The kids these days
Jan. 5th, 2019 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI've been mulling over Steve Paikin's interview with Jonathan Haidt on his book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which has been creating a minor debate amongst my online teacher circles. It's well worth watching even if, like me, you're almost certainly going to rage out at parts. It's an interesting case of being partially right and then catastrophically wrong by what I imagine is an attempt to pad several long reads into an actual book by conflating legitimate problems with people trying to solve them.
The gist is as follows: Children today (children as defined up until the early 20s, for reasons) are more anxious and fragile these days because we've sheltered them from the sorts of experiences that make them tougher. This, I agree with to a point. But it merits some unpacking: What is fragility, exactly? Is it a request for trigger warnings when encountering a depiction of violent rape in a classroom reading? Is it a protest against a transphobic speaker who has been known to publicly out trans students and target them for relentless harassment? Is it complaining online that your professors have a "liberal bias"? A male gamer's fear that feminism is taking over video games? Is it a cis person's abject terror at the thought of using the same washroom as a trans person, or a white person's unwillingness to share a water fountain or a swimming pool with a black person? I would argue that fragility has always existed in some form or another, but certain types of fragility have, traditionally, been coddled more than others, and only some are termed as such.
Then there's the question of whether kids today (and younger adults; I have a plug-in that automatically corrects all instances of "Millennials" to "Snake People," which spares me a lot of silliness in thinkpieces) are less resilient, to which I'd say yes, but with some reservations. Are the students who I teach now more anxious than those I taught a decade ago? Yes, but I teach a very different demographic so it's hard to say for certain. Were the students I taught a decade ago more anxious than I was as a teenager? Yes, which is a m a z i n g as I'm a pretty anxious person now. But I can't imagine say, being anxious enough to miss months of school, knowing full well I'll fail, or not handing any work in not because I'm not capable of doing it but because my terror at this task is so overwhelming that I can't force myself to do it. But my experience is, while likely more varied than Haidt's, still quite limited, so I'm willing to listen to arguments on either side.
So, assuming that kids today are more anxious and fragile, what caused this? Haidt correctly points to overscheduling and helicopter parenting as a cause, and suggests that there are economic factors at work. So, yes, I agree that this is a problem, and it's at least a problem up to high school and based on what my friends who teach in post-secondary are saying, still a problem in college and university. But the social and economic factors at work are fairly clear here. In a shit economy where one's best chance at a decent living is post-secondary, optimizing education for post-secondary is a survival strategy. If that means that five-year-old Madison needs to be shuffled back and forth to Mandarin lessons, ballet, and hockey practice and is left with no unstructured play time in order to be competitive in a neoliberal institutional framework, her parents are going to make those sacrifices, because if they're the one family that doesn't, little Madison is fucking screwed. Where my first divergence from Haidt happens is that what about those kids whose parents can't afford those lessons? If his argument is correct, then the kids of single moms who have to work three fast-food jobs to afford an apartment in a food desert should be having better life outcomes and less anxiety than the Park Slope kids. But of course they don't, because in both cases, the root of anxiety is economic insecurity, reinforced by race and class.
But moving on to high school, I see some evidence of moral dependency in which teachers and school administrators are absolutely complicit, but also trapped by the litigious nature of education. To use a neutral example, if my nerd friends and I wanted to play D&D at lunch, we'd just do that. We didn't need an official club or teacher supervision; we set up in the cafeteria or locker bay and did our thing. If we wanted to engage in political activism—well, we did have some clubs for that, but we primarily ran them ourselves, and they certainly weren't organized franchises like Free the Children or Me to We, complete with a binder outlining activities that the teacher could organize for us. I hardly need to tell you that this is no longer the case. I definitely see a failure to self-organize amongst my students, a focus on extracurricular activities for application-padding rather than interest, and difficulty with self-advocacy. I tend to see young people as overly dependent on adults—in my day, we were concerned about privacy, we snuck into clubs, we didn't tend to get drunk or high with our parents. This isn't all healthy behaviour, to be sure, but it did foster independence in the way that allowing children to fall off playground equipment is probably, long-run, good for them.
