In the summer after high school I worked inside the coal mines to put away money for the fall college term. There I met a seventeen-year-old man - not a boy by any stretch, a man - who had got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and immediately went into the mines to earn a living for them. I don't remember his name, only that at seventeen he was so much more mature than I was - a maturity level I never reached until my thirties. Somehow we have to reverse the prolonged adolescence that is the modern college man and woman. A nation IS its citizens, and we are turning ours into bowls of jelly.
As a kid, I walked a mile to and from school, and was outside with my friends until my curfew, which was frequently after dark). I lived in an upper middle class/affluent neighborhood. Life still had it's traumas, but you were expected to deal with them.
When I was fourteen, I was competing with other kids my age to mow lawns in the summer, and shovel driveways (Michigan) in the winter. My first paycheck came from working as a caddie. At sixteen, I started bussing tables, and worked various restaurant jobs through college.
I now live in a similar neighborhood, and never see kids working around the neighborhood, or playing, as far as that goes. I don't see them working in restaurants, or other small businesses much, and wonder how they spend their days.
It was my generation that started this downward spiral into prolonged adolescence. My kids, born in the early 80s, were at the beginning of the 'everybody gets a trophy, nobody's feelings should ever be hurt, or feel ashamed' generation. As a parent, even though I knew this was ridiculous, we were constantly fighting this mindset that was being promoted at the public schools, and local 'mom' culture.
You shouldn't get a trophy if you don't deserve it.
Getting your feelings hurt is part of learning how to cope as an adult
Shame is a way of telling you that you've made bad decisions
I'm not sure there's anyway to get our society back to what it was. I don't blame the moms as much as the genetic need to nurture and protect children is very strong, but the fathers seem to have abdicated their role in telling kids to get out of the house, don't cry unless you're bleeding, it's time to get a job, you're eating too much, etc.
Being a parent is hard, and 30-40 years ago, parents decided it was more than they wanted to do, so they avoided the hard parts. This is where it took us.
And, my grandparents and parent said my generation had it too soft.
I just realized I may have been channeling Dana Carvey.....'And we LIKED it'
My dad was born in 1956. He built the house I grew up in on land he bought soon after he graduated high school because he'd been working and saving for years by the time he was in his early 20s. He started building the house right after he was laid off due to the recession in the early 80s. He did everything--plumbing, electric, you name it. He still cuts and gathers firewood every year to heat that house, still does small building projects around his land. His truck needed a new bed recently. Instead of spending a bunch of money on a used one, he welded another bed for himself. Every car we had (not many), we drove until it was on the verge of 300,000 miles because he would just keep fixing it. He taught my sister and I how to change tires, change the oil, file saws, how to take care of machinery, sharpen mower blades, how and when to rototill, plant green manure, dress a deer, the names of the trees in our woods, etc., etc. Now, in retirement, he spends his time building engines from scratch and putting together old cars, loading his own bullets, reading reading reading, walking in the woods. He would help me with my trigonometry and calculus homework when I was in school, gives me suggestions on books nowadays. He worked at a factory for around 40 years, something he didn't like but did anyway to make ends meet, never went to college, never owned a cell phone, but is completely content. He is, quite literally, my hero (my mom's pretty amazing, too). I think a lot of people are not so lucky to have such role models anymore.
This piece to me connects to Shrier's recent article in which she interviews Leonard Sax. I went to the library and got a few of his books after reading that yesterday. I finished The Collapse of Parenting last night, which pretty much sums up the current situation. One of the biggest things I took away was that parents used to be both strict and loving; now, they think they have to be one or the other. Guess which one most choose?
You've obviously never owned a dachshund. If you're ever passing through Iowa I'd be happy to introduce you to Walter and Teddy. They'll change your opinion.
Just...and what is it that we keep hearing "control of my body", while giving NO support for the body in the womb? split. I am fine with "it is your decision"...result is?
Yes. I’m your age. Too many parents are out-sourcing parenting to schools and park districts. They only want the nice parts of “parenting”. They are surprised that they don’t know their adolescent kids. Well, duh.
And it gets worse with each half generation. I’ve told my kids I fear the schools will turn my grandchildren into people I loathe, and who loathe me (and their parents.)
Most teachers and social workers don’t see it. They can’t. They’re swimming in it.
They are swimming in it. I have two friends whose wives are counselors that view everyone as damaged. As noted in the column, they work from the perspective that something has caused you trauma and you just don't know it yet.
I am a social worker in a high school and I refuse to raise our kids this way. I am unpopular with staff and occasionally with students sometimes, because while I am empathetic and cognizant of how life experiences impact kids, I DO.NOT coddle them! This is a major disservice to them and the county...I am tired of watching it.
Do teenage girls even babysit anymore? I started at 50 cents an hour and worked up to 1.50. Had a nice little business of referrals going. Saved for the clothes I wanted since money was tight at home.
As soon as my kid turned 16 he had to have a summer job. Bagging groceries was the first one.
The kids around the corner from us have affluent parents and the word is parents. They parented their children. All of their children had to participate in sports and all of them had to have a job.
When they were 11 or 12 we hired them to do light cleaning around our house, clean the base boards, sweep of the decks. We always overpaid them. They mowed lawns, babysat and when they were by law eligible to work, they waited tables.
They three oldest all graduated Summa cum laude and the youngest is in his junior year at college.
The operative word here is parenting and providing a safe, stable home life.
Many parents get shamed if they allow their teens to do the tasks you describe. "You let your 15 year old mow lawns?!? Don't you think that is dangerous?" You let your teen babysit?!? That is a big risk; something could happen and she won't handle it correctly. And the parents of the children she is babysitting aren't concerned? Sounds like bad parenting on both of your parts." "You allow your teen to work during the school year?!? What about homework; how does she find time to get it done?" And on and on.
Parenting is hard and I’m far from a perfect parent. One of the toughest parts is to fight against this culture that we read about on Common Sense. And we all know kids who turned out bad despite good parenting.
Kids do still work. My 14-yo got a summer job as camp counselor and she sells clothing online. To someone else’s point we never hear of the kids who are hardworking.
We simply don't prepare our kids in their teens, to be adults. We avoid that part of parenting and assume that college, or someone else, will do it. 25 is the new 15.
We have 87 houses in our neighborhood. We have a pretty good supply of babysitters and house sitters and kids advertising on our Facebook page.
I don’t see kids mowing lawns for hire, but maybe I’m missing it. I usually see landscaping service companies do that. When my 6 year old gets a bit older, he will, indeed, he mowing our lawn.
Girl falsely accuses teacher. She gets fired. Charges all dropped because they were false from beginning to end. Teacher without job at school she loved.
Covid. Everything was shut down and they had to isolate. They were helping their younger brothers and sisters and everyone was online. Only part of the story, but still pretty significant for most kids for a couple years.
Mine did and still do! Both started babysitting at around 13. Now 19 & 23 and even the 23 yr old will babysit at night & on weekends sometimes for extra money. (She has a full time job)
I have a theory on that. (I have a theory on everything.) Throughout history, men traditionally built the material world; women built every man and woman in it. That's changed now - in large part due to the need for both partners to work - one full-time, often a second part-time job. The partner then works, at a minimum, part-time, sometimes full-time. So who's raising the children? Third parties - nannies, babysitters, daycare, government schools.
Or nobody. Who teaches little boys to be men? Nobody. Who teaches little girls to be women? Ditto. Who is on watch when gub'ment schools fill their little heads with Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Warrioring, community organizing, and that Madison and Jefferson were, first and foremost, slaveholders? Nobody. Nobody is watching the third parties. Nobody has the time. I see a glimmer here and there suggesting that may be changing. Sure hope so.
So much to discuss here! I completely agree. Believe me when I say my opinion is quite unpopular with many women, but why are you even having children if you are going to drop off an 8 week old, 10 hours per day, at a daycare center, while you go to work? I stayed home with my daughter until she was 2 and 1/2 yrs old. Was it hard financially? You bet. Was it ultimately worth it? Absolutely!
This is the reason why I am for the child tax credit for stay at home parents in lieu of subsidizing childcare/pre-K. $500 per child can be life changing for a family. Families can then decide if they want one parent home. Like you, I stayed home when my kids were young. I was making more $$ than my spouse at the time I left work. It was incredibly hard in the early years for so many reasons including financial, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Subsidizing childcare is only going to make it more expensive than it already is.
Ha! I was born in 1960 and had my kids late in life. Many of the parents that had kids in my youngest’s classes are 10-15 yrs younger than me. I used to be appalled at how these Moms knew every detail of every piece of homework & test the kids had to take. They micromanaged every move their kids made. Helicopter parents. Sometimes I’d start to doubt myself because I told my kids that their schoolwork was their job to keep track of, not mine. I was about the only one. The youngest is now a sophomore at an out of state college. The societal influences of “taking care of your mental health” (ie: stay in bed and skip class if you’re having a bad day)derailed her a bit in the second semester last year, but hopefully she stays on track this year.
On February 8, 1922, a newspaper published in Massillon, Ohio mentioned the term participation trophy, so it would appear this harmful act has been around for a while, but alas, down through history, adults have always lamented about the youth. But here are the implications of participation trophies:
I’ve concluded that secularization is really the prime mover in our descent to jellydom. Materialism, especially in the globalized internet age, is a highway to despair. Why bother going through the pain and effort of becoming a responsible adult when your reward is a life of insatiable status anxiety? Young people are opting out of “real life” because we haven’t given them a reason to really live.
Incidentally, this is precisely the message that Jordan Peterson delivers in his “rules for life” and it’s no wonder he’s so popular among young adult men.
You don't need the promise and reward of an afterlife in order to have a reason to live, that's just silly. Responsibility, and morality itself for that matter, exist completely independent of religion. They are universal human attributes, not divine gifts bestowed by a higher power.
Besides, life itself is reason enough to live a noble and fulfilling existence. If anything, our mortality only serves to make our short time here more precious, not less.
Young people are not 'opting out of of real life' because they are godless heathens, there's all sorts of reasons for that: lower standard of living, bleak environmental future, the primacy of social media, lazy parenting...the list goes on and on. Sure religious participation is at an all-time low, but there are oodles of things changing right now from a few decades ago. Correlation is not causation.
