Sometimes I hear stories out of the parenting trenches that make me shake my head. I get so perturbed  every time I hear about parents acting out against their kids with uber extreme behaviors, that I just want to pass out a memo or something that says: “Hey, parent…you really don’t HAVE to act that way. Surprise, you gotta choice.”

I’m not talking about the extremes that will land you in the news, of course. I’m talking about the minor ones that turn a seemingly good day into a drama-filled one. The behavior that, if left unchecked, will add up to years of resentment by the kid, and put up walls between the relationship of parent and child.

It’s not good. It’s as if some parents are parenting with something to prove . It’s as if the choices that are guiding what they say and do to the kids are actually based on what they experienced – or didn’t experience – as a child.

Like for example, in what world does a parent reign holy terror on a kid for getting a B?

That’s an extreme, wouldn’t you say? But it happens. Maybe it happens in the form of excessive lecturing, unfair amounts of privileges being taken away…whatever form of over-reaction you could insert here.

It begs the question: Was this parent a bad student themselves, in school?  Now that little Johnny got a B, are they afraid they’re going down the same road they did, and the next step he’s going to take is *gulp* getting a C? Perhaps they might even conclude that surely he MUST be spiraling out of control.

But he probably isn’t.

Who knows what qualifies a parent to lash out on a child for getting a B like that. It makes me wonder: maybe the tripped-out behavior is because their own parents weren’t all that supportive of their own educational game, and now that they have children of their own, they’re overcompensating the inefficiencies they had back then, to go extra hard on the teens.

So. Not. Right.

It’s a vicious circle of choosing to react in the extreme. Obviously a B is not the end of the world, but many parents – for whatever reason – will act like it is.

Sure, we all have our own unique parenting styles, but much of it is in direct response to the styles by which our own parents raised us. Should we want our kids to be successful in life? Sure, but surely we need to look for a happy medium.

We might not have liked certain aspects of the way we were brought up, but that doesn’t mean we need to parent like we’re on a mission to prove the tactics of our own parents were wrong. We have to find a balance in our parenting styles that is as drama-free as possible. This will ensure our kids will still talk to us when they reach their 20′s.

It’s such a hassle seeing parents designing their parenting style around such extreme choices.

Choosing the extreme reaction is never wise, if you ask me, and should even be applied to most everything in life, as well.

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