Sometimes I despair for the kids these days, I really do.
I didn’t expect to feel this way at the tender age of 42. I was supposed to find them puzzling, with their Snapchatting and their Venmo and never looking up from their phones. I was supposed to think they were having too much sex or doing too many drugs and not listening to their wiser elders, gosh darn it. I was supposed to grouse that young people are always getting themselves into trouble.
Instead I’m worried that they aren’t getting themselves into enough trouble. They seem so fragile. They can’t read Ovid without a trigger warning and a pair of latex gloves, or go off to college without calling their parents to check in. Did no one ever take them aside and explain that college is for abandoning your parents, leaving them to worry about what you are doing with their money while you forget to call them for a month at a time?
There is something truly terrifying about a generation of younger people that craves more adult intervention into their lives. Yet that’s what everyone from teachers to employers reports: a rising number of kids who seek to be tethered to their parents, and don’t seem to know what to do unless Mom or Dad is hovering nearby.
People have been worrying about The Kids These Days since time immemorial. And yet, older people I talk to — ones old enough to remember seeing the low-speed, low-stakes train wreck that was my own generation hurtling through college and into the workforce — confirm my impression that This Time Really Is Different. The upper stratum of the Trophy Kids really are going into college expecting to live in a sort of Nerf universe where nothing ever really hurts, and there’s always an adult to pick them up and put them back on track. And they’re coming out into the workforce expecting the same sort of personal concierge service from a world that, as I was myself dismayed to find 20 years ago, really doesn’t have time to care how they feel.
Not that I blame the kids. Their parents are their ones who did it to them, hovering over them every spare minute — and in those rare moments when they have some time off from the endless commute between soccer practice and enrichment activities, calling the cops on anyone who leaves an 11-year-old outside to play basketball for an hour, so that their parents will have to hover too.
All this helicoptering is supposed to help the kids. Yet raising kids who have never experienced a serious setback isn’t helping them, as Julie Lythcott-Haims points out at Slate. “As parents, our intentions are sound — more than sound,” she writes. “Yet, having succumbed to a combination of safety fears, a college admissions arms race, and perhaps our own needy ego, our sense of what is ‘best’ for our kids is completely out of whack. We don’t want our kids to bonk their heads or have hurt feelings, but we’re willing to take real chances with their mental health?”
Lythcott-Haims goes on to point out a growing body of research that cannot prove, but certainly suggests strongly, that all this protection is making kids more mentally fragile. Hovering robs kids of resilience and what psychologists call “self-efficacy”: the sense that they themselves are capable of producing the outcomes they want.
Childhood should be the time when it’s OK to fall down, because there’s someone around who can set limits and help you fix it if things go wrong.
The movement for free-range parenting is a good start toward building a better childhood for our kids. But it probably won’t succeed without rethinking a lot of broader trends, from legal liability to our hypertrophied education system, that have gone into constructing the Nerf universe.
Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes on economics, business and public policy.
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