Larson, E. (October 15, 2014). Raise a
thick-skinned kid. Parents, 88(10), p. 72-79.
The article “Raise a thick-skinned
kid” in the October issue of Parents
was a very silly and a no brainer when it came to the advice given in the
story. The story began with the author, Elizabeth Larsen’s, son crumbled under
any type of pressure he received by ANY of his coaches. The author and her
husband were the complete opposite when it came to pressure as a small child,
learn to use it as an advantage and grow from it. The article brought in many
professional opinions about how children today having no coping skills and how
they need to learn how to put their emotions into place, recover from the
situation, and thrive from it. The article then gives examples on how other
parents build their children’s thick skin with sharing “survival” stories from
the parents past, standing up for what they believe not matter what, or not
sugarcoating the tough stuff. The information proved by the story is something
parents should know from when they were children. Children, in my opinion,
today are too coddled by their parents and then parents don’t know what to do
so they turn to getting advice from a parent centered magazine. Parents should
take the information of having to deal with pressure and confrontation from the
past and use it to help shape their children’s lives.
The reason when I choose this
article in this magazine out of all the other magazines in the world and
articles in the world would be because of convenience and curiosity. Parents is geared for an audience with
children who are either newborn, toddlers, or children or those who are
expecting children. While my mother is a parent, she isn’t going to start using
these tips on her two twenty plus grown adult children. No one in my house has a
child or wants one at the current moment so we are always scratching our heads
when we get our issue of Parents in
the mail. The magazine has no name on it nor an address. It is just a magazine
that shows up at my house every month. While looking for an article to find, I
came across the “raise a thick-skinned kid” story and it raised my curiosity. I
have always felt like in today’s day and age, society likes to give children
everything they want. While I don’t have a child myself, I’ve seen countless
statuses and pictures of friends on Facebook spoiling their less then one year
old on Christmas. Parents should learn
to not coddled their children as much because they are just building a wall up
for some other person to knock it down and the child has no where to go to
“protect” themselves. Having read the story, I was curious to see what ads
surrounded the piece.
There were 90 ads within the entire magazine. 
The Parents magazine had a totally of 176
pages which mean that there was a total of 51% of pages dedicated to ads. I
think this is way too many ads for the magazine. The ads would break up the
stories breaking my reading to advertise Gymboree. I feel like the magazine
cares more about selling you on what is in their ads instead of giving good
information to read. The ads do fit the magazine with ads for parent’s such as
birth control and cleaning supplies and for their children which are food like
Campbells’ and Lunchables and car seats. I feel like the ads that were places
in the article I read were placed there for a reason. The first ad was for
Gymboree basically saying, “Hey, make sure you kid looks good.” The next ad was
for Minted, which could say “Make your house the cool house to hang out at.”
The last ad is for Strayer University with the quote saying, “Your success is
your family’s success”. The ad were put in the article to make sure while making
your child has good esteem you need to make sure that they can be proud and
like you.
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