Rosemond argues that parental involvement inhibits children’s growth and development. Parents who are involved prevent their children from learning to recover and navigate their lives via trial and error.  This results in ever more dependent children and in increasingly frustrated adults who often, incorrectly, attach their feelings of self worth to their children’s performance.

He concludes that the involved parent is “bad for parents, bad for children, bad for families (obviously), and for all those reasons, bad for America.” 

Just a few years prior to Roosevelt’s Strenuous Life speech, Booker T. Washington spoke to the same club, noting, “The greatest injury that slavery did my people was to deprive them of that great executive power, that sense of self-dependence which are the glory and the distinction of the Anglo-Saxon race.  For 250 years we were taught to depend on someone else for food, clothing, shelter and for every move in life.”

Rosemond might argue that this injustice has spread to children of all races.  We have moved from an interested to an involved society, never allowing anyone to learn the lessons of life, nor live the strenuous life, but instead are ever dependent on someone else.

Possibly in celebration and in honor of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, we should once again strive to live out the doctrine of the strenuous life.