The other example that I can think of is in assigned readings. Several years ago, some Very Smart People declared that there was a Serious Crisis in boys' literacy. Boys weren't reading, oh no! The solution was at first to provide more graphic novels in English class (which is quite foolish, as graphic novels tend to require more literacy skills, not fewer, to analyze) and then to ensure that no book would be read in English class that was not geared specifically to young adults as a marketing category, and featuring a male protagonist to be relatable to male students. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not by very much. The idea that boys could be made to empathize with characters unlike themselves, or that they could be pushed outside of their comfort zone, was never seriously discussed.
To a degree, I buy Haidt's assertion that if an offensive speaker is booked at a university, students who are legal adults will go to the dean about it. I'm pretty sure that happens in some places. Where I differ, again, is that the problem is that students want to be protected from language and experiences that are not politically correct. The problem is actually that they'd go to the dean rather than self-organize to no-platform the offensive speaker; appeal to authority is, in fact, how we end up with strongmen politicians. Given that I see no-platforming happening more often than appealing to the administration (because, surprise, the administration is only interested in making filthy lucre) I don't think the problem of a new, somehow more dangerous wave of political correctness is actually a thing. Also, if it is, it's almost entirely sectioned off from the real world, where people of colour and trans folks can still be safely oppressed.
Speaking of which, one of his arguments towards the end, which was an objection to "Grievance Studies" and the idea that educational institutions are teaching that educational institutions are inherently oppressive is...interesting. Given that in my lifetime, the Canadian government was still kidnapping indigenous kids to be imprisoned, tortured, raped, and experimented on in residential schools suggests that, yes, all of our institutions may in fact have rotten foundations that merit interrogation, just sayin'.
The gist is as follows: Children today (children as defined up until the early 20s, for reasons) are more anxious and fragile these days because we've sheltered them from the sorts of experiences that make them tougher. This, I agree with to a point. But it merits some unpacking: What is fragility, exactly? Is it a request for trigger warnings when encountering a depiction of violent rape in a classroom reading? Is it a protest against a transphobic speaker who has been known to publicly out trans students and target them for relentless harassment? Is it complaining online that your professors have a "liberal bias"? A male gamer's fear that feminism is taking over video games? Is it a cis person's abject terror at the thought of using the same washroom as a trans person, or a white person's unwillingness to share a water fountain or a swimming pool with a black person? I would argue that fragility has always existed in some form or another, but certain types of fragility have, traditionally, been coddled more than others, and only some are termed as such.
Then there's the question of whether kids today (and younger adults; I have a plug-in that automatically corrects all instances of "Millennials" to "Snake People," which spares me a lot of silliness in thinkpieces) are less resilient, to which I'd say yes, but with some reservations. Are the students who I teach now more anxious than those I taught a decade ago? Yes, but I teach a very different demographic so it's hard to say for certain. Were the students I taught a decade ago more anxious than I was as a teenager? Yes, which is a m a z i n g as I'm a pretty anxious person now. But I can't imagine say, being anxious enough to miss months of school, knowing full well I'll fail, or not handing any work in not because I'm not capable of doing it but because my terror at this task is so overwhelming that I can't force myself to do it. But my experience is, while likely more varied than Haidt's, still quite limited, so I'm willing to listen to arguments on either side.
