The standard American parenting advice is directed toward one specific end: get your kids as independent as possible, as fast as possible. Let them cry it out, schedule their feedings, put them in preschool as soon as possible. Once in school, the rush begins to inundate them with as much “knowledge” as we possibly can, with emphasis put on making good grades and conforming to a specific mode of “acceptable behaviour”. The question which begs to be asked is whether all of this is actually creating the desired end result: healthy, happy, competent adults who can interact with society in a useful (or at least, not harmful) way?
We all live in society, of course, and interact with the products of this system on a regular basis. Most of us, in fact, are products of it ourselves. We should be able to answer this question from our subjective experience, but as we have allowed ourselves to become a culture reliant on “official results”, let us take a moment and examine what the statistics say about how our society is shaping up.