Regardless, I would vehemently argue you don't need faith to have purpose in life.
It’s ironic he mentions Jordan Peterson, who often uses the Christian Bible to support his ideas, but ultimately does not believe the myths himself. Whatever god Peterson believes in, it isn’t Jehovah.
Immaturity is the word. I know exactly what you are saying. I was just an immature, irresponsible kid when I went to college. In the middle of my junior year, I walked away from my classes.
I tried to get a job but had no skills so I joined the Army. I saved my money and when I was discharged went back to school and because I had walked away without dropping my classes, I was 13 grade points down. That gave me incentive to actually study and I pulled myself out of the grade point hole in my first semester.
I was still an immature jerk but at least in this area, schooling, I had purpose and drive. I had a goal and I pursued it.
Not all of us are wired the same way. I was a shiftless, lazy immature nitwit. Sure, some of the students have mental challenges but I believe, and that is just my opinion, most of the washouts to be like I was, immature and directionless.
The author of the article, to me, lays the blame on the universities for student failure. It sounded like the same song. Everybody is a victim Nobody is at fault for bad behavior. It's the institution's fault not the student. I'm sure the schools could to more to council these kids but I wasn't a victim. I was a jerk.
You're right, it did ay the blame on parents and students, but also schools that oversell their ability to "manage" the students. Overall, I thought it was a balanced article that affixed blame to everyone responsible for the failure of students.
I didn't read the article that way. The author talks about more support staff and counseling. If you read leftist articles the solution to bad behavior is counseling. Nobody is responsible for their behavior because everybody is a victim and counseling is the solution.
I actually got the impression that the author was trying to say that parents are responsible to prepare their children for college and shouldn't expect universities to be babysitters.
This is bullshit, I went to college had challenges , went to a professor for assistance when having a hard time in chemistry and he looked at my grades and said "yep, you are having trouble " that was it. A counselor told me if you need a swift kick in the ass you can come and see me. I busted my ass , and finished college because I wanted to succeed. Then I went to med school in a foreign country and busted my ass again and succeeded. A bunch of pussies we are raising who can't , hunker down and just do it. Time passes anyway, the only thing to battle is the books and some ups and downs of relationships. Weak , Weak ,Weak people . I was taught not to feel sorry for myself . Don't feel sorry for yourself , have a Gil and just study, study, study . We are turning into amoebas .
What I learned from this article was the amazing amount of kids with mental health problems. What have we done as a society to create a cohort of youngsters who can't function without the supervision of mommy? This is what we have to deal with as a society today. Maybe the flood of illegals at our border is not a bad thing as they will add some backbone to an over protected generation.
I suspect social media plays a significant role. Imagine where we’ll be in another generation as virtual reality begins to supplant real, direct experiences.
God. When I came out of the mine after my first day, I was SOOOOOO proud that I could blow black snot out of my nose. Made me feel like a man. LOL Like everyone is saying here, young people can be so stupid.....
Ditto! I worked in a Pepperidge Farm factory on an assembly line - think "I love Lucy" but without the laughs! I did get to eat the food but MAN, was that a good reminder that I needed a college degree!
avoiding loans was a great idea...until the incentives were so perversely inverted. It will likely become impossible to avoid taking loans for most schools now, and mathematically inevitable to accept them based on your current or likely income when a large portion will be automatically forgiven based on the current DoE plan (5% DI payment cap, 10 year repayment)
I did a little "Dad's investing course" for my two sons - complete with lectures. The two flip charts that seemed to have the most effect were the "Future Earnings Potential" and the
"Compounding" chart. The first simply plots age against future earnings available to you. Of course, your working life starts out at the maximum, since all your work life is ahead of you. As you age, it goes down and down and down, until about 65-70 it goes very close to zero. At that point you likely have a lot of life ahead and NO potential to make money, so if you didn't put any retirement, it's cat food for you.
The second chart is of course an exponential curve, which goes as: A = pe^(rt), where A = amount at the end, p = principal, e = magic number, 2.718281828... r and t are rate and time. We all know that rate and time are in the exponent, so a tiny improvement in either one gives vastly better money at the end, but the takeaway lesson is that the same magic formula that makes you rich also makes the banker from whom you borrowed rich too - on your back. So use credit very wisely and very little. I've never seen a banker or a broker with a smaller house than his client.
You must be kidding me with this article. What’s wrong with the parents and if their kids are so mentally disturbed maybe college is not the place for them now. Seems like it’s time for the parents to grow up. I went to university for an education not to receive social services.
Sometimes it’s the parents. But it seems to me that society has generally created the expectation that, just as everyone is expected to finish high school, the next expected step is going to college. Obama’s wife said as much.
I disagree. College has indeed become a de facto babysitting institution for many who neither want it nor need it. It’s expensive in that it a) costs a lot of money up front and b) delays millions of people each year from making any positive contribution to society.
The fact that a third (!) of enrolling college freshmen don’t become sophomores is telling. You don’t need college to paint a house, or to build, plumb or electrify it, or to drive a semi. College is irrelevant to lots of jobs that pay quite well. Smart people recognize that and many go to work straight out of high school. Not all smart people go to college.
These mentally fragile people with "eating disorders", and the propensity for "self-harm" wouldn't last a day doing any real work as a plumber, electrician, or a mechanic.
What is also very great about the American college system is that a plumber, mechanic, etc. can enroll in a business or accounting class to support the growth of their business or a theater, horticulture, or philosophy class to support an interest.
A LOT is the parents. I'm on the FB parent pages of my two in college. Wow. It's a therapist's dream. Parents posting about crying while making their kid's favorite meal after they left for college ["Tonight I cried over chicken."] (yes, actual quote), orchestrating roommates, complaining that their son was woken up in his dorm by drunk girls. It goes on. The upside is that it provides wonderful fodder for our family group chat.
Parents complaining about their son being awakened in his dorm by drunk girls? Seriously? When I was in college we would have prayed for that. But, then, dorms weren't co-ed either. That kid has some seriously messed up parents.
btw, get off the FB parent page. And FB generally.
Yes the parent Facebook pages for the colleges are pretty incredible. I’d love to just constantly post the eye roll emoji on most of their posts. Have you read any of the grown and flown stuff? Most of that is pretty eye roll worthy as well.
"College has indeed become a de facto babysitting institution for many who neither want it nor need it."
As they say at the shootin' matches, you drove dead center. My cousin's son told him fifteen years ago that he absolutely did not want to go to college. He instead went to work for the power company; within six months he was stringing 765,000 Volt lines on the top of 150' towers. He's now FAR up in the management hierarchy, strong, muscular, self-confident, with piercing eyes, management skills, more toys than he knows what do do with - and by the way, beating good-looking women off with a stick. And no college loans to worry about. Now If I could just convince MY two sons of that ....
I just sent two off to college for the first time, different schools (one large public, one small private). At both parent orientations, 90% of the information given was about diversity, mental health and all of the resources they have to help kids. Only 10% was about the actual education. It was bananas.
She recommended kids having a job first. She also recommended taking a gap year. It’s at the end of the article. Basically you can’t get them ready in one summer. Make sure they can get themselves up and get to work on their own before sending them off to college.
Totally agree. Like this is outright insanity. I was the first person in my family to go to university here in Canada and it was a thrilling achievement for me at the time. I felt nothing less than 90% stoke and excitement mixed with a minor amount of 5% of fear I would fail and 5% fear of the student loans I needed to take on at the time. Looking back my university experience (which I finished in 2010) was just the most incredible experience in my life. I loved it and it was incredible. There were some moments that led to me being humbled and realizing I needed to change my definition of "work" but god to read these posts where somehow in the span on 10 years signing up for university of college is now being presented as this traumatizing experience where the school is somehow (mysteriously) responsible for managing the mental health of these students is beyond strange. For fucks sake go to your first year class which lets me honest....isn't going to be that hard...and just do the homework, enjoy meeting your friends and just have a blast. This is one of the oddest posts I have seen on Common Sense.
Common Sense is this: If you are lucky enough to be admitted to a Canadian or US university of College you are literally amongst the most lucky people on the face of the earth. Enjoy it and stop the victimization drama
I have a coffee shop and I have to yet hire a young person who cleans the bathrooms, although it is in the job description they agree to be paid for. Those kids leave their homes with basically no challenge ever, no skills, and no work ethics. Every attempt made to treat them as adults is an offense. These people will lead the world in a bit. We are all fucked 🤣.
The fact that 'quietly quitting' is in the conversation shows how far we've descended. This is a term to justify being an awful employee, and is line with 'whatever shaming' being a way to justify behavior that should make one ashamed.
Ha-ha, as a supervisor, I had one of my employees complain about me to our division director that I didn’t love her enough. A young woman in her 20s. That was her exact complaint. She expected me to behave like her parent.
I think the problem starts with early childhood education when the only goal is to make everyone, feel good. And it continues through all levels of education with social media reviews and feedback. Everyone has to feel happy. So the students are able to avoid challenges and hard work. But what works for toddlers, shouldn’t for kids beginning with age 7, I think. Yes, you don’t want toddlers to cry. But at some point our children must be toughen up and learn responsibilities.
I see how my grandchildren are being raised: we cannot criticize them because they get upset and we cannot make them do things they don’t like. When we play a game of chess, I cannot win, because my granddaughter starts crying and refuses to play ever again. Something is terribly wrong about this kind of parenting. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when young people look for safe comfortable places in life more than for anything else.
"I see how my grandchildren are being raised: we cannot criticize them because they get upset and we cannot make them do things they don’t like. When we play a game of chess, I cannot win, because my granddaughter starts crying and refuses to play ever again. Something is terribly wrong about this kind of parenting. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the young people look for safe comfortable places in life more than for anything else."
Yeah thats not good for the kids & will end up hurting them. As a mom of young kids, we set expectations & rules. Our kids do chores. They obviously have to do things they don't like. Life isn't always about having fun. The expectation is that they clean up their toys before leaving the room. Actually you do want toddlers to cry. They have to learn that crying will not make me give in & spoil them. If they cry for no good reason, I walk away & let them cry it out. If I'd try to stop the tears by doing whatever they want, then they'll always cry & throw temper tantrums their whole life to get their way.
