Don't Feed the Bears: How Parents Can Set Their Kids up for Failure

By Don Levin

Even the best of parents with the purest and most idealistic intentions to provide a better life for their children can set them up for failure by confusing better with easier.

So how do we provide our children with the opportunities and tools for greater success without spoiling them? How do we insure that we have positioned them for this greater standard of living without overly indulging them? No doubt it is a balancing act, and requires planning, forethought, and consistency. It also requires a long term vision, short term goals, and an incredible degree of hard work on the part of both parents working in unison to provide a stable foundation. It means not sacrificing teaching experiences when an easier choice or route presents itself. It means that from the day that youngster is born you plan on working hard, making a plan, and then working your plan as parents. It means modeling the way by living an exemplary life of courage, integrity, and character. It requires a positive attitude through which we can constantly encourage their hearts. It means establishing standards and requirements, and enforcing them. A newly planted tree can be straightened or held in place with the thinnest of wires. However, if we ignore the crooked sapling for any length of time it is often too late and too difficult to make a change when it has had a chance to grow in ways contrary to those that we desire. Children require constant nourishment to the soul, probably even more than they need to have their physical needs met by us. Remembering this is often our greatest challenge.

If you are a parent, you need to read this book.

-Chris Sorensen

Author of The Greatest Discovery

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9781449060299

Don Levin

Don Levin is the President & CEO of USA-LTC, a national insurance brokerage, and has been in the long term care insurance industry since 1999. Don is also a former practicing Attorney-at-Law, court-appointed Arbitrator, as well as a retired U.S. Army officer with 23 years of service. Don earned his Juris Doctor from The John Marshall Law School, his MPA, from the University of Oklahoma, and his BA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is also a graduate of the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College and the Defense Strategy Course, U.S. Army War College. In his spare time, Don has published thirteen other books in a wide range of genre, as well as countless articles on leadership, long term care insurance, and personal development. Don is very active with his church and within the community, and remains focused on his wife Susie, their five children, nineteen grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and two dogs aptly named Barnes & Noble. A native of Chicago, Don and the majority of the clan now resides in the Boise, Idaho and Northern Utah area. Don may be reached at [e-mail].

Book preview

Don’t Feed the Bears

How Parents Can Set Their Kids Up for Failure

Don Levin

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2009 Don Levin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/21/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-6029-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-6028-2 (sc)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Acknowledgements and Final Thoughts

About the Author

Preface 

Please Read the Signs

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Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to our national parks and wildlife refuges. They indulge themselves in the natural and pristine beauty of the great outdoors, and also view wild animals that they do not routinely encounter in the suburbia in which most of them dwell. They are greeted at the entrances to these large national parks by forest rangers and game keepers that provide strict advice and counsel on how to enjoy the park and its indigenous animals safely.

In addition to these instructions, visitors are also warned not to feed the bears. For those who may be forgetful of these rules, there are huge signs posted with both great prominence and frequency. These signs warn all the visitors NOT to feed the bears. Shoot, even the cartoons of my childhood that featured Yogi Bear and Jellystone Park were filled with these same admonitions. These signs are posted not for protection of the human visitors new to the wildlife habitat, but for the protection of the bears! They are necessary because every year hundreds of bears die after the end of the visitors’ season. They die not because of what they were fed by their human visitors, but because later after the humans have departed, these large animals are no longer in a position to fend for themselves. Sadly, most of them slowly starve to death.

So why talk about bears? What is it that makes this story germane to our topic of insuring that our children actually enjoy a better life as opposed to just an easier one? As the father of five such bears, I mean kids, and the grandfather of eight grand bears, I will maintain that the moral to the story is absolutely on point. Biblically we know that it is far better to teach a man to fish rather than to continually feed him fish. Why? Because when we impart the gift of self-reliance, we don’t merely feed them a meal or for a day, but rather, we feed them for life.

When we impart the gift of self-reliance, we don’t merely feed them a meal or for a day, but rather, we feed them for life.

With that as a premise, the question then becomes how should we impart all the necessary wisdom and desired gifts? How do we do it in such a way that the student does not resent the teacher? How do we do it so that the teacher does not want to kill the student in the process of sharing life’s lessons? How do we do it without spoiling the bear by feeding him and eliminating agency, the opportunity of experiential learning, and the internalization of proper values? When should we start to impart these life lessons? Certainly we don’t want to wait until they are ten years old to teach them how to walk; nor do we tell a very young child only once to look both ways before crossing the street or not to touch the hot stove.

