By Paula Voell NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 09/04/07 7:28 AM
Soon, children will be absorbing the rules of school — instructions about homework, allowable T-shirts and whether peanut butter sandwiches can be packed. All fine and dandy.
But author Charles J. Sykes thinks there are equally important rules, unwritten rules, that children — and their parents — ought to learn. He’s packaged them into a new book, “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School” (St. Martin’s Press, $19.95.)
The rules of life, at least Sykes' version, are pithy, understandable, enhanced by anecdotes and delivered in Midwestern straightforwardness. They include:
• “Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.”
• “Batman’s girlfriend is right. It’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you.”
• “No matter what your daddy says, you are not a princess...”
Rule No. 46 — “Check on the guinea pig in the basement” — is a reminder to himself of the period when he neglected Chester (mainly cleaning his cage) and the larger message not to forget parents, friends, children in the busyness of other activities.
“That’s a personal one,” said Sykes, a radio and television host at WTMJ in Milwaukee, “but it’s surprising how many people responded to it.”
It doesn’t take long to spot people who don’t play by the Sykes rules.
As an example, let’s pick on actor Ethan Hawke, who seems not to have absorbed Rule No. 1: “Life is not fair. Get used to it.”
Not long ago, Hawke was on the AMC show “Shootout,” explaining how difficult celebrity marriages are, including his with his ex, Uma Thurman, because they are complicated by career jealousy.
“It’s unfair when one person’s career is taking off and the other is really suffering,” Hawke is quoted as saying.
“Now, should we break out a really small violin?” said Sykes, when told of the comment.
If these rules have a familiar ring, it’s because he had an earlier version called “14 Rules...,” which made the rounds on the Internet and was, mistakenly, attributed to Bill Gates, Sykes said.
Anyway, Sykes thinks parents would do well to internalize these rules and reclaim their role as parents, reversing the trend of child-pleasing and entertaining that passes for “parenting” today.
“There’s been a shift in parenting that is awfully striking,” said Sykes, father of three. “We’ve sort of confused keeping them endlessly entertained with actually preparing them for life. That requires certain expectations from parents. It requires us to say no, to make unpleasant or difficult choices, as opposed to treating the next generation as a modern day aristocracy.”
“When I was growing up, the world centered around adults,” said Sykes, who is 52. “I’d go places with my dad. Now, I go to my kids’ events. We follow them around. It’s not necessarily negative, but I think we’ve gotten to the point where super parent has become smothering parent.”
Recently, when he dropped his middle son off at Georgetown University, he was struck by the interactions between the freshmen and their parents, he said.
“It was the kind of thing normally seen between a CEO and a junior aide,” said Sykes, who is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. “The parents were following their child around and ministering to him.
“And these are the kids who are successes.
“We have a generation that appears to be attached with an eternal umbilical cord to the cell phone to call mommy and daddy,” he said. “And when you deprive a child of independence and confidence about what they can accomplish, you actually take away the root of self-esteem.”
As well as setting back the maturation process, he said.
“We have a generation that’s far more likely to move back home than any other generation,” he said. “They don’t want to grow up and we shouldn’t be surprised. That’s the way we raised them.
“It’s not that it’s too hard in the world, it’s that it’s too easy at home.”
As to why parenting has changed so dramatically, Sykes thinks it might be because his generation didn’t face any major problems.
“I never went through the Great Depression or fought and won a world war,” he said, “So, maybe we didn’t feel any intense pressure to be strict,” said Sykes, who has also written “Dumbing Down our Kids.” “We wanted to be cool parents or our kids’ buddies.
Too often, Sykes said, parents try to “bubble wrap” children in an attempt to protect them from bumps and bruises, which he calls the stuff of life.
“When grown-ups refuse to grow up something has gone terribly wrong,” he said, “and maybe we should question the way we prepare our children for the adult world.
It could start with Rule No. 8: “Your navel is not that interesting. Don’t spend your life gazing at it.”
pvoell@buffnews.com