Our neighbor, when her daughter was little, wouldn't let her cry. She would do whatever the kid wanted, just so she'd stop crying. Now the daughter is a teenager. If she wants her mom to buy her stuff, she throws a teenage temper tantrum: hissy fit, slamming doors, threatening suicide. That's one that teen girls love to do.
We aim to have our kids follow our rules & expectations. They have to learn that they can't always get their way in life. They have to learn disappointment. The most valuable lesson.
There is a middle ground, too, which is appropriate in many circumstances: Don't give in to what he wants, but hug him as he cries. I remember when my belly got too big with #2 to carry #1. He had a tantrum on the sidewalk. I felt like crying, too. I told him I can't carry you, but we can sit here and hug until you feel better, and then we can walk and hold hands. So we did. He's a pretty well-adjusted fellow, now, and has even carried me from time to time! Other important motherly instruction includes "So f'in what?" when dealing with minor upsets, and "It's your own damn fault and no one feels sorry for you." And "hearts are made for loving, but you have a right to protect yourself from people who want to hurt you." A lot of weird parents out there today, hurting their kids with saccharine sweet denials of reality. Children should be taught that they are loved just because, that the world does not revolve around them, and how to contribute to the world around them. They are like threads, and the parents' job is to weave them into the fabric of society. Love isn't like Disneyland.
I take it back. I have two more employees who do/did: the manager who is gay, and a former employee who is a conservative and who declined the unemployment in 2020 and looked for a job who allowed him to continue to work.
When we were in dire straits back in 2010 (mortgage upside down, no work to be found, savings dwindling), the wife persuaded me, against my better judgement, to get food stamps and state medical coverage for indigents. I said, "But we're able bodied and ought to be able to work!" Indeed it was not long before I found a good contract job in technology, and it's been good since then. I felt ashamed using those damned food stamps, and I would never recommend it to anyone who wants to keep their self-respect.
I see nothing wrong with the society helping when you are in need. I have wonderful hard working friends who were on food stamps for a few months while he was in school and she was not allowed to work due to her immigration status. Problem is with those who think they are entitled to that, forever if possible!
What’s baffling is that it’s not like employers pluck people from the ether to work for them. People apply for and ask for a job that once they get they treat like it’s nothing.
There’s a scene in the movie Cinderella Man where a thousand men show up at the docks for work and the foreman comes out and says he’ll take 50, which is a fraction of the men there. The rest go home during the Depression to little to no food. I think about that a lot and my grandparent’s generation, both my grandmothers had four brothers each who traveled across country for work programs. Did they feel despair? We’re they hopeful at all? We have so much more than they did on every level and yet this weird despair that has no remedy takes so many people. The bar that is placed on work with meaning and balance is invisible. Does anyone ever feel “balanced?” Or “fulfilled?” These terms are used to keep people constantly searching and unsatisfied. Were any of my uncles fulfilled or were they just happy to get a paycheck before they all got shipped off to WWII? Would we survive another Great Depression?
Yes there are young people today who are being told that their job/career needs to have meaning, to have purpose, to "fulfill them".
Which is nonsense. Fulfillment comes from your marriage, your children, your family & community. Anyone hoping their job will bring meaning to their life will keeping hoping forever.
Maybe some parents are giving the wrong message to their kids, who are looking for career guidance. We need to tell our kids to find a job that earns a paycheck; seek meaning in their families & communities.
That’s the truth! Are we though I’m not so sure. We are such a great country and we are allowing all and sundry to make a real mess out of us - it’s a pity we need to get back on track. We have to stop doing a lot of the crazy shit we been doing the last 20 years. Like FB Social Media etc we have to get back to our communities our churches there is work to go let’s get cracking!
Sorry but I read this instead as an indictment of America and American parenting. We have sent 17 year olds off to fight on vicious places such as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Is it really asking too much to expect an 18 year old to attend classes and take care of themselves? If it is, our problem is way, way deeper than a 33% college attrition rate. Our progressive friends scoff when we refer to "snowflakes." What does this essay reveal? Maybe it's long past time to take away the toys, and the psychiatrists and the Ritalin and start toughening up these kids. Micro-aggressions? Seriously?
I would liken it to the tail wagging the dog. Not only are so many young adults 'micro-aggressed' to the point of parody - their apparent affliction turns their professors and academic institutions into the same spineless jelly like pansies as they scramble out of the way to escape the kids' sanctimonious ire.
When teachers and school administrators have to prostate themselves apologizing to the outraged student body for remarks they may have uttered, actions they may have instituted, or people they invited to speak - examples of which we have read too often about here at Common Sense and elsewhere - you know we have a huge problem in this country. Our future leaders are in this cohort.
Thanks, Lee. Imagine if the first group of clowns who "occupied" a university building or harassed a professor or fellow student were summarily expelled - with the black mark on their records - how fast all this nonsense would stop. Imagine, also, a parent who just shelled out $70 K in tuition at Yale finding out that it was forfeited by his or her child's woke temper tantrum. But until that happens this nonsense will continue.
By the way, a father who tells his son with a scraped knee to "suck it up" is not a bad parent. He is placing the injury in context and not making it open heart surgery. And, sure, studying is a pain in the ass, especially when there are fun things to do. But that doesn't mean the kid has "a learning disorder," requiring tutors, therapy and drugs.
All I hope is that the Millennials hand the leadership to the Gen Alpha and skip Gen Z. That's assuming Gen Alpha is an improvement, which isn't likely but *could* happen. They're ten years old now, so mebbe there's hope?
Ah my friend, jt, maybe if we just let boys be boys and girls be girls and gave them plenty of time for unsupervised play and getting in trouble, instead of managing every second of their little lives, we might have some normal kids again?
Unsupervised play is the best thing for kids, I agree.
We don't overschedule our kids & we don't do a lot of activities or planned things. We tell them "Go play in the basement" "Go play in the yard". Entertain yourselves.
Yeah, that's mostly all it takes, AFAIK. That was one-a the main points of "The Coddling of the American Mind." Simple play. The book explained the fear that their kids would be kidnapped was *way* more than the reality of it.
And boys will be boys if parents let them be. Girls too, if they stay off the 'Net. That's the other big problem. SM.
you gotta keep kids off the internet as much as possible. Social media use in kids/teens leads to depression/anxiety/lack of sleep, girls becoming trans, suicides & boys becoming mass shooters.
I always tell parents to not buy a smartphone for their kids. Buy a phone that can only call/text. when they are older. When younger, they do not need devices. If the school gives them devices, limit the use. and Filter the internet.
Or maybe we should re institute the draft, although with our Military being run by the likes of Thoroughly Modern Milley, it's probably the same coddling and relaxed standards we see in colleges. Especially when they're purging the actual war fighters.
Pathetic students like those described in this pathetic article should not be in college. They should be in boot camp, along with their failures of parents.
The military does a great job training these soft young men into adult, and it does it very fast. It did it with me. Looking back, in 12 to 15 weeks, the military can convert a soft 18 years old into someone who can get up early, work for 12 hours or more, take responsibility. Some people failed at this but they are in the extreme minority. Most took the responsibility in stride.
I think there’s an article on common sense/the Free Press about the military having troubles recruiting enough people, because they are either too overweight or have drug problems in their past, so they don’t qualify for the military.
There are several things I tell young person who goes to college:
- Pick degree that will land you a Job, that means STEM, not some "studies" that will guarantee you unemployment and student debt but not thing else.
- Don't pick college based on following => Their sports team(chances is you will be financing this BS from your tuition with no benefit to you), how campus looks (you are financing it from your tuition with little benefit) or how "college experience is"
- Pick college that offers best ROI, if local in state collage costs couple thousand, its is financially irresponsible to pay $50k for college in different state. If you are not attending Harvard or some other Ivy league, there is 99% chance that after you get your first job, nobody will ever ask you where you got your degree.
- Get the degree as soon as possible=>Your goal is to get the degree (peace of paper), that will get your foot in the door for well paid job, your goal is not to experiment or have collage experience because if you finish fast, you will be able to earn income and do what every you liked on your own dime without going in to debt or wasting money.
- No mater what your university admin says to you, that you are "family" and other BS, know they will get rid of you as soon as you cant pay and will try to milk you until last $. So after you finish, you don't owe anything to your university, you paid everything to them trough your tuition, there is absolutly no need to give them another dime afterwards.
- Due to all woke BS that is currently going on campuses, be carful don't engage in some "revolutions" or other BS that is going on on campus, because every revolution eats its own, today they will be with you, but one wrong thought you will be burnt on the cross.
Other than that, good luck, and the faster you finish, faster you can enjoy your life, and belive me better to be young and have income and do what you want, than be young broke and settled with college debt.
Don't got into STEM if you don't have the aptitude or had not put in the hard work in high school. I went to aerospace engineering in the 90s, and after the freshman year, 1/2 of the class dropped out of engineering and went into business or other crap.
We don't want stupid people or people who don't work very hard in STEM. Solving science, engineering, and high mathematical problems is hard work.
In my experience (15+ years in a rail engineering firm), nobody solves "high mathematical problems" any more. Software does that. I also observed that being a junior engineer isn't necessarily all that good a job. And those people who went into business? Some of them end up managing the early-onset STEM folks. You don't need to be an engineer to be a good project manager or executive.
The nature of today precise engineering cannot rely on close form equations anymore. They are are used in the undergrad to teach engineering concepts. For more real life complex problems, computer modeling is needed but they are based on the fundamental mathematical concepts. Good modelers are also good at math, more often they have higher degrees because they know about BS in, BS out. The rest just push buttons.
Project management people requires good planning and good financial skills. Some are better at it than others, and some prefer never having to do it.
When I was in college for the first time, back in the 80s, several of my male friends were planning to major in Engineering. But there was a specific calculus class you had to pass in order to get into the Engineering program. It weeded out a LOT of prospective engineers, including some of my friends. It was intended to, I think. I'm not sure that it was that the subject matter was that hard, but rather that it was taught in such a way as to discourage those without the necessary grit from continuing with a challenging course of study.
I think that most engineering students find freshman calculus is hard. Very few of us got A. While the majority passed but it was the test of fire for those who still wanted to pursue the engineering school. Then we went on to differential equations, Laplace transform, Fourier transform and everyone struggled with them. Not until we were in the senior year, or graduate school that we understood why they were taught.