So, assuming that kids today are more anxious and fragile, what caused this? Haidt correctly points to overscheduling and helicopter parenting as a cause, and suggests that there are economic factors at work. So, yes, I agree that this is a problem, and it's at least a problem up to high school and based on what my friends who teach in post-secondary are saying, still a problem in college and university. But the social and economic factors at work are fairly clear here. In a shit economy where one's best chance at a decent living is post-secondary, optimizing education for post-secondary is a survival strategy. If that means that five-year-old Madison needs to be shuffled back and forth to Mandarin lessons, ballet, and hockey practice and is left with no unstructured play time in order to be competitive in a neoliberal institutional framework, her parents are going to make those sacrifices, because if they're the one family that doesn't, little Madison is fucking screwed. Where my first divergence from Haidt happens is that what about those kids whose parents can't afford those lessons? If his argument is correct, then the kids of single moms who have to work three fast-food jobs to afford an apartment in a food desert should be having better life outcomes and less anxiety than the Park Slope kids. But of course they don't, because in both cases, the root of anxiety is economic insecurity, reinforced by race and class.
But moving on to high school, I see some evidence of moral dependency in which teachers and school administrators are absolutely complicit, but also trapped by the litigious nature of education. To use a neutral example, if my nerd friends and I wanted to play D&D at lunch, we'd just do that. We didn't need an official club or teacher supervision; we set up in the cafeteria or locker bay and did our thing. If we wanted to engage in political activism—well, we did have some clubs for that, but we primarily ran them ourselves, and they certainly weren't organized franchises like Free the Children or Me to We, complete with a binder outlining activities that the teacher could organize for us. I hardly need to tell you that this is no longer the case. I definitely see a failure to self-organize amongst my students, a focus on extracurricular activities for application-padding rather than interest, and difficulty with self-advocacy. I tend to see young people as overly dependent on adults—in my day, we were concerned about privacy, we snuck into clubs, we didn't tend to get drunk or high with our parents. This isn't all healthy behaviour, to be sure, but it did foster independence in the way that allowing children to fall off playground equipment is probably, long-run, good for them.
The other example that I can think of is in assigned readings. Several years ago, some Very Smart People declared that there was a Serious Crisis in boys' literacy. Boys weren't reading, oh no! The solution was at first to provide more graphic novels in English class (which is quite foolish, as graphic novels tend to require more literacy skills, not fewer, to analyze) and then to ensure that no book would be read in English class that was not geared specifically to young adults as a marketing category, and featuring a male protagonist to be relatable to male students. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not by very much. The idea that boys could be made to empathize with characters unlike themselves, or that they could be pushed outside of their comfort zone, was never seriously discussed.
To a degree, I buy Haidt's assertion that if an offensive speaker is booked at a university, students who are legal adults will go to the dean about it. I'm pretty sure that happens in some places. Where I differ, again, is that the problem is that students want to be protected from language and experiences that are not politically correct. The problem is actually that they'd go to the dean rather than self-organize to no-platform the offensive speaker; appeal to authority is, in fact, how we end up with strongmen politicians. Given that I see no-platforming happening more often than appealing to the administration (because, surprise, the administration is only interested in making filthy lucre) I don't think the problem of a new, somehow more dangerous wave of political correctness is actually a thing. Also, if it is, it's almost entirely sectioned off from the real world, where people of colour and trans folks can still be safely oppressed.
Speaking of which, one of his arguments towards the end, which was an objection to "Grievance Studies" and the idea that educational institutions are teaching that educational institutions are inherently oppressive is...interesting. Given that in my lifetime, the Canadian government was still kidnapping indigenous kids to be imprisoned, tortured, raped, and experimented on in residential schools suggests that, yes, all of our institutions may in fact have rotten foundations that merit interrogation, just sayin'.
