Agreed.
And I do understand that teaching your child to feel their needs and feelings matter is also important and comes from a place of love.
But without context and qualification and limits, and applied broad-brush as a “policy stance,” it has the potential to produce adults who will struggle to have happy, healthy relationships.
I do wonder to what extent the “the girl can do whatever she wants” posts might have been different if the disappointed snd let-down child was a little girl and the “I can do just as I please” child a boy. The reason I say this is I feel a lot of the really strident “I will not bend to please” philosophy has its origins in the resistance over past decades to misogyny.
The problem with this is, while to a great extent this was needed, necessary and laudable against an historical background, and to some extent IS still important, very few philosophies can withstand an unnuanced application. The idea is currently being stretched to breaking point.
But to reverse the genders again, my friend is married to someone whose mother who adored him, and in her adoration she raised him to believe his desires and needs mattered so much that he is now struggling in a marriage to my friend who also believes that her wants and needs matter NOT most or all the time, but at least some of the time. Unfortunately this is a difficult thing for him to grasp; it cuts across his fundamental childhood beliefs that “ if you love me, you’d care about my feelings and let me have my way.” He takes so much, he is so draining and so unable to see that she does love him, she just sometimes needs other family members’ feelings to matter too. He loves her, too, and it is going to devastate him when his marriage imminently collapses. But he just knows nothing different. He has never learned to pick his battles on prioritising his feelings.
If only his mother had not “loved not wisely, but too well.”
Far too many children have this attitude and in the long run it ISN’T in their best interests. Self-belief and self-respect is one thing; an inability to ever pass over our first choice wish in favour of someone else’s is another.