You Are Enough!

Last month we had Oscars night. Amid the usual flurry of tears, air-kissing and acceptance speeches, there were quite a few impassioned messages. Some political like Patricia Arquette pushing for equal pay across genders. Others like Graham Moore, the American screenwriter/author who won the Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in "The Imitation Game" took a much more personal approach.

http://mashable.com/2015/02/23/graham-moore-oscars-speech/

'Stay weird..stay different'

He's perfectly right, of course. We should be true to ourselves.
But in all honesty, how many of us can imagine a teenager being OK with being considered 'weird'? How many of us remember our own teenage years when we were desperate to be cool, and in?
As Moore himself showed, with the revelation of his attempted suicide at sixteen, teenagers are NOT ok with being weird or different.

"When I was sixteen years old, I tried to kill myself, because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong."

Teenagers, and I daresay, even tweens these days are under immense pressure to conform, to fit in with the hip, cool crowd. They are desperate to impress their peers, their crushes. And when this does not happen, they have a hard time. The need to fit in creates a fertile breeding ground for emotional bullies....those insecure persons, who will do all they can to highlight a person's perceived weirdness, as by doing so, they consolidate their own position of popularity.
I experienced this kind of bullying myself, and I am pretty certain that it wasn't just me.

It takes time, experience and maturity to get to the point where you do not care if you're considered weird or strange or eccentric. Nowadays I have no problem with telling anyone ...this is me; like it or lump it.  But that is the point. I am an adult with two children of my own. I am not sixteen. I have been around a few times and I have no need to impress.

On the Academy Awards stage, Moore spoke as an adult not a teen. So how realistic is his plea to "that kid out there who thinks she's weird and she's different and she doesn't fit in anywhere" to stay weird, to stay different?

One of the comments on the original post was that as parents we empower our child so that the need to fit in is no longer as important as the need to be individuals...
Hmmmm... 
As a parent, it is my duty to give my children security, support and acceptance. But even if I were the perfect parent, which I'm not (sorry to disappoint you) peer pressure is something we should never underestimate..
Yes, as parents we definitely play a big part in how our children grow and develop, not just physically, but also emotionally and psychologically.
But it would be foolish to believe, even for a moment, that just because of us providing unconditional love and security, our children will be impervious to peer pressure. Peer pressure is a powerful force, because it is based on young people's need to fit in. The need to fit in is hard-wired into teenagers. It is just part of who they are.

Encouraging children to think for themselves, to make their own choices, to go with their gut feeling..these are all positive, even great things that a parent can do. They can give the child strong reference points even during times of emotional and hormonal upheaval. 
The point here is not to stop doing these things, but to stop burdening ourselves with unrealistic expectations. To stop thinking that we alone influence our children's choices and decisions. To stop feeling that we are total failures if our children do something stupid. To stop blaming ourselves when things do not turn out quite the way we planned. 
After all, our children are individuals with their own mind, not inanimate dolls which will stay put where you place them.

In any discipline, we are told not to set unrealistic goals and targets, as this will only set us up for failure. Shouldn't we be treating parenthood in the same way?
We all know that perceived failure affects how we see ourselves, and how we feel about ourselves. If we are constantly feeling inadequate because of our perceived failings as parents, how can we expect our children to be the strong individuals they need to be in a world that grows more complex with every passing day?

"L-ezempju jkaxkar"we say in Maltese. If we want our children to feel good about themselves and accept themselves as they are, we have to start by being an example to them ourselves.