Home  Blog by Parents View by Category Parenting A crucial lesson from Paris Hilton's mother
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A crucial lesson from Paris Hilton's mother |
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Written by Abel Cheng
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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I admit I make the same mistake as Paris Hilton's mother did.
One day, when my daughter came home from her kindergarten, she told me she was hit by her classmate. You can’t blame me, as a natural respond, I was angry and I asked all the questions I could ever think of to find out more about the incident.
Who the culprit was? What’s his name? Was it serious? Did it cause bodily injuries?
And the mother load: Why on earth would someone do something like that to cause pain to my lovely daughter?
Guess what, my drilling drew nothing but silence from my daughter. And something dawned on me as an afterthought. I’ll tell you in a moment.
But before that, can you see what happened here? You can’t see. Let me tell you.
What I did was I only pointed the finger at the person who hit my daughter. I already made the judgment that my daughter is innocent.
I am not saying my daughter is at fault but we as parents always assume that our child is the victim before getting to the bottom of an incident.
In a similar account, this was what happened to Paris Hilton’s mother when a judge sentenced Paris Hilton to 45 days in county jail last Friday for violating her probation.
 This was the respond from her mother, Kathy Hilton, when a reporter asked what she thought of the judge's decision:
"What do you think? This is pathetic and disgusting, a waste of taxpayer money with all this nonsense. This is a joke."
Kathy said this because it’s only natural for a mother to do everything that she could to protect her daughter – even though we know Paris has violated the law.
It was an “expected” answer. In all fairness, which mother would say that her child is wrong?
But what I realize now is that that is not always the right thing to do. Overly protecting a child would bring more harm than good to him (I know it’s not easy to do even for me).
Instead, what we should do, in our quest to protect our children from outside harm, is we must leave some space for them to grow - through personal experience.
As we all know personal experience is the best teacher. Let our children grow by allowing them have the chance to go through what they need to go through. Don’t rob of the opportunity for them to wise up by trying to protect them... or worse still you go through for them.
By encouraging our children to face a problem themselves, they would be able to tell convincingly what is good and what is bad. It’s better than a thousand times of lecture from a parent. The experience itself (including bad) is priceless and it helps them move forward in life more confidently.
And taking responsibility of one's own action is the key to succeed in life.
You may ask aren’t parents supposed to do something when our kids run into trouble? How can we just stand there and do nothing?
It’s a fair question. We parents only step in when our child raises a red flag and needs our help. Yes, we only interfere when requested. Of course, you have to educate them to approach you for help when things really get out of hand.
With that said, I am very positive that Paris Hilton will be able to survive in jail and come out as a wiser person if she’s the one who goes to jail, not her mom.
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