All of this is not to say that I don't think fragility is a problem; I relate hard to the link about Millennial failure-to-adult above, even though I'm not a Millennial and have been spared from many of the classic Millennial problems. But I think its causes—the fact that we have less than 12 years to avert apocalyptic climate change and yet instead of going after the 100 companies responsible for 71% of carbon emissions, people are actually contemplating blotting out the sun, the fundamental dystopic natures of both the gig economy and the concept of a "jobless recovery," the global rise in fascism, the much older and more insidious neoliberal commodification and atomization of all aspects of life—are more difficult to solve than simply telling snowflakes to suck up their peanut allergies or instituting University of Chicago-style free speech policies. They involve confronting a more widespread social anxiety, one with very real causes and real consequences beyond participation trophies and overly coddled kids.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 09:54 pm (UTC)https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work?__twitter_impression=true
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 10:19 pm (UTC)But like, I feel guilty all the time for not working and I'm not keeping up with everyone else in my field, and when I take holiday I spend a week just existing without deadlines before I'm functional again. And I refuse to believe it's because I got too many participation awards.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:31 am (UTC)I always know I could be doing more, and this is one of the biggest sources of stress in my life.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 11:13 am (UTC)My husband is an excellent resource, in that he expects me to stop working at some point, which is probably the major reason that I do. Otherwise I'd never be able to deal with the guilt.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 10:39 pm (UTC)Not to be nitpicky, but surely she means 'old boomers and young Gen-Xers.' Even then, that doesn't work, because someone who's 38 in 2018 would have been born in 1980. Given that her mother probably didn't have her when she was 16, her mother was probably born in 1958 or earlier. That's middle Boomer. Gen Ex is roughly from 1965 (when Boomers would have been 20) - 1979 (birth rates started going way up again in 1979 -- they started dropping in 1971). (Actually her dates are fucked up because then she says she graduated in 2003 and moved to Seattle but anyway.)
But typically my annoyance over pieces like this is that
the Millennial youthsSnake People are getting attention and sympathy for stuff which has actually been systemically going on since at least the mid-nineties, when most people I know started going to grad school rather than trying to get jobs because there were no jobs to get that would allow you to pay off the student loans you already had from getting a B.A. which everyone had told you to get or you'd never be able to get a job. Nobody cared then because Gen Ex is smaller than the Boomers and their kids. It's nice to see people under 30 and even under 40 being treated for stuff like ADD and depression and other illnesses 'my g-g-generation' was told to suck up and overcome, but it still leaves me sour and envious.The other thing about that is pieces like this don't get the systemic thing right -- she says "Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics" -- nooo, that was Reagan. Who was out before I was ten. Gen-Ex is Bush 1, who was obsessed with cutting the deficit, and Clinton the "new/centrist/economically conservative Democrat", who famously brought it down to zero, at the expense of the safety net. Gen Ex is when we started having "mild recessions" and "jobless recoveries" and also the economic crisis in 2008. When she says "Women have told me that reading Emma’s cartoon, which has gone viral many times over, brought them to tears: They’d never seen the particular work that they do described, let alone acknowledged" -- dude, BETTY FRIEDAN was outlining that in 1963. (And for that matter the idea of life as a supposed exhibit for others of endlessly cultured, smoothly handled meaningful and photogenic moments existed before Instagram.) This is not new. The media describing the Millennial "burnout" or whatever is suffering from historical amnesia, and so are the people who write articles like this. I mean, "I’m seeing myself, the parameters of my labor, and the causes of my burnout clearly. And it doesn’t feel like the abyss. It doesn’t feel hopeless. It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge" -- fucking seriously? What about student debt reform? Unionizing TAs? Challenging "right to work"? Encouraging male partners to take on more household labour?
Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves.
//EYEROLL
WELL NO, IT NEVER HAS. IT NEVER WILL.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:34 am (UTC)I think the thing with the cartoon is a shade different than Betty Friedan. Because the latter was talking about unpaid household labour, but in this day and age, het men say that they want to help. Emma's cartoon deals specifically with the household managerial role, which while related, is a product of paying lipservice to feminist progress without actually dismantling any of the structures that prop up the patriarchy.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 05:32 am (UTC)(from right in the middle of the 70s birthrate slump)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 12:38 pm (UTC)It took me awhile to parse at first, but then I remembered that many of my Millenial friends have parents the same age as mine, while I have friends my age who have kids in their 20s.
