The opportunity to achieve a moment of clarity for an aging, well-to-do father was sadly lost on a ski lift during our winter vacation. My wife overheard the sexagenarian chatting with another skier, and it went something like this: “I’m so proud of my daughter; she’s just doing so well. The guy she’s living with is still selling a lot of pot, but she’s out of rehab now, they’ve been in the same apartment for a while, and I’m only sending them $1200 a month. She’s even looking for a job!”
Remarkable gal. Truly.
So I’m not sure that’s an adequate definition of success. How is it that a well-educated, affluent, salt-and-pepper grey professional brags about a child in such circumstances? For most of my life, such information would not have been volunteered, and the exasperated father would likely be either taking strong measures to change the situation, or would already have cut the kid off altogether. In any case, it certainly wouldn’t have been a topic of casual conversation. I offer this one example – but similar incidents are not infrequent over the past several years that I’ve been paying attention.
How did we get here? My wife and I have spent many evenings ruminating over this topic, primarily in an effort to identify and avoid similar outcomes for our own offspring. I believe we have cause to worry. The impression of many of our peers – and indeed of the popular media – is that the generation behind Gen X, that is, Gen Y or the Millennial Generation – is seemingly bereft of personal responsibility, motivation, and even morality in comparison to generations before it. Is this as trite as it sounds? I’m reminded of the stereotypical old guys shaking their canes saying, “When I was your age…”etc. Sure, the older generations have always vilified the younger to some degree; though the gap between this newest crop and the rest appears unusually wide.
I struggle to identify precisely what is to blame, as the implications for our future in the hands of these people grows increasingly ominous.
Two factors strike me as having the most negative impact upon the younger generation of today: first, they are the kids of Boomers. The Baby Boom generation is widely recognized as placing a premium on divergence from established norms; if it’s new, it’s got to be better. Boomers loosened the rules with regard to behavior toward parents and other children, and allowed something more akin to a “Lord of the Flies” environment at home, which has effectively become a padded room, while protecting children to a nearly absurd and hysterical degree outside the home, fixating on nightmarish possibilities so remote that they are less than the proverbial getting hit by a bus or struck by lightning. Children of this generation have famously been coddled in ways that older generations were not. From the oft-cited practice of giving a trophy to every child who participates in a game, to the extreme and unprecedented measures we take to protect our children from the most statistically unlikely eventualities – car seats that will stop a fully grown rhinoceros until the kid is the size of my grandmother, a leash for walking the child in public places, putting padding on the coffee table and corners of the house – these things insulate a child from life’s little realities, for which the children are subsequently (and woefully) unprepared once they leave the nest… which many, resultantly, do not.
A second factor is more subtle: the guilty parent syndrome. A product of the modern dual income family, the comparative absence of parents from the child’s waking time precludes the quintessential dinner table conversation and solid hours of family togetherness we enjoyed a couple of decades ago. Children have become overscheduled, constantly stimulated by media devices and group activities, and have comparatively little space to “just be kids”, using their time and imaginations to dream up new ways to play and explore. Parents arrive home late, and keep their kids up and awake longer than they should in an understandable effort to spend time with them… but kids need their sleep, and I submit most of them today are sleep-deprived. Tired kids are irritable kids, and because we’re not good at reprimands or discipline, this becomes a vicious cycle.
Indeed, a 2010 Pew Research study found that, “Millennials report having had fewer spats with mom or dad than older adults say they had with their own parents when they were growing up.” Well of course – if parents don’t discipline their kids, there will probably be fewer arguments (early in life, at least). Further, “A majority say that the older generation is superior to the younger generation when it comes to moral values and work ethic.” Well at least they’re self aware.
What we’ve seen in recent years are kids who know no boundaries – simply put, they do things we could never get away with thirty years ago. They mouth off to their parents with impunity. They’re sassy to adults they don’t even know (inconceivable!). They destroy things, willfully and in full view. Corporal punishment is no longer accepted (or probably even legal), so why shouldn’t they? The words please and thank you are nearly out the window, while yes ma’am and no sir are anachronisms – completely gone. At get-togethers, kids won’t leave you alone. They continually badger the adults to entertain them, whereas… wait for it… in my day, we couldn’t wait to get down to the playroom or outside and away from our parents. This is the reason the older generations don’t get Gen Y: they continually make the opposite choices from what we once considered natural.
If we raised our kids the way our parents did, child services would show up at the door and we would be thrown in jail. Literally. But here we are now. Didn’t we survive? And, by comparison to these kids, haven’t we thrived? Most of us in prior generations recognized that we had challenges ahead: all Gen X ever heard was that the Soviets would bomb us, or the next ice age was coming & the world was going to run out of food, and that regardless, we would be the first generation to enjoy a lower standard of living than our parents. Those who fought the Second World War were just glad to be alive and free, and wanted to make the most of the opportunities they’d earned. It isn’t the same today. An article in the Small Business Review advises us to change our expectations: “Don’t look for a Gen Y worker to approach work as you did—eager to please your boss and willing to do scut work or put in extra hours to get ahead. The stereotypical Gen Y employees “seem to feel entitled to a raise and promotion in a week, that corner office in six,” says Dr. Carolyn Martin, co-author of Managing the Generation Mix (HRD Press, 2002).”
So if we cannot correct this course, we can look forward to some tough years ahead, and to the increasingly dependent, over-entitled brats who contribute relatively little yet continue to expect much from us. That is, unless we have a collective epiphany, that our parents and grandparents actually knew a few things, and that kids need rules, need firm guidance, and responsibility. We have to yank our kids out of the sluggishly low level of personal expectations of behavior, achievement, and conduct that threaten to drag us all backwards in the evolution of our society and culture. We have given our children too much in the last twenty years; they don’t know their place and have emerged into our society and work environments with a bizarrely skewed vision of reality and what they are “due”.
From those to whom much is given, much is expected – it’s an old sentiment, attributed to Jesus Christ, who was by all accounts a pretty good kid.
