parents, more in the emotional sense than the financial.
Helicopter parents\\u2014listen up!\\xa0
An overly-protective brand of parenting has produced a generation of kids ill-equipped to move out of the shadow of parents who have, for all of their lives, monitored, sheltered, and directed every aspect of their existence. Moving out of the house, going to college, getting a job\\u2014it\\u2019s scary out there!
Parenting guide for baby boomers.
The generation of baby boomers is largely responsible for creating this atmosphere of uber-parenting, somewhat with good reason. Stranger-danger never existed in the way it has since the wave of child abductions and the publicity it stirred up came into our culture back in, let\\u2019s say, the 80s and after. Young children were taught to mistrust, to use passwords, and to keep in constant communication with their parents\\u2014and that\\u2019s become so easy to do, often to the extreme with tweets, texts, and all the myriad social media sites at everyone\\u2019s fingertips.
Hooked on praise
Allyson talks about the phenomenon of over-praising and over-rewarding our children to the degree that they can\\u2019t accept losing or not bringing home a trophy for merely showing up at the soccer field. Like being dependent on drugs, they can\\u2019t move forward in school or ultimately in their careers without being lauded at every juncture. They need that fix!\\xa0 \\u201cYou're really, really setting them up for some very difficult times,\\u201d says Allyson, \\u201cif you're not there to maintain that level of praise.\\xa0 Of course, that doesn't happen in the real world.\\u201d\\xa0 Furthermore, she says, \\u201cShowing up is not an achievement.\\u201d

To help parents cope and hopefully correct the effects of helicopter parenting, Allyson\\u2019s book contains a 4-step strategy called GRIT.\\xa0 She explains that GRIT stands for hard work and is a game plan to get our kids ready for life on their own, to show them how to be resourceful, how to advocate for themselves, and how to have the resilience to brush off the inevitable failures.
The value of failure
Allyson makes the very strong point in her book that it is better to praise for effort, rather than for intelligence, citing a study which showed that students praised for hard work were able to take on new challenges and break new ground, whereas those praised for intelligence took the easier path by repeating the same patterns, just to avoid looking bad and losing face. The goal is to continue the journey by growing and improving along the way.
Allowing our children to fail and instilling within them a resilience and resourcefulness which pulls them through those failures is a gift of ..."