And yeah, people who are younger forget that for a lot of Gen Xers we entered college/workforce right after the 1989 crash.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 10:44 pm (UTC)I'm kind of confused about the demographic he's talking about to begin with. I'm pretty sure that people who are in their twenties and teens now are not considered Millenials so ????
I agree that I've noticed a lot of people of my generation and younger having weird anxiety issues and not have much emotional control. I do think that in part it's a parenting problem, but I also think it's because the cases I'm thinking of are simultaneously coddled AND have relatively strict demands on them that make them feel pressured. Case in point, in my generation the most anxious kids I knew when I was a teenager were kids who were aiming for Med school (which is really competitive here) and often had parents who constantly made sacrifices for them.
On the other hand, I think part of this is probably a perception thing. Mental illness used to be considerably more taboo than it is now, and it's possible that people just hid it or put it down as a kid being difficult or weird. Maybe kids who now miss months of school in previous decades would just have dropped out of the system entirely or seem like they were skipping for other reasons.
I 100% disagree (obviously) with the whole "political correctness" thing. Asking that people get some basic respect isn't fragility and neither is expecting that certain spaces shouldn't be threatening (people should be able to go to university without having to be afraid that someone will show up on campus and incite hatred against them).
I see a bit less political participation among people in their teens or early 20s now but it's just anecdata. A while ago a university over here scheduled a far-right group to speak and a bunch of people of all ages who had ties to the university showed up to protest it.
(As an aside, I think some aspects of politics are increasingly normalised as part of daily life. There's absolutely misogyny and racism and so on, but I've noticed that girls my sister's age or younger seem more tuned into feminism as an everyday thing vs. when I was a teenager and it seemed weird that I was a feminist.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:38 am (UTC)On the other hand, I think part of this is probably a perception thing. Mental illness used to be considerably more taboo than it is now, and it's possible that people just hid it or put it down as a kid being difficult or weird. Maybe kids who now miss months of school in previous decades would just have dropped out of the system entirely or seem like they were skipping for other reasons.
That's a lot of it (same with increased rates of autism—like, probably not so much as increased rates of diagnosis). But I do think there are more reasons to be anxious than there were when you could at least have a career for life.
(As an aside, I think some aspects of politics are increasingly normalised as part of daily life. There's absolutely misogyny and racism and so on, but I've noticed that girls my sister's age or younger seem more tuned into feminism as an everyday thing vs. when I was a teenager and it seemed weird that I was a feminist.)
I'm seeing that too, within the space of a couple years. It's a good development! But also the backlash is stronger than it was.
I was going to critically comment (to comment critically? Oh, nevermind) ...
Date: 2019-01-05 11:16 pm (UTC)Another reason to remind me that this place is a much better use of my time than The Other Place.
Re: I was going to critically comment (to comment critically? Oh, nevermind) ...
Date: 2019-01-06 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 12:54 am (UTC)For young people, certainly, I think part of it is that parents and authority figures are making more choices than they used to on their behalf. But I feel this way even myself, so I don't think that's the whole story.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:42 am (UTC)Workers in the 30s were also precarious and screwed but they had ethnic identity, or class identity, or both, and so while they were angry and shat upon, I suspect they weren't as fragile.
For young people, certainly, I think part of it is that parents and authority figures are making more choices than they used to on their behalf. But I feel this way even myself, so I don't think that's the whole story.
I definitely felt this way and I think most people of our generation did.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 05:36 am (UTC)I would agree.
*makes a note of this*
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 11:12 am (UTC)1. I'm personally fragile because I've never been allowed to fail and suffer the consequences and keep going, so I'm facing it in my 30s instead of in primary school. I've always been taught that the consequences for failure will be catastrophic so I need to do whatever it takes to succeed. I haven't been coddled into this attitude - I've been terrified into it.
We've got Korea and Japan as examples of what happens when every moment is structured because every educational moment matters, and there's no coming back from a single failure - miss out on the right middle school and you'll never get into the right university. I don't think their educational systems are held up as producing especially resilient kids.
