“Kids! I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today…”
If you’re trying to understand how kids/young adults can possibly come to the conclusion that it’s a “responsible” choice to move back in with the parents after college, then this article is a must-read (thanks to the Work It blog for the link).
Tom McGrath’s Philadelphia Magazine article “Bad Parents” is long, but worthwhile (and I think that title sentiment may be a little strong – “over-invested” is probably more accurate, but certainly less catchy). Here’s an edited (for length) version; I don’t feel that I can add a lot, but I still have a few comments interspersed and following:
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PARENTING was a simple job. Not easy, but fairly straightforward: You had kids, you provided them with food, clothes, shelter, an education, and a decent sense of right and wrong, then you pushed them out into the world, hoping that at the very least they wouldn’t be a burden on society. If they turned out better than that…you might allow yourself a moment of parental pride before going back to watching Jeopardy! and drinking your nightly Manhattan. “Glad to hear you’re doing well, honey. But I got a life here.”
Today, in contrast, parenting…has become not only vastly more complicated, but seemingly more important than ever before. Listen closely and you’ll hear people utter earnest things like, “It’s the most important job I’ll ever have,” or, “Yes, I may be a world-class surgeon, but my real life’s work is raising little Heather.” Well, I guess. But let’s not botch my appendectomy, okay, Doc?
(I have made the first of those “earnest” comments myself, numerous times, but I think I may have a somewhat different job description in mind than the one that’s outlined here.)Unfortunately, evidence is steadily mounting that The Way We Parent Now — roughly defined as giving your child as much opportunity and attention as possible, while requiring little from him or her in return — is turning out to be something of a disaster, at least in terms of producing, you know, well-adjusted, contributing human beings. For starters, a good chunk of kids…today seems to be wilting under pressure from parents to achieve. Meanwhile, the need to succeed has other kids so stressed that they’re literally getting sick.
(If it really is “the most important job,” some parents don’t seem to understand the goals and objectives, and it’s hindering their performance and hurting their outcomes.)No less important, though, is that a generation of kids who’ve been overindulged, overprotected and generally over-parented seems to be overwhelmingly underprepared to live in the real world.
Not that you can tell them. A study released earlier this year found that the current generation of college students is the most narcissistic ever. In the study, psychologists asked students to respond to statements like, “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” Two-thirds of the kids showed elevated levels of narcissism — 30 percent more than when the study was first done in 1982.
How did this happen? How is it that a group of moms and dads who love their kids so much, and who were so intent on being great at raising them, has turned out to be, arguably, the worst parents ever? The short answer might be expressed like this: We’ve been too uptight about things — achievement, success, appearances — we should have been relaxed about, and too relaxed about things — values, integrity — that we should have been more uptight about.
…(P)arents are more educated and sophisticated than ever before. This means they not only think more about parenting, but also — aware of how tough it will be for their own kids to match, let alone surpass, them in terms of money and success — feel much more anxious about it. The result: An entire generation has decided that childhood is too important to be left to children.
“We’re professional at everything,” says Ken Ginsburg, a brown-haired 45-year-old whom I meet one afternoon in his office. “You’re a professional editor, I’m a professional doctor. And we want to bring that professionalism to parenting.”
This instinct shows itself in a variety of ways, starting with the enrichment culture that has come to define middle-class childhood in the past couple of decades, a culture whose driving credo can be described as either a) I want everything in my kid’s life to be educational and good for his development, or b) it’s never too early to get an edge on all those other little bastards out there gunning for Harvard. Hence the spike in all the things we now associate with a professional-class childhood: lessons, tutors, fights to get into the “best” preschools, culturally enriching trips. In a way, it makes me think of Michael Kinsley’s wonderful line two decades ago about Al Gore: He called him “an old person’s idea of a young person.” What we’ve given our kids is a middle-aged yuppie’s idea of a childhood. Why play with frogs, son, when there’s a French cooking class you can take?