I knew some people at my firm who had really fine minds and all-the-way through technical expertise like you're describing. I don't think the work could have gotten done without them, but also it couldn't have been done with them alone, because they are just too time-limited and expensive. The drones were needed to turn the crank. Project management is less constrained: it is a talent and a personality type, but there are more people of different backgrounds who can do it. I admired the construction project managers the most, just because of the high-stakes physical aspect and relentless schedule of what they were doing. They really had to be at the top of their game all the time. These were not always engineers, sometimes they had a trade school background with years on the railroad.
I had a liberal arts education at a top-ten liberal arts college and wouldn't trade it for the world. As a vehicle for mental training and development it is unbeatable. An honors-level capstone in History or English literature is one of the most intellectually demanding things you can do, much harder than anything you'll likely face on the job. But this kind of education has to be of the best, most demanding quality. A few soft humanities classes mixed with "activism" won't do it.
For most people, professional training should come later, when one's mind and experience are fully developed to take advantage of it. In my lengthy career, I worked with many STEM people who only knew how to do the narrow thing they were trained for. Many of them were engineers, so presumably they had passed courses in higher mathematics, but they could not write, reason, or problem-solve independently. In my career I was always busy, always developing new things, always moving into new fields and taking on new responsibilities, for which my education made me very well suited. I found there was a lot of value in the business and technical world for this kind of capability.
To be fair, liberal arts is not for everybody, both for money reasons (it is best to avoid loans for this) and because it usually takes a while longer to establish yourself in a career. A lot of people don't have the privilege of being able to do this. It can't be the model for a national educational system, but it should be a respected option.
1970s STEM graduate here… went back in the liberal arts post retirement. I was expecting what you said, but got a lot of indoctrination, what to think rather than how. If you ask a STEM prof in general, “how do you know that?”they have an answer. If I asked “how do you know that” to one of these it was seen as a provocation and an indicator of incorrect thinking.
Things have decayed massively on the liberal arts front since I was an undergraduate (mid 1980's). In fact, I wonder if there is even such a thing as a liberal arts *education* anymore, judging from the communications from my alma mater. The guts of historical study is the seeking for full understanding and everything now seems oriented to propaganda for causes I am out of sympathy with. So I'm now in a STEM program instead.
Many people who excelled in STEM field do not have the personality traits for dealing with long winded people. I wish they are more liberal arts minded but they aren't enough of them. The soft minded STEM are too often promoted into management because we can't trust them to do the actual engineering work. I've taken enough personality tests to know.
I also met a lot of liberal art types who aren't logical at all, can't argue well, and they do yell a lot when you disagree with them. I was told liberal arts is the best degree because you can do anything. Only a few can learn new skills but most can't fix a simple plumbing job. Liberal arts study isn't what is was 40 years ago.
From experience, 90% of the people at work, from technical to publishing, they all want to learn A job and nothing else. They don't learn other new skills. Only a small percentage of them do. They usually do one job for a long time and wonder why they can't find the same job after they are laid off.
This is why I qualify my comment. Studying liberal arts subjects is not the same as getting a liberal arts education. I never imagined that my liberal arts degree gave me the ability to do just "anything," only that I could do some valuable things that more directly-trained people could not. If anything, it's given me respect for true expertise (not least because I have had to work with those experts to get things done). History helps a lot with that, you see a lot of different personalities facing a lot of different challenges in the history books.
I didn't mean to sound as I disagree with you. I would love to study history, the arts, but as a foster kid growing up and joining the military after high school, at 22, I needed to get into a career field that pays well and to allow me to pursue other interests. I study history in my free time, because I wanted to know more, to learn how people deal with the same problems centuries ago for example.
Oh, I think we're fundamentally in sync, sorry to have given the impression otherwise :) I read history (especially military history) for those same reasons (also because I'm fascinated with obsolete technology and how people built and used it). Fortunately, history is something that gets better with age and experience.
We have slowly backed ourselves into this corner of helplessness. It is much bigger than something which can be solved by institutions and supporting organizations, but that is clearly part of the solution.
It is no surprise to anybody paying attention that we have coddled and smothered a generation of children. Whether it was the indulgences of the first children coming out of the baby boomer families or the more recent developments attendant to various statuses, we have put all the focus on the individual and individuals’ rights in our society. Does anybody really know a teenager with an afterschool job? This is the society that you get when everybody is supposed to be at SAT prep class in the afternoon. We have also seen a steady increase in older parents and smaller families, neither of which is conducive to developing the type of strong and well developed children that should be leading their generation. An older parent is an insecure parent. A parent of a single child is even more protective of their progeny. Those children, who make up a larger part of our emerging generations, are their family’s trophies. And like the trophies we gave all of those kids for simply growing up, they are inherently fragile.
If you peel back the onion deeply enough, you realize that what we are witnessing is a slow unraveling of the nation’s confidence. More focused on protecting the gains in their wealth over the past generations, American families slowly began to worship the wrong things. They chose to race forward and collect things rather than developing in their children character. That is not going to be repaired by more deans on college campuses, many of whom dig in and double down on the same strategies that put us into this mess in the first place.
@mainstream Also the concepts that have been pushed for years are never truly attainable. Work-life ‘balance,’ ‘fulfillment’ and so many terms that are thrown around but are guaranteed losers because they never come to fruition. Latest is finding ‘meaningful’ work, which is great but for most people you’ll work many, many jobs that don’t fit that description before you find one that does. But now that means you don’t take any job seriously until you find that meaningful job. It’s a constant set up for dissatisfaction, especially for young people.
I recently hired a new admin assistant. My previous assistant wanted “work-life balance” which turned out to mean she wanted to do the absolute bare minimum and run out the door at 5:00 on the dot. I interviewed several people and they all had the same requests: benefits, a six-figure salary and “work-life balance”. All I heard was they wanted to be grossly overpaid and would never put in the effort to get the job done. I hired a 23-year old woman who grew up working on her parents farm and she never mentioned any of these things. She’s been amazing so far and is a really hard worker. There’s a huge difference with how we raise our kids these days. So many people today are inherently lazy and believe employers should cater to their every need. I worry what this will look like in another few years.
This is one of the reasons U.S. organizations are outsourcing work to India, the Philippines etc - almost scary work ethic (okay, and lower wages).
Our kids will be competing with Indian kids for routine office work soon, at least in midsized and larger companies, given that the pandemic validated the WFH model
Nope. Been happening for some time now. A couple examples:
1) I used to use D.C. based patent people to do searches before I filed. A few years ago my patent lawyer suggested I try an Indian company. They took about a week, deliver a far superior search, and charge less than a third of what the Americans do.
2) We’ve been dealing with an Indian engineer to do CFD (computational flow dynamics) studies for us for about the past year. Mohit doesn’t look like he’s old enough to buy a drink, but he’s smart as anything. $20/hour, and no excuses, just results. He reminds me of Asok, the Indian intern in Dilbert. Asok gets the job done, even when nobody helps. He could easily run the company.
Indeed. My point is that more and more mainstream American companies will move large parts of office work to India, like they moved production work to Mexico and then China. Either moving entire functions, or - just as significantly, if not more do - splitting existing jobs into onshore/offshore pairings when existing onshore employees leave.
I’ve worked for two companies that have progressively moved work to India and in one of these organizations it reached the stage where every type of non-manual work was assumed to be a default mixture of onshore/offshore unless there was a good reason why not. So, offshoring permeates the entire organization.
I think this is still only done by a minority of companies, but will soon become mainstream, which will put young people in America under a lot more pressure to perform.
My husband is a Senior Technical Architect. His company luckily does NOT have H1B's & they have hard working U.S. citizens (who are paid well).
He has had to do projects/consulting work with other companies who hire H1B's in India to cut costs. H1B's are ATROCIOUS. They quadruple everyone else's work with their incompetence. Deadlines cannot be met. Projects go wrong and have to be redone, over and over again.
These companies think they are saving money but they are actually losing money b/c it takes so much longer with these incompetent fools. Also: another fun trick played by H1B's in India: the resumes are completely falsified & they often have someone ELSE interview in their place. To hide the fact that they have no skills & are incompetent. They literally have Another Person Interview in place of them!
At one of these companies, they have 75% H1B contractors & 25% American employees. The H1B's know nothing & do nothing. They screw projects up constantly. The few American employees are literally scrambling to fix the work these fools are messing up.
Thanks, Sally Sue. What you are talking about here is immigration scamming - people so desperate to get into North America that they lie about their abilities and end up hopelessly underperforming.
But separately there are tens of millions of smart, hardworking and English-speaking people in places like India who are happy to stay there and earn good money as remote co-workers laboring alongside onshore people.
There certainly can be cultural issues using offshore labor (e.g. around proactivity and around "pushing back" and challenging co-workers and clients) that sometimes that create inefficiencies and can reduce the value of offshoring, but companies are learning how to avoid or minimize these. Money will find a way to solve these problems.
I bet India has the same 'normal distribution' of talent as anywhere else, and with a population of 1.4 billion people (more than the whole of Africa) and with English as the language of educated people, it's going to produce a lot of competent office workers over the next few years competing with our WFH kids.
I am talking about both H1B's here in the US & also Off-shore Tech in India.
Yes, the off-shore tech is more than happy to stay in India, they earn high salaries & can afford numerous household servants.
The Off-shore Tech is horrific & quadruples everyone's work. Companies think this will save them money but it ends up costing much more. Project delays. Incompetence which causes failures. Everyone is Cleaning UP the mess created by these off-shore morons. I am sure that people who are not directly involved on the technical side cannot see what is going on. Ask any U.S. software developer about their personal experience working with an off-shore team & they will tell you it is a nightmare. Everything goes wrong.
This! So much this! This crap being fed to all of us that so much meaning has to come from our job. Sometimes it’s just a damn job! Just do it, get paid, pay your bills and shut up already!
I think my dad (Greatest Gen) would have been appalled at the idea that work was supposed to give his life "meaning." He worked in a steel mill, for wages that allowed him to save money for the things he wanted to do. We took "vacation" vacations at least once a year, in addition to driving to Colorado twice a year to visit my favorite aunt (my dad's sister). My dad found his "meaning" in tending his yard, interacting with his friends, and participating in local union leadership and state and local politics (but not as a candidate).