I regreted all the stuff I did with friends because it couldn't go on an application. If I'd only found a teacher-supervisor, I could have called it a club and put it on a piece of paper! Which is ridiculous, but that's what the system is.
I am curious about why you think boys are doing worse in school? I had a prof who theorized that the skills women are socialized to perform are the ones school rewards (the same skills it takes to organize a household and get dinner on the table).
I'm a Snake Person and goodness I feel like there's more important things to worry about than no platforming.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 02:05 pm (UTC)They do not; however, they produce high test scores in the kids that don't jump out of windows, and high test scores are quantifiable, but emotional resilience is not. Accordingly, our education system, which was quite good, is trying to imitate theirs.
I am curious about why you think boys are doing worse in school? I had a prof who theorized that the skills women are socialized to perform are the ones school rewards (the same skills it takes to organize a household and get dinner on the table).
Broadly speaking, I think your prof is right. Organization, obedience, teamwork, and lack of disruptive behaviour, are all skills that the school system prizes, above academic achievement. I even remember that I would write these great essays but not present them well, whereas the girls (they were always girls) who handed in essays that used multiple colours of highlighters did better even if they weren't as well-written or researched.
The other side of it is that, historically, girls were held back academically and discouraged from STEM fields, so we're only now seeing what girls are capable of when given the same opportunities as boys. It's not necessarily that boys are doing worse so much as they're doing worse in comparison to girls, now that they have competition.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 09:22 am (UTC)I used to be penalized for bad penmanship and I was so jealous of the girls with nice handwriting.
Now we encourage girls to go into stem, right up until the moment after they get their first job in the field...
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 11:34 am (UTC)Now we encourage girls to go into stem, right up until the moment after they get their first job in the field...
Hah, truth.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-06 11:41 pm (UTC)One confounding factor is, as you hint at in your opening paragraphs, that while young people probably are more fragile (for a variety of reasons, including the fucked-upness of things), a lot of things get confused for fragility which are not.
So requests for trigger warnings are not necessarily a sign of greater fragility - they are a recognition of the potential for real harm, which was always there, but previously unrecognized. Like, people starting to wash their hands after going to the toilet was not because young people were snowflakes, but because we became aware of the germ theory of disease.
Then the whole PC thing, and its opposite on the right of white people freaking out over black people using the same fountain, or Piers Morgan over the existence of Gregg's vegan sausage rolls, is not fragility; it's about who gets to tell whom to shut up or to keep them out of places, and on what grounds. It is not that racist white people would suffer lasting psychological damage from black people using the same fountain, it's that they got to make the rules. Likewise when students no-platform (though I hate that term and wish there were a better one) a transphobe, it's not because they are more easily traumatized than previous generations, it's because there is a sufficient body of people who recognize transphobia as a bad thing and are able and willing to try (not necessarily successfully) to prevent that shit from coming onto their campuses.
Actual fragility is when people are less able to cope with and recover from negative experiences, for which as your post and this discussion show there are a lot of possible causes. But it's different from greater understanding of different negative experiences, and of people's relative power to effectively object to stuff.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 12:44 am (UTC)Or maybe, trigger warnings/requests for such are not a sign of fragility, but a difficulty in recovering from/addressing and recognizing trauma is. If that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 01:03 am (UTC)I've not tracked this trend lately, but the middle class caught up in the Red Queen's race of paying for powerups to increase their children's chance of success leads to financial overextension and increased chance of bankruptcy.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 01:09 am (UTC)A whole book to say "wages haven't kept pace with inflation"? :)
Seriously, though. The economy affects parenting, which affects children's mental stability. Not exactly rocket science or a symptom of excessive PC.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 02:28 am (UTC)And as you say, zip to do with purported excessive PC, while parental anxiety over whether their debt-fueled investment in offspring will pay off is bound to provoke performance anxiety in children.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 02:50 am (UTC)Agreed totally on parental over investment as a source of anxiety.