A Nation Of Wimps Analysis

The author of “A Nation of Wimps” is Hara Estroff Marano who is also a journalist and editor. Hara although not a trained psychologist has been editor at “Psychology Today” for 15 years. This article was published in “Psychology Today Magazine” in Aril of 2008.In “A Nation of Wimps”, Hara puts her own personal experience with childhood and her children’s life to help readers understand her connection to childhood adolescence. She is writing this to show how much culture has changed over the years. Hara uses these specific techniques to connect the reasons behind how times have changed so that now we are more protective over our children. Hara employs multiple rhetorical strategies including: appeal to logos, appeal to ethos, the use of children,

One example is “If your baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10 – year- old who has metaphoric gas, you don’t burp him. You let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it’s not the end of the world.” This is a metaphor for comparing a baby to a 10-year-old. When a baby is upset, you are supposed to burp it because they cannot burp themselves unlike a 10-year-old who can handle being upset easier than a baby they do not need to be coddle. They can deal with problems on their own. Another metaphor is the use of the word hothouse compared to a greenhouse. A greenhouse is to secure plants from the environment outside the greenhouse just like the hothouse which is used to symbolize where overprotective children live. It is saying that they are trapped inside the house and cannot experience the outside world. The last metaphor present in this article is the comparison of a cell phone to an umbilicus cord. Hara is trying to emphasize that when a baby is in a woman belly they are attached to their mother and get all the nutrients they need from

Hara is trying to say that the phone allow them to be always connected to their parents and they do not have to figure out situations on their own when they can just pick up the phone and make a call to their mother to solve the problem.

The last rhetorical technique I found was the use of repetition toward the ending of the story, “the data show that children have become: less humorous, less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and vernally expressive, less humorous, less imagative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing and less likely to see things from a different angle. The repetition emphasizes on how overprotectiveness on children is not good for all aspects of their life and diminishing their personality.

A fallacy used in this paper is slippery slope; it is present when Hara says, “they become cautious, quiet and introverted. They shrink from social encounters, lack confidence, are easily influenced by others and sitting ducks for bullies. And are on the path to depression. This implies that from all these situations that depression will