We've had to de-program our adult kids from the notion--absorbed from culture and their peers--that work is *meant* to be fulfilling. For the vast majority of people, work is what you do so that you have the money to enjoy other aspects of your life. It's best if you don't HATE your job, but it's just a way to put food on the table. It doesn't have to be (and probably won't be) some kind of meaningful career.
It is very true and despite what I wrote I do believe that everyone should have meaningful work. Just from my experience, the people I’ve seen who enjoy their work the most are older and have either come up the ranks in their current industry or have changed industries over the course of their working life. What concerns me now is young people who are led to believe they should have that level of career satisfaction right out of the gate and don’t realize that a lifetime of work has its ups and downs like everything else. Or if you’re not following your dreams right now, your current job is meaningless. I’ve worked in a few different industries and I did learn skills and made contacts and friends through all of them. There was value even when I knew the job was not for me.
That’s why I believe that in many ways the narrative that the only way to work is on your dream ends up hurting more people than it helps.
FYI, I’m a single divorced mom who had my daughter at 34. She’s 16 now, an A student, gets herself up and out bed and to school on time. She also works part-time. Just saying’ we’re out here. 😀
I think single moms have it the toughest. Good for you!
But too many can't be the great mom you are. Single parenting is one of the reasons so many kids end up in trouble. I can't imagine juggling a job (or two!), parenting, household chores, and activities. I blame the fathers who abandon their kids, and our society who so readily allow that to happen.
Well, our difference is that her father is still very much involved and has been in her life still. We co-parent - we just didn't want to be married to each other anymore. And, I agree - too many missing dads!
My thoughts exactly...well said! It all started with "participation trophies". We need to allow children to work through their disappointments and failures. We learn when we struggle and we also know what success feels like when we improve.
Noted Atheist, Sam Harris, speaking for rational materialists,says that our goal across humanity should be to minimize UNNECESSARY suffering.
Sam and his cohort must know the redline after which we pass into necessary suffering.
When you see a generation growing up with a profound illiteracy around the taproots of our civilization, the so-called NONEs will fall under the sway of guys like Sam and their CRT-advocating professors.
Never has a nation gambled so big on so many untested theories.
I am always proud to display my two trophies. Two daughters, one is a PhD student in Physical Chemistry @ Berkeley, the other is a Junior @ UVM carrying a 3.8 GPA in Environmental Studies, with a minor in Italian (she is fluent in Italian). My pride and joy.
You would think that the parents we speak of, who fail their children, would have the foresight to understand that their children will one day represent them. And that terrible parenting would come home to roost. They either can’t see this, don’t care, or don’t have the skills to do otherwise. They are tarnishing their trophies.
Older parents are not insecure parents. They are the parents who actually remember what it was like to have a paper route and babysit and have weekend jobs during high school. They’re the parents that worked during college. They’re the parents whose children read lots of books. They are the parents whose children get A’s because they are expected to live up to their full potential. They are the parents that are more likely to complain that the kids aren’t working hard enough at school and that they need more work—not that they need to get out of it. They are also the parents that wonder where recess has gone. Their kids are super involved in sports and other activities, and they don’t have the drug and weight problems that lots of students have these days. Their kids are the leaders in the class because their parents value education and work ethic.
Okay..I’m 65 and don’t have kids, but…maybe 30 years ago when I saw this phenomenon evolving all I could think was ‘these are the kids MY generation raised’.
On the other hand, I never thought it would get this bad.
And last, now that we’ve heard all the sad stories about why we need to forgive student loans, mostly so they ‘can get on with life’, this is telling me that they are NOT ready for big world responsibilities of mortgages and the like, and probably never will be.
Ok, edit: this piece is the culmination of all we read here in Common Sense. Cancel culture and misinformation at the hands of children who can’t tie their own shoelaces.
Great piece for telling us what we already know: we have a generation that is peppered with self-centered, egotistical half wits who are the direct result of "helicopter" and or "bulldozer" parents who themselves are living with a lot of delusions. There are many young people who do not fall into this category but we never see or hear anything from them, and there is a reason for that.
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it but Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind...goes over most of this. While no doubt there are children that do indeed have legitimate mental health issues, Haidt and his co-author ultimately blame helicopter parents and social media for a lot of it. Millions of parents have tried to protect their children from everything, not just physical harm but any kind of negative experience. These are the kids that get to college and can’t stand to have their views challenged because “words are violence.” Couple that with the fact that millions of kids grew up without physical social interaction because their entire social life is through social media. They’re not prepared to interact with thousands of strangers with face-to-face dialogue.
Sadly the proposed solution appears to be more coddling. Safe spaces, canceling, censoring, etc. At some point these kids are going to need to enter the real world where they won’t be coddled. Then again, MSM cancels and censors every day so maybe these kids will be alright.
I just graduated college. I know many people who have had serious mental illness during. It almost cost me my best friend.
What I didn’t understand throughout this was the lack of realization that maybe going to a university a couple hundred of miles away from home wasn’t the answer. Peoples parents and themselves kept pushing them to stay in the environment they were in, at whatever cost to their friends around them watching them suffer. I’m all for being resilient and Working through problems, but when your kid is needing hospitalization , why not just throw in the towel? Perhaps this isn’t for you?
It seems weird to me that people are so attached to a degree from a specific university, or so attached to a plan they made when they were 18, they are willing to go through suicide attempts, starvation, hospitalization, etc in order to get it. I don’t see that as honorable, I see it as not being realistic about what environment you actually thrive in.
I thought this was a useful and well written article.
My comment is about the comments. If you want to think seriously about an issue, you have to accept the irrelevance of your own particular experience,in this case either as a college student or the parent of a college student. It's a single data point among millions of data points.
The author has a plethora of career data points and professional experience backing up her observations and suggestions. Accordingly, she has a better grasp ion the situation than any non-professional.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that for a second. Actually, You're just plain wrong. As a general principle the idea that we should "just trust the expert" falls on its face.
I liked the article. It was interesting and covered a deep difficulty in, not only college, but our society. And I think the author, tho part of the problem, understands how they got in the difficulty they're in.
But I was gonna post that I enjoyed the comments as much as the article. Because the people in the comments have mostly identified where the problems lay:
Bad parenting ruining the lives of their unstable children. Read "The Coddling of the American Mind" if You don't believe me. Rather, trust *certain* experts. After validating what they say against common sense (like You see here).
No, parents are parents and should stand on their own two feet. Experts should be consulted only when there is a problem the parents can’t deal with, like a medical or mental challenged. Everyday stuff like being a responsible person is on the parents.
I think it’s great when someone is aware of their own limitations and seeks help. It’s a very important part of being human. I assume you took that advice and molded it to your own situation, your child perhaps. You did good as a parent in that case. Though there are many other situations that you knew intuitively as well.
Absolutely right….and wrong! Personal experience has limited utility across a spectrum of people. But, the “professionals” suffer both from personal experience AND institutional myopia and insularity. They can’t be objective about their industry. And the industry has no real competition to challenge it. Most businesses have competition to keep them fairly objective. Universities and social work do not. There is no Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in these two fields. Just more money pouring in, with worsening outcomes. JMVHO
Stop, I can't take the pain of these poor, poor children suffering at college. Oh for the good old days when you got drafted out of high school, told to shut the F up as your new Mom was now called the TI. Your new family was your unit and your life could depend on supporting each other.
Now not saying we need the draft, but how many kids today even work or are required to help do anything? Everything is emotional and requires guidance and support. Our son's went to college and were told, graduation, military or get a job. One got military and one graduated. Did we, yes the actual parents help him work through it? Of course we are parents and no counselor, scream room or support person knows our kids like we do. How about time to have the talk. You need to decide, are you and us willing to borrow and actually pay back loans? Are you going to realize you need to accept responsibility for yourself but understand we are still here for support? Come on America we are stronger than this and let's kick the whinny you need special support because life is hard. Look at the rest of the world and be thankful you are not forced to live in poverty or work from early childhood. Now dry your tears and get your ass back into life.
I thank God every day my parents worked three jobs to pay the Catholic school tuition for me and my sibs K-12. The nuns taught 50 kids per classroom, and we still got a great education, as well as a sense of duty to family and community. To get into trouble with the nuns was a horror since Mom would be called, and we’d catch hell again when we got home. No bringing shame on the family by failing or screwing around at school. But this was all a long time ago, and now the nuns and Mom would be charged with child abuse.
Not really. They were tough at times, but all the stories of beatings aren’t true. They would shame kids for bad behavior, that was effective since no one wanted that embarrassment again. Some of my nuns were pretty brilliant actually. History, Latin, Literature, Chemistry. They were inspiring.
In the summer after high school I worked inside the coal mines to put away money for the fall college term. There I met a seventeen-year-old man - not a boy by any stretch, a man - who had got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and immediately went into the mines to earn a living for them. I don't remember his name, only that at seventeen he was so much more mature than I was - a maturity level I never reached until my thirties. Somehow we have to reverse the prolonged adolescence that is the modern college man and woman. A nation IS its citizens, and we are turning ours into bowls of jelly.
I was born in 1956.
As a kid, I walked a mile to and from school, and was outside with my friends until my curfew, which was frequently after dark). I lived in an upper middle class/affluent neighborhood. Life still had it's traumas, but you were expected to deal with them.
When I was fourteen, I was competing with other kids my age to mow lawns in the summer, and shovel driveways (Michigan) in the winter. My first paycheck came from working as a caddie. At sixteen, I started bussing tables, and worked various restaurant jobs through college.
I now live in a similar neighborhood, and never see kids working around the neighborhood, or playing, as far as that goes. I don't see them working in restaurants, or other small businesses much, and wonder how they spend their days.
It was my generation that started this downward spiral into prolonged adolescence. My kids, born in the early 80s, were at the beginning of the 'everybody gets a trophy, nobody's feelings should ever be hurt, or feel ashamed' generation. As a parent, even though I knew this was ridiculous, we were constantly fighting this mindset that was being promoted at the public schools, and local 'mom' culture.
You shouldn't get a trophy if you don't deserve it.