But treating youth like some sort of executive training program for short people is only one hallmark of professional parenting. We also see it in our increasing safety-consciousness — anything that can give you a bump or bruise must be stopped — and even more so in our increasing involvement in our kids’ lives: prearranged playdates, hyper-organized youth sports run by hyper-organized parents, obsessive second-guessing and stage-parenting when it comes to school. As one observer puts it diplomatically: “Parents are overly enmeshed with kids. You wonder sometimes if it’s really the child’s accomplishments or the parents’.” (And a “helicopter parent” is born…)
The problem is that this over-scheduled, over-nurturing, overbearing style of parenting robs kids of something crucial: the opportunity to be alone with other kids, the chance to figure the world out on their own.
(What’s fascinating is that while) many of us over-parent when it comes to promoting achievement, we under-parent when it comes to things parents prior to us were fanatical about for centuries: manners, courtesy, respect, responsibility. It’s not that we’re pro-brat, but that we’re so uncomfortable being figures of authority that we can’t demand those things of our kids. To go back to Al Gore, it’s like we want to be a young person’s ideal of an older person: the cool parent, the one who doesn’t mind if you blow milk out your nose at the dinner table.
(Well, to be honest, I don’t object to some fooling around at our own dinner table if it’s just the family – but in public or someone else’s home, you’ll learn to act right and you’d better do it.)You see this not only in parents refusing to tell their kids “no,” but generally in the way we talk to our children. Where our parents told us that yanking the cat’s tail was wrong, we opt for the less judgmental “That’s not a good choice, sweetie.” Where our parents were content with “Because I said so,” we feel compelled to explain our reasoning, lest we seem dictatorial.
(I think we don’t want to seem arbitrary, not necessarily “dictatorial,” when we try to explain to our kids exactly why we do or don’t want them to do such-and-such. But if they don’t really care about the why, “just because” may be entirely called for.)(I)t somehow strikes me as the perfect image of modern parenthood: a generation of grown-ups bending over to accommodate our children’s every want, while simultaneously requiring nothing from them in return. On one level, we may have decided that childhood is too important to be left to children, but on another, more important level, the kids are very much in charge…(t)he result of all this is a group of kids with a depressingly skewed sense of values and a shocking sense of entitlement.
(If there is a moment) when all the bad aspects of The Way We Parent Now reach their rococo stage, it’s in the college application and selection process.
…(W)ho knows at 14 or 15 what they’re really interested in? Isn’t adolescence the time in your life when you should feel free to explore a lot of different possibilities, without a lot of risk and without having to worry how it will look to someone on the outside? What’s more, it strikes me that there’s something off in the idea of a school that’s the right “fit,” as if choosing a college is like trying on a pair of shoes. Certainly, some kids — some people — do better in certain kinds of situations, but I wonder if it all doesn’t underscore a message that kids have gotten since they were young: You’re great just the way you are; if something doesn’t fit, it’s not your fault; you just need to find someplace that will accommodate and appreciate the full wonderfulness of you, you, you. People: Isn’t it possible the kid might need to do some adjusting? What a shock that this is the most narcissistic generation ever.
(Emphasis added above – yes, this exploratory process is the hallmark of adolescence, NOT the years immediately after college graduation.)Mostly, though, I guess I wonder this: If a child is mature enough and competent enough to go to college, shouldn’t he or she be able to manage the process of applying on his or her own, with perhaps a small assist here and there from Mom and Dad? Apparently, though, I’m smoking crack…
A friend recently confessed that last year, after bugging her applying-to-college daughter to send an e-mail to the admissions officer at a particular school, she finally hacked into her e-mail account and did it for her. The admissions officer e-mailed back, and they ended up in a lovely little online exchange, college rep and “student.”
