Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Prepared for life or protected from life?

This week on Facebook, one of my younger colleagues (who is just a couple of years older than my son) shared a post entitled Why Generation Y is Unhappy.  Generation Y, also known as Millennials, is the group of people born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s, so both my children fall into this category.  Because of this I read it with a keen interest.

According to the article, Generation Ys are unhappy because their expectations are much higher than the reality they face.  Their parents (my generation) are the Baby Boomers born in the 1950s, and our own parents grew up in the era of the Great Depression and the Second World War (my mother was born in 1929 so experienced both of these as a child).  Because of this my parents brought me up to believe in the value of a secure job, to strive to purchase a house for security, and to think in terms of a single career for life.  Our expectation was that it would take considerable time to "rise through the ranks", but that eventually if we worked hard we would make it.  As a young teacher in my 20s I never would have thought of applying for promotions that were way above what I thought I could do - I have to say my generation was pretty humble, and many colleagues of the same age as me do find the "arrogance of youth" pretty irritating at times when Millennials think that after a year of two of experience they are qualified enough to "run the show" and apply for positions that we have taken 20 years to work ourselves into.  This arrogance is interesting - some time ago my son told me that his boss had had a conversation with him where this word cropped up.  My hunch was that my son is competent at what he does, but that his expectations are probably higher than the reality of where he currently is at this stage of his career, just a year and a half off a graduate scheme.  His boss was probably a Baby Boomer like myself.

Anyway the article in question explained that the Baby Boomers generally did better than expected - and because of this they were happy.  I thought about my own situation, and that was certainly true.  I was the first person in my entire family to get a university degree, and also the first person to own property - even before my own parents bought their house (mine of course was much smaller, but still I was able to do this in my early/mid-twenties).  Because we experienced success, so the argument goes, we also encouraged our children to strive for success.  Our GenY children grew up not just wanting, but actually expecting to do better than us.  We encouraged our children to feel "special" - and the reality is that most of them are not!   Because our children feel special, they feel they should be excelling in the workplace.  They are not content or patient like our generation was - they are highly ambitious and they have an inflated view of their own abilities (brought about by us, their parents who constantly showered them with praise) which means they are not content to simply be doing well.  Because their expectations are so much higher than the reality in which they find themselves they become disappointed and frustrated - and unhappy - which brings us back to the title of the article.

Enter social media.  My children have grown up in various countries and attended international schools because I worked as a teacher in those schools.  The vast majority of their peers at these schools were the sons and daughters of international businessmen living a luxurious expat life.  My children's friends on Facebook are still those peers - and now many of them are doing extremely well as they have entered mummy or daddy's business - and some seem so wealthy that they don't really have to work very much at all!  And of course all of the highlights of these great lives are posted on Facebook for everyone to admire.  GenY kids, like my children, therefore could well end up not just feeling unhappy, but also feeling inadequate when they compare their lives with their friends.  Both my kids are actually doing really well - but I often wonder how they feel about their lives compared with those that they went to school with.

Today I'm looking at this from a parents' perspective.  I've started to read Julie Lythcott-Haims' book How to Raise an Adult.  It's an interesting read!  Julie starts by comparing our childhood with that of our children.  We had a pretty free time of it.  My mother didn't work outside of the home and generally gave us lots of freedom.  We lived on the edge of London, took public transport or walked to school, played outside, visited shopping centres, hung around the neighbourhood parks and so on. Once I left the house, my parents had no real idea where I was, and I certainly had no way of contacting them to let them know if I'd missed the bus home, for example.  We just turned up late and that was OK - I didn't have to deal with a panic stricken parent wondering where I was.

But by the time I became a parent things were different.  Children didn't play outside so much.  Often children didn't take themselves to school but were driven by their parents.  There was also much more emphasis on parents helping their children to do their homework.  My mother, who left school at the age of 13 when her school was bombed in 1942, didn't have the education to help me when I was a teenager.  Plus there weren't such things as standardized tests.  Certainly I had no idea as a teenager how my "scores" compared with students of a similar age on the other side of the world.

Another big difference, as mentioned before, is that suddenly children came to school with a much higher self-esteem.  This wasn't true of the children I taught in the first few years I became a teacher - working in a mining community during the miners's strike of the early 1980s - but by the time I became an international teacher I experienced students who had been told for years that they were wonderful.  I remember the horror that these students experienced when they didn't get As or B+s in their assignments - because they'd always had this grade inflation in previous schools.  For me, coming from the UK, an "average" grade was a C.  For the American students I taught, a C was like failing!

Children's time became much more regimented.  For the first time I noticed things like after school activities and clubs - something that didn't exist in my day unless you were on the sports team.  By the time I moved onto my second international school the term "helicopter parents" was becoming more common.  Somehow the Baby Boomers who had championed free thinking, questioned authority and were passionate about the rights of the individual, were becoming more and more involved in their own children's lives.  This was a huge contrast with the role taken by their own parents.  I remember in Thailand my son talking about one of his friend's mothers as being his friend's "best friend" and I remember saying to him "I'm not your friend, I'm your mother!"  I had no wish to be seen in a different role - but maybe I was strange.  At the same time, the mothers of my childrens' friends, just like me, were working mothers.  They were two income families and talked about "quality time not quantity time".   I counted myself lucky that my kids were both in the same school that I was, and that actually we had quite a lot of quantity time!

But what has been the outcome?  A whole generation of children who are still, as young adults, relying on their parents.  And a whole generation of parents who measure their own success by the accomplishments of their children.  And the question has to be asked - are the GenY adults unhappy because my safety-conscious, academic achievement focused, self-esteem promoting generation has robbed these children of the opportunities to develop into healthy adults?  Are GenY adults unhappy because they are used to problems being solved for them and because they are used to constant praise?  Are they not resilient because they have not ever had to encounter the challenges and bad times that life threw their way?  Are they actually capable of thriving in the real world on their own? Have we prepared our kids FOR life, or have we simply protected our kids FROM life?

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