Getting your feelings hurt is part of learning how to cope as an adult
Shame is a way of telling you that you've made bad decisions
I'm not sure there's anyway to get our society back to what it was. I don't blame the moms as much as the genetic need to nurture and protect children is very strong, but the fathers seem to have abdicated their role in telling kids to get out of the house, don't cry unless you're bleeding, it's time to get a job, you're eating too much, etc.
Being a parent is hard, and 30-40 years ago, parents decided it was more than they wanted to do, so they avoided the hard parts. This is where it took us.
And, my grandparents and parent said my generation had it too soft.
I just realized I may have been channeling Dana Carvey.....'And we LIKED it'
My dad was born in 1956. He built the house I grew up in on land he bought soon after he graduated high school because he'd been working and saving for years by the time he was in his early 20s. He started building the house right after he was laid off due to the recession in the early 80s. He did everything--plumbing, electric, you name it. He still cuts and gathers firewood every year to heat that house, still does small building projects around his land. His truck needed a new bed recently. Instead of spending a bunch of money on a used one, he welded another bed for himself. Every car we had (not many), we drove until it was on the verge of 300,000 miles because he would just keep fixing it. He taught my sister and I how to change tires, change the oil, file saws, how to take care of machinery, sharpen mower blades, how and when to rototill, plant green manure, dress a deer, the names of the trees in our woods, etc., etc. Now, in retirement, he spends his time building engines from scratch and putting together old cars, loading his own bullets, reading reading reading, walking in the woods. He would help me with my trigonometry and calculus homework when I was in school, gives me suggestions on books nowadays. He worked at a factory for around 40 years, something he didn't like but did anyway to make ends meet, never went to college, never owned a cell phone, but is completely content. He is, quite literally, my hero (my mom's pretty amazing, too). I think a lot of people are not so lucky to have such role models anymore.
This piece to me connects to Shrier's recent article in which she interviews Leonard Sax. I went to the library and got a few of his books after reading that yesterday. I finished The Collapse of Parenting last night, which pretty much sums up the current situation. One of the biggest things I took away was that parents used to be both strict and loving; now, they think they have to be one or the other. Guess which one most choose?
What a wonderful legacy your parents have given you. I was blessed to read this.
There is no such thing as unconditional love.
You obviously do not own a dog.
You've obviously never owned a dachshund. If you're ever passing through Iowa I'd be happy to introduce you to Walter and Teddy. They'll change your opinion.
Just...and what is it that we keep hearing "control of my body", while giving NO support for the body in the womb? split. I am fine with "it is your decision"...result is?
Yes. I’m your age. Too many parents are out-sourcing parenting to schools and park districts. They only want the nice parts of “parenting”. They are surprised that they don’t know their adolescent kids. Well, duh.
And it gets worse with each half generation. I’ve told my kids I fear the schools will turn my grandchildren into people I loathe, and who loathe me (and their parents.)
Most teachers and social workers don’t see it. They can’t. They’re swimming in it.
They are swimming in it. I have two friends whose wives are counselors that view everyone as damaged. As noted in the column, they work from the perspective that something has caused you trauma and you just don't know it yet.
Oh they're not counselors, they are drug dealers. All of them. The more they fuck those children, the more money they make.
I am a social worker in a high school and I refuse to raise our kids this way. I am unpopular with staff and occasionally with students sometimes, because while I am empathetic and cognizant of how life experiences impact kids, I DO.NOT coddle them! This is a major disservice to them and the county...I am tired of watching it.
Not all school staff are crippling kids.
"I DO.NOT coddle them!"!
Those are words that should be required daily chanting by parents once their kids reach age 6 - you know, 1st Grade.
Indeed: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/health/teens-psychiatric-drugs.html
Tom...oh, i like that. thanks.
Do teenage girls even babysit anymore? I started at 50 cents an hour and worked up to 1.50. Had a nice little business of referrals going. Saved for the clothes I wanted since money was tight at home.
As soon as my kid turned 16 he had to have a summer job. Bagging groceries was the first one.
What happened?
The kids around the corner from us have affluent parents and the word is parents. They parented their children. All of their children had to participate in sports and all of them had to have a job.
When they were 11 or 12 we hired them to do light cleaning around our house, clean the base boards, sweep of the decks. We always overpaid them. They mowed lawns, babysat and when they were by law eligible to work, they waited tables.
They three oldest all graduated Summa cum laude and the youngest is in his junior year at college.
The operative word here is parenting and providing a safe, stable home life.
Many parents get shamed if they allow their teens to do the tasks you describe. "You let your 15 year old mow lawns?!? Don't you think that is dangerous?" You let your teen babysit?!? That is a big risk; something could happen and she won't handle it correctly. And the parents of the children she is babysitting aren't concerned? Sounds like bad parenting on both of your parts." "You allow your teen to work during the school year?!? What about homework; how does she find time to get it done?" And on and on.
Parenting is hard and I’m far from a perfect parent. One of the toughest parts is to fight against this culture that we read about on Common Sense. And we all know kids who turned out bad despite good parenting.
Kids do still work. My 14-yo got a summer job as camp counselor and she sells clothing online. To someone else’s point we never hear of the kids who are hardworking.
Good on you! Nice to know it still happens.
You don't hear about them because they're an endangered species, and it's rare you get a glimpse of them. :)
And a lot of kids applied, too, so that’s a good sign. :)
Neighbor boy mows my lawn. His father pushed him into it but that's what fathers do. I needed help and when he got the first cash, he was into it.
We simply don't prepare our kids in their teens, to be adults. We avoid that part of parenting and assume that college, or someone else, will do it. 25 is the new 15.
To a large extent, prosperity happened.
Long story. (And I'm taking a break, so...)
Affluenza?
We have 87 houses in our neighborhood. We have a pretty good supply of babysitters and house sitters and kids advertising on our Facebook page.
I don’t see kids mowing lawns for hire, but maybe I’m missing it. I usually see landscaping service companies do that. When my 6 year old gets a bit older, he will, indeed, he mowing our lawn.
This is what happened:
Girl falsely accuses teacher. She gets fired. Charges all dropped because they were false from beginning to end. Teacher without job at school she loved.
ZERO, zip, zilch, NADA CONSEQUENCES for girl.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-student-claimed-a-teacher-slapped-her-prompting-an-arrest-the-teacher-was-just-vindicated
The inmates are running the asylum expression has never been more true
TY. Yes, true. *So* true.
Worst part is it's in so *many* areas these days. All levels of education. Gov. Businesses. The list goes on like the Energizer Bunny.
Check the demographics for the school. Dollars to donuts there is a racial aspect to this episode. Sad to say, but ted's the facts.
TYTY. You make an interesting point. Likely correct, but article didn't (or wouldn't) say.
baby sitting. oh no. too scary for sexual harassment
Covid. Everything was shut down and they had to isolate. They were helping their younger brothers and sisters and everyone was online. Only part of the story, but still pretty significant for most kids for a couple years.
Mine did and still do! Both started babysitting at around 13. Now 19 & 23 and even the 23 yr old will babysit at night & on weekends sometimes for extra money. (She has a full time job)
Say it louder for the people in the back!
yep!
I have a theory on that. (I have a theory on everything.) Throughout history, men traditionally built the material world; women built every man and woman in it. That's changed now - in large part due to the need for both partners to work - one full-time, often a second part-time job. The partner then works, at a minimum, part-time, sometimes full-time. So who's raising the children? Third parties - nannies, babysitters, daycare, government schools.
Or nobody. Who teaches little boys to be men? Nobody. Who teaches little girls to be women? Ditto. Who is on watch when gub'ment schools fill their little heads with Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Warrioring, community organizing, and that Madison and Jefferson were, first and foremost, slaveholders? Nobody. Nobody is watching the third parties. Nobody has the time. I see a glimmer here and there suggesting that may be changing. Sure hope so.
So much to discuss here! I completely agree. Believe me when I say my opinion is quite unpopular with many women, but why are you even having children if you are going to drop off an 8 week old, 10 hours per day, at a daycare center, while you go to work? I stayed home with my daughter until she was 2 and 1/2 yrs old. Was it hard financially? You bet. Was it ultimately worth it? Absolutely!
This is the reason why I am for the child tax credit for stay at home parents in lieu of subsidizing childcare/pre-K. $500 per child can be life changing for a family. Families can then decide if they want one parent home. Like you, I stayed home when my kids were young. I was making more $$ than my spouse at the time I left work. It was incredibly hard in the early years for so many reasons including financial, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Subsidizing childcare is only going to make it more expensive than it already is.
"Subsidizing childcare is only going to make it more expensive than it already is."
Obviously, you paid attention during Econ classes. Too bad moe Americans seem unable to grasp this "there is no free lunch" principle.
And then we started medicating when they got too annoying.
Ha! I was born in 1960 and had my kids late in life. Many of the parents that had kids in my youngest’s classes are 10-15 yrs younger than me. I used to be appalled at how these Moms knew every detail of every piece of homework & test the kids had to take. They micromanaged every move their kids made. Helicopter parents. Sometimes I’d start to doubt myself because I told my kids that their schoolwork was their job to keep track of, not mine. I was about the only one. The youngest is now a sophomore at an out of state college. The societal influences of “taking care of your mental health” (ie: stay in bed and skip class if you’re having a bad day)derailed her a bit in the second semester last year, but hopefully she stays on track this year.
Yup. Never got involved in homework. She figured it out, Googled it, or asked a friend for help, if needed.
On February 8, 1922, a newspaper published in Massillon, Ohio mentioned the term participation trophy, so it would appear this harmful act has been around for a while, but alas, down through history, adults have always lamented about the youth. But here are the implications of participation trophies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWv1VdDeoRY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTXrV0_3UjY
Carol Dweck . She should be the Secretary of Education )Assuming we can't rid America of that department).
Ohio here, I live in Wooster!
Parents now seem to want to be friends with their kids and not parents.
I’ve concluded that secularization is really the prime mover in our descent to jellydom. Materialism, especially in the globalized internet age, is a highway to despair. Why bother going through the pain and effort of becoming a responsible adult when your reward is a life of insatiable status anxiety? Young people are opting out of “real life” because we haven’t given them a reason to really live.
Incidentally, this is precisely the message that Jordan Peterson delivers in his “rules for life” and it’s no wonder he’s so popular among young adult men.