(Editorializing: This is an excellent example of parenting that’s far more about the parent’s needs than the child’s.)What was driving my friend, what I suspect drives most of the parents caught up in this, is fear — a gut-wrenching anxiety that strikes on so many different levels. It’s evolutionary: If your son doesn’t get into a good school, his career prospects will be dim, and he won’t be able to feed himself and his offspring, and your genetic line will die off. It’s cultural: Without the right diploma, your daughter will never be able to do better than you, as every generation of Americans has done better than the one before it. It’s a status thing, an achieving yuppie’s worst nightmare: You were given a task to complete — raise a thriving, “successful” child — and you failed. You, friend, are not a professional.
To be fair, in one way, this generation’s fears are justified. Thanks to the sheer number of kids now coming of age and the growing number of educated, affluent families aiming for the tippy-top, it is harder than ever to get into an elite college. But in another way, they’re delusional: Study after study has shown that what really makes a difference in whether people thrive in life has less to do with where they went to school than with what internal traits they possess.
That’s a message that some parents, alas, never grasp — even when their kid is so stressed out that he ends up with headaches or stomach pains or much worse.
The great irony is that many of those kids have been so over-parented that it’s the first time they have to deal with real adversity, so they’re literally at a loss how to handle it. It must seem to them like the ultimate bait and switch: You asked nothing of me … until you asked everything.
The solution, Ginsburg believes, lies in redefining success. What matters more than anything else is that we listen to and support our kids, while holding them to high expectations — not on their résumés, but in traits the world has long recognized as worthwhile: generosity, compassion, kindness, creativity, responsibility.
Previous generations had a word for this — “character” — and they seemed to know innately, or perhaps because they’d suffered through a depression and a world war, that it was a lot more valuable than a degree from an elite university or even a sweet signing bonus when you’re coming out of law school.
I referred to myself as a “traditionalist” about parenting in an earlier post. Maybe part of it is that I was too young when I became a parent to fall into “professionalizing” it much (also, I was trying to establish something else as my profession at the same time). And even raised in a more “old-fashioned” way, there have been times my son was knocked for a loop by an unexpected setback – and honestly, he’d have a meltdown. But after it was over, he’d start figuring out what to do…sometimes with parental counsel, but increasingly with his own resources, which I think is the very definition of not being “at a loss” about how to handle adversity. I believe that part of responsible parenting is giving your kids the tools to make it themselves, but not necessarily the finished product. Along similar lines is the concept my son’s father referred to as “equality of opportunity, not equality of results” (and as a former college professor, he’s run into a few of the parents described in this article).
Speculating about where this parenting style comes from, I wonder if it combines elements of nostalgia for and backlash against the way many of today’s parents were raised. We sometimes want to replicate what we knew in our original families, and sometimes want to rebel against it – and sometimes we may do both. Members of Generation Jones are among the last for whom full-time, at-home moms and “breadwinner” dads weren’t a “choice,” they were just ordinary – yet even then, these weren’t particularly “child-centric” families. At the same time, “Jones-ers” and Gen-X’ers were the kids most heavily affected by the rising divorce rates of the 1960’s and ’70’s, as well as the rise of the two-career family among the famously self-absorbed Baby Boomers, now parents themselves. Are parents who excessively involve themselves in their children’s lives somehow trying to replicate – or re-imagine – their own upbringings, or do they have a poor sense of appropriate boundaries? Or has the familiar parental motivation of wanting to give our kids a better life just gotten way bent out of shape?
I haven’t personally known many parents who have fully embodied the characteristics described in this article, but most stereotypes have some elements of the truth in them somewhere, and I’ve seen enough people practice enough aspects of this kind of parenting that I’m pretty sure it’s not a media invention. But I think that self-awareness is the first step in addressing a problem, and I also think there’s time for those of us still in the process of raising our kids to take a good hard look at them, and ourselves, and see what might need to be changed. I suspect a backlash may be brewing from those who have to deal with the kids and young adults who’ve been so “over-parented” and overly entitled, and we’d better get ready to deal with that too – from both sides, with eyes wide open.