For the life lessons we are talking about here, I always thought it started when the student obtained his or her first after school part-time job. This often accompanied the procurement of the treasured and exalted drivers license that provided independence and a degree of autonomy to said student of life. In our house, it also meant if you wanted to drive the car, you had to contribute the difference in the annual insurance premium that you accounted for with your [teenaged] presence. Over the years my insurance company has very sympathetically helped me to endure the addition of five such co-drivers with much welcome good student discounts which we always encouraged as additional motivation to maintain solid grades.

Aside from having to fork over some of their own hard earned dinero for the car insurance premium, what does the presence of a real job represent in terms of change to the socio-economic status enjoyed by our child? Again, perspective is reality, and hindsight is truly twenty-twenty. From the perspective of my children, the extra cash in their pocket, earned by the sweat of their brow should only enhance their standard of living. Their rationale: as loving parents, we should willingly continue to subsidize the gasoline tank, entertainment expenses, meals [consumed with more frequency away from home], cell phones, wardrobe, and other pursuits. Therein rests the first conflict. As I attempt to place myself in my children’s moccasins, I realize that they really believe that this added loot should be a way to make life easier for them, and certainly has nothing to do with assisting either the family’s overall economics or the parental units’ standard of living. To even suggest such heresy is grounds enough to send them into fits of indignation and prompt them to quote the Declaration of Independence on the topics of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Amazingly enough, I actually had one of my offspring point out to me that in terms of lifestyle, that they would come out ahead by NOT working, and by simply relying on the largesse of Mom and Dad. Naturally I pointed out that this was not an option unless they were content with walking places, and doing an awful lot of socially unacceptable brown bagging at meal time! Not to be dissuaded, this articulate, enterprising, and argumentative budding entrepreneur had a great deal more to say on the subject. In discussions he even drew parallels to the number of welfare recipients who refuse to go back to work because it is far easier to sit at home and draw a reduced amount of income without having to endure the indignity of working. It was then pointed out to me that unless I wanted to foster such an entitlement mentality, then I needed to re-think my position. Where do they learn this stuff?

Naturally my strategy dictated that this conversation be steered towards the idea of developing life skills which in turn would encourage autonomy and fiscal responsibility. Imagine a world in which children learned about fiscal responsibility and grew into adulthood that was symbolized by financial independence from their parents. Compromises were reached, and my recollection is that like a truly successful negotiation session, we both walked away from the table just a little bit unhappy.

As noted, my premise is that our children will make more prudent and wiser decisions when they have skin in the game. First and foremost, they learn to distinguish between needs and wants. In this day and age of instant everything, wouldn’t it be nice if they actually had to experience something other than instant gratification? What if this lesson fostered the learning of other life lessons such as Ben Franklin’s pay yourself first, or neither a lender nor a borrower be. Would this have an impact on the number of college students who are graduating from college and promptly filing bankruptcy so as to free themselves of the credit card debt that they have unwisely saddled themselves with in an effort to live without working, or live beyond their means while students? Thus far, none of my litter has followed this self-destructive path.

Because my children know that I was sent off to work at age 14 (with a birth certificate doctored up by my father that said I was 16) so that I could become more or less self-sufficient, they generally know when to stop arguing and to dutifully nod their head and accept the tyrannical decisions of the [benevolent] despot that they call Dad. I was allowed to continue to live at home with the expectation of three hots and a cot, or three squares and an oblong, take your choice, as well as medical and dental care. I was however expected to pay my own way for everything else. Since this was common knowledge to my children, I did not have to repeatedly reference what they have termed the raw deal that I received. What they don’t know is that while I do appreciate the fact that I don’t owe anybody anything, I do remember how unfair I thought it was that I had to sacrifice a lot of the normal fun activities in which I would otherwise have participated. Also, because of the skewed manner in which I was raised, I have had to tread softly in attempting to teach the principals of financial independence for fear of going too far in one direction or the other. We naturally contrast my raw treatment with the sweet deal that their mother received: free ride to a small private college, a new car, and a checking account that somehow replenished itself merely with a telephone call home.

This past summer, my youngest daughter decided not to come home from college following her freshman year, but rather to stay out West and to enjoy the