You don't need the promise and reward of an afterlife in order to have a reason to live, that's just silly. Responsibility, and morality itself for that matter, exist completely independent of religion. They are universal human attributes, not divine gifts bestowed by a higher power.
Besides, life itself is reason enough to live a noble and fulfilling existence. If anything, our mortality only serves to make our short time here more precious, not less.
Young people are not 'opting out of of real life' because they are godless heathens, there's all sorts of reasons for that: lower standard of living, bleak environmental future, the primacy of social media, lazy parenting...the list goes on and on. Sure religious participation is at an all-time low, but there are oodles of things changing right now from a few decades ago. Correlation is not causation.
Regardless, I would vehemently argue you don't need faith to have purpose in life.
It’s ironic he mentions Jordan Peterson, who often uses the Christian Bible to support his ideas, but ultimately does not believe the myths himself. Whatever god Peterson believes in, it isn’t Jehovah.
Immaturity is the word. I know exactly what you are saying. I was just an immature, irresponsible kid when I went to college. In the middle of my junior year, I walked away from my classes.
I tried to get a job but had no skills so I joined the Army. I saved my money and when I was discharged went back to school and because I had walked away without dropping my classes, I was 13 grade points down. That gave me incentive to actually study and I pulled myself out of the grade point hole in my first semester.
I was still an immature jerk but at least in this area, schooling, I had purpose and drive. I had a goal and I pursued it.
Not all of us are wired the same way. I was a shiftless, lazy immature nitwit. Sure, some of the students have mental challenges but I believe, and that is just my opinion, most of the washouts to be like I was, immature and directionless.
The author of the article, to me, lays the blame on the universities for student failure. It sounded like the same song. Everybody is a victim Nobody is at fault for bad behavior. It's the institution's fault not the student. I'm sure the schools could to more to council these kids but I wasn't a victim. I was a jerk.
Actually I disagree. I think the article very much puts the blame on kids and parents, which is where it should be.
You're right, it did ay the blame on parents and students, but also schools that oversell their ability to "manage" the students. Overall, I thought it was a balanced article that affixed blame to everyone responsible for the failure of students.
I didn't read the article that way. The author talks about more support staff and counseling. If you read leftist articles the solution to bad behavior is counseling. Nobody is responsible for their behavior because everybody is a victim and counseling is the solution.
That's it. The far left, which is now the left, wants to take everything out of, and away from, the home. The kids belong to them.
“The education of all children from the moment that they can get along without their mother’s care shall be in state institutions” -Karl Marx
Me too
I actually got the impression that the author was trying to say that parents are responsible to prepare their children for college and shouldn't expect universities to be babysitters.
is every kid autistic now. on medication. seems that way. we have a "spectrum" every kid is on it somewhere
I predict an explosion of autism due to the masking of very impressionable, very young children.
This is bullshit, I went to college had challenges , went to a professor for assistance when having a hard time in chemistry and he looked at my grades and said "yep, you are having trouble " that was it. A counselor told me if you need a swift kick in the ass you can come and see me. I busted my ass , and finished college because I wanted to succeed. Then I went to med school in a foreign country and busted my ass again and succeeded. A bunch of pussies we are raising who can't , hunker down and just do it. Time passes anyway, the only thing to battle is the books and some ups and downs of relationships. Weak , Weak ,Weak people . I was taught not to feel sorry for myself . Don't feel sorry for yourself , have a Gil and just study, study, study . We are turning into amoebas .
As my dad would say, "A boot in the ass is the poor man's psychiatrist"
What I learned from this article was the amazing amount of kids with mental health problems. What have we done as a society to create a cohort of youngsters who can't function without the supervision of mommy? This is what we have to deal with as a society today. Maybe the flood of illegals at our border is not a bad thing as they will add some backbone to an over protected generation.
Less the lack of supervision from mommy than the lack of mental toughness and discipline from daddy, IMO.
That is now known as toxic masculinity.
I suspect social media plays a significant role. Imagine where we’ll be in another generation as virtual reality begins to supplant real, direct experiences.
While my kids are now successful adults, I sometimes wonder whether less access to smartphones would have "improved them" even more.
I do think the instant attention that is conjured by smartphones is a real disaster to development and maturation.
I’m visualizing Zoolander thinking he has black lung after working in the coal mine for one day. 🤣
God. When I came out of the mine after my first day, I was SOOOOOO proud that I could blow black snot out of my nose. Made me feel like a man. LOL Like everyone is saying here, young people can be so stupid.....
I worked in restaurant kitchens. Nothing like good hard manual labor to make you realize how much a degree can be worth.
Ditto! I worked in a Pepperidge Farm factory on an assembly line - think "I love Lucy" but without the laughs! I did get to eat the food but MAN, was that a good reminder that I needed a college degree!
HT to you. That - and working for a moving company - have got to be the two worst jobs on the planet.
avoiding loans was a great idea...until the incentives were so perversely inverted. It will likely become impossible to avoid taking loans for most schools now, and mathematically inevitable to accept them based on your current or likely income when a large portion will be automatically forgiven based on the current DoE plan (5% DI payment cap, 10 year repayment)
I did a little "Dad's investing course" for my two sons - complete with lectures. The two flip charts that seemed to have the most effect were the "Future Earnings Potential" and the
"Compounding" chart. The first simply plots age against future earnings available to you. Of course, your working life starts out at the maximum, since all your work life is ahead of you. As you age, it goes down and down and down, until about 65-70 it goes very close to zero. At that point you likely have a lot of life ahead and NO potential to make money, so if you didn't put any retirement, it's cat food for you.
The second chart is of course an exponential curve, which goes as: A = pe^(rt), where A = amount at the end, p = principal, e = magic number, 2.718281828... r and t are rate and time. We all know that rate and time are in the exponent, so a tiny improvement in either one gives vastly better money at the end, but the takeaway lesson is that the same magic formula that makes you rich also makes the banker from whom you borrowed rich too - on your back. So use credit very wisely and very little. I've never seen a banker or a broker with a smaller house than his client.
You must be kidding me with this article. What’s wrong with the parents and if their kids are so mentally disturbed maybe college is not the place for them now. Seems like it’s time for the parents to grow up. I went to university for an education not to receive social services.
Sometimes it’s the parents. But it seems to me that society has generally created the expectation that, just as everyone is expected to finish high school, the next expected step is going to college. Obama’s wife said as much.
I disagree. College has indeed become a de facto babysitting institution for many who neither want it nor need it. It’s expensive in that it a) costs a lot of money up front and b) delays millions of people each year from making any positive contribution to society.
The fact that a third (!) of enrolling college freshmen don’t become sophomores is telling. You don’t need college to paint a house, or to build, plumb or electrify it, or to drive a semi. College is irrelevant to lots of jobs that pay quite well. Smart people recognize that and many go to work straight out of high school. Not all smart people go to college.
We need smart plumbers, electricians, mechanics etc - all skills not taught in college.
These mentally fragile people with "eating disorders", and the propensity for "self-harm" wouldn't last a day doing any real work as a plumber, electrician, or a mechanic.
What is also very great about the American college system is that a plumber, mechanic, etc. can enroll in a business or accounting class to support the growth of their business or a theater, horticulture, or philosophy class to support an interest.
I taught art history to prison guards at Raiford in Florida at night. at least I did not fear walking to my car. LOL. and a few were really interested
It costs more per hour for a plumber than for a software developer, the former of which cannot be outsourced or offshored.
Hear hear!
A LOT is the parents. I'm on the FB parent pages of my two in college. Wow. It's a therapist's dream. Parents posting about crying while making their kid's favorite meal after they left for college ["Tonight I cried over chicken."] (yes, actual quote), orchestrating roommates, complaining that their son was woken up in his dorm by drunk girls. It goes on. The upside is that it provides wonderful fodder for our family group chat.
Parents complaining about their son being awakened in his dorm by drunk girls? Seriously? When I was in college we would have prayed for that. But, then, dorms weren't co-ed either. That kid has some seriously messed up parents.
btw, get off the FB parent page. And FB generally.
yeah I know. I hate FB, but the parent pages do provide some solid info at times which is the only reason why I follow them. oh and for the laughs.
Anyway, after I wrote it, I thought "what an obnoxious thing to say." Sorry.
I can only imagine the helicopter parents posting there........
Yes the parent Facebook pages for the colleges are pretty incredible. I’d love to just constantly post the eye roll emoji on most of their posts. Have you read any of the grown and flown stuff? Most of that is pretty eye roll worthy as well.
"College has indeed become a de facto babysitting institution for many who neither want it nor need it."
As they say at the shootin' matches, you drove dead center. My cousin's son told him fifteen years ago that he absolutely did not want to go to college. He instead went to work for the power company; within six months he was stringing 765,000 Volt lines on the top of 150' towers. He's now FAR up in the management hierarchy, strong, muscular, self-confident, with piercing eyes, management skills, more toys than he knows what do do with - and by the way, beating good-looking women off with a stick. And no college loans to worry about. Now If I could just convince MY two sons of that ....
I just sent two off to college for the first time, different schools (one large public, one small private). At both parent orientations, 90% of the information given was about diversity, mental health and all of the resources they have to help kids. Only 10% was about the actual education. It was bananas.
Wow. That’s tough to sit through.
I think that’s what the article is in fact saying?
Yeah that's how I read the "don't overpromise" point.
Yes, the parents are the problem.
Seriously, I'm not sure which direction the author is advocating.
that is because the author did not give solutions...like always.
She recommended kids having a job first. She also recommended taking a gap year. It’s at the end of the article. Basically you can’t get them ready in one summer. Make sure they can get themselves up and get to work on their own before sending them off to college.
Totally agree. Like this is outright insanity. I was the first person in my family to go to university here in Canada and it was a thrilling achievement for me at the time. I felt nothing less than 90% stoke and excitement mixed with a minor amount of 5% of fear I would fail and 5% fear of the student loans I needed to take on at the time. Looking back my university experience (which I finished in 2010) was just the most incredible experience in my life. I loved it and it was incredible. There were some moments that led to me being humbled and realizing I needed to change my definition of "work" but god to read these posts where somehow in the span on 10 years signing up for university of college is now being presented as this traumatizing experience where the school is somehow (mysteriously) responsible for managing the mental health of these students is beyond strange. For fucks sake go to your first year class which lets me honest....isn't going to be that hard...and just do the homework, enjoy meeting your friends and just have a blast. This is one of the oddest posts I have seen on Common Sense.
Common Sense is this: If you are lucky enough to be admitted to a Canadian or US university of College you are literally amongst the most lucky people on the face of the earth. Enjoy it and stop the victimization drama
I have a coffee shop and I have to yet hire a young person who cleans the bathrooms, although it is in the job description they agree to be paid for. Those kids leave their homes with basically no challenge ever, no skills, and no work ethics. Every attempt made to treat them as adults is an offense. These people will lead the world in a bit. We are all fucked 🤣.
Oh maybe they’re just “quietly quitting,” the newest craze in self-care!
I feel for employers.
The fact that 'quietly quitting' is in the conversation shows how far we've descended. This is a term to justify being an awful employee, and is line with 'whatever shaming' being a way to justify behavior that should make one ashamed.
It’s absurd.
I feel for America.
Ha-ha, as a supervisor, I had one of my employees complain about me to our division director that I didn’t love her enough. A young woman in her 20s. That was her exact complaint. She expected me to behave like her parent.
I think the problem starts with early childhood education when the only goal is to make everyone, feel good. And it continues through all levels of education with social media reviews and feedback. Everyone has to feel happy. So the students are able to avoid challenges and hard work. But what works for toddlers, shouldn’t for kids beginning with age 7, I think. Yes, you don’t want toddlers to cry. But at some point our children must be toughen up and learn responsibilities.
I see how my grandchildren are being raised: we cannot criticize them because they get upset and we cannot make them do things they don’t like. When we play a game of chess, I cannot win, because my granddaughter starts crying and refuses to play ever again. Something is terribly wrong about this kind of parenting. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when young people look for safe comfortable places in life more than for anything else.
"I see how my grandchildren are being raised: we cannot criticize them because they get upset and we cannot make them do things they don’t like. When we play a game of chess, I cannot win, because my granddaughter starts crying and refuses to play ever again. Something is terribly wrong about this kind of parenting. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the young people look for safe comfortable places in life more than for anything else."
Yeah thats not good for the kids & will end up hurting them. As a mom of young kids, we set expectations & rules. Our kids do chores. They obviously have to do things they don't like. Life isn't always about having fun. The expectation is that they clean up their toys before leaving the room. Actually you do want toddlers to cry. They have to learn that crying will not make me give in & spoil them. If they cry for no good reason, I walk away & let them cry it out. If I'd try to stop the tears by doing whatever they want, then they'll always cry & throw temper tantrums their whole life to get their way.
Our neighbor, when her daughter was little, wouldn't let her cry. She would do whatever the kid wanted, just so she'd stop crying. Now the daughter is a teenager. If she wants her mom to buy her stuff, she throws a teenage temper tantrum: hissy fit, slamming doors, threatening suicide. That's one that teen girls love to do.
We aim to have our kids follow our rules & expectations. They have to learn that they can't always get their way in life. They have to learn disappointment. The most valuable lesson.
There is a middle ground, too, which is appropriate in many circumstances: Don't give in to what he wants, but hug him as he cries. I remember when my belly got too big with #2 to carry #1. He had a tantrum on the sidewalk. I felt like crying, too. I told him I can't carry you, but we can sit here and hug until you feel better, and then we can walk and hold hands. So we did. He's a pretty well-adjusted fellow, now, and has even carried me from time to time! Other important motherly instruction includes "So f'in what?" when dealing with minor upsets, and "It's your own damn fault and no one feels sorry for you." And "hearts are made for loving, but you have a right to protect yourself from people who want to hurt you." A lot of weird parents out there today, hurting their kids with saccharine sweet denials of reality. Children should be taught that they are loved just because, that the world does not revolve around them, and how to contribute to the world around them. They are like threads, and the parents' job is to weave them into the fabric of society. Love isn't like Disneyland.
Love children are like threads that need to be woven into the fabric of society!
That’s why we have immigration.
😂 I’m an immigrant and I confirm as the owner of the business I am the only one cleaning the bathroom.
I take it back. I have two more employees who do/did: the manager who is gay, and a former employee who is a conservative and who declined the unemployment in 2020 and looked for a job who allowed him to continue to work.
When we were in dire straits back in 2010 (mortgage upside down, no work to be found, savings dwindling), the wife persuaded me, against my better judgement, to get food stamps and state medical coverage for indigents. I said, "But we're able bodied and ought to be able to work!" Indeed it was not long before I found a good contract job in technology, and it's been good since then. I felt ashamed using those damned food stamps, and I would never recommend it to anyone who wants to keep their self-respect.
I see nothing wrong with the society helping when you are in need. I have wonderful hard working friends who were on food stamps for a few months while he was in school and she was not allowed to work due to her immigration status. Problem is with those who think they are entitled to that, forever if possible!
How you used them is what they are for.
Yes but I reserve the right to feel ashamed :)
I find that the best people to work with are the ones who do the extra 2% to help out. The rest just say it's not their job.
What’s baffling is that it’s not like employers pluck people from the ether to work for them. People apply for and ask for a job that once they get they treat like it’s nothing.
There’s a scene in the movie Cinderella Man where a thousand men show up at the docks for work and the foreman comes out and says he’ll take 50, which is a fraction of the men there. The rest go home during the Depression to little to no food. I think about that a lot and my grandparent’s generation, both my grandmothers had four brothers each who traveled across country for work programs. Did they feel despair? We’re they hopeful at all? We have so much more than they did on every level and yet this weird despair that has no remedy takes so many people. The bar that is placed on work with meaning and balance is invisible. Does anyone ever feel “balanced?” Or “fulfilled?” These terms are used to keep people constantly searching and unsatisfied. Were any of my uncles fulfilled or were they just happy to get a paycheck before they all got shipped off to WWII? Would we survive another Great Depression?
Yes there are young people today who are being told that their job/career needs to have meaning, to have purpose, to "fulfill them".
Which is nonsense. Fulfillment comes from your marriage, your children, your family & community. Anyone hoping their job will bring meaning to their life will keeping hoping forever.
Maybe some parents are giving the wrong message to their kids, who are looking for career guidance. We need to tell our kids to find a job that earns a paycheck; seek meaning in their families & communities.
I use to live in the rust belt and remember a line out the door for a full time job at McDonalds. (notice job is singular)
I'm just wondering if some-a these can survive the next recession. We'll see.
We can't just rely on immigration. I say this as an immigrant.
We have to ask ourselves, are we raising our kids well? are we raising our grandchildren well? Are we raising good Americans for the next generation?
This is our responsibility as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
That’s the truth! Are we though I’m not so sure. We are such a great country and we are allowing all and sundry to make a real mess out of us - it’s a pity we need to get back on track. We have to stop doing a lot of the crazy shit we been doing the last 20 years. Like FB Social Media etc we have to get back to our communities our churches there is work to go let’s get cracking!
Legal immigration.
We don't want criminals.
Absolutely!
Totally fucked!
Sorry but I read this instead as an indictment of America and American parenting. We have sent 17 year olds off to fight on vicious places such as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Is it really asking too much to expect an 18 year old to attend classes and take care of themselves? If it is, our problem is way, way deeper than a 33% college attrition rate. Our progressive friends scoff when we refer to "snowflakes." What does this essay reveal? Maybe it's long past time to take away the toys, and the psychiatrists and the Ritalin and start toughening up these kids. Micro-aggressions? Seriously?
Yeah, You got it. And, yeah, this is an indictment and the problem is way, way deeper. TYTY.
You are right, Bruce.
I would liken it to the tail wagging the dog. Not only are so many young adults 'micro-aggressed' to the point of parody - their apparent affliction turns their professors and academic institutions into the same spineless jelly like pansies as they scramble out of the way to escape the kids' sanctimonious ire.
When teachers and school administrators have to prostate themselves apologizing to the outraged student body for remarks they may have uttered, actions they may have instituted, or people they invited to speak - examples of which we have read too often about here at Common Sense and elsewhere - you know we have a huge problem in this country. Our future leaders are in this cohort.
Thanks, Lee. Imagine if the first group of clowns who "occupied" a university building or harassed a professor or fellow student were summarily expelled - with the black mark on their records - how fast all this nonsense would stop. Imagine, also, a parent who just shelled out $70 K in tuition at Yale finding out that it was forfeited by his or her child's woke temper tantrum. But until that happens this nonsense will continue.
By the way, a father who tells his son with a scraped knee to "suck it up" is not a bad parent. He is placing the injury in context and not making it open heart surgery. And, sure, studying is a pain in the ass, especially when there are fun things to do. But that doesn't mean the kid has "a learning disorder," requiring tutors, therapy and drugs.
Jeesh, what have we become?
We've become just like You indicated. Defining a good parent as a bad one, and a good kid as a bad one that needs medicalized and feminized, IMO.
All I hope is that the Millennials hand the leadership to the Gen Alpha and skip Gen Z. That's assuming Gen Alpha is an improvement, which isn't likely but *could* happen. They're ten years old now, so mebbe there's hope?
Ah my friend, jt, maybe if we just let boys be boys and girls be girls and gave them plenty of time for unsupervised play and getting in trouble, instead of managing every second of their little lives, we might have some normal kids again?
Unsupervised play is the best thing for kids, I agree.
We don't overschedule our kids & we don't do a lot of activities or planned things. We tell them "Go play in the basement" "Go play in the yard". Entertain yourselves.
Yeah, that's mostly all it takes, AFAIK. That was one-a the main points of "The Coddling of the American Mind." Simple play. The book explained the fear that their kids would be kidnapped was *way* more than the reality of it.
And boys will be boys if parents let them be. Girls too, if they stay off the 'Net. That's the other big problem. SM.
oh yea
you gotta keep kids off the internet as much as possible. Social media use in kids/teens leads to depression/anxiety/lack of sleep, girls becoming trans, suicides & boys becoming mass shooters.
I always tell parents to not buy a smartphone for their kids. Buy a phone that can only call/text. when they are older. When younger, they do not need devices. If the school gives them devices, limit the use. and Filter the internet.
You got it right there, M Sally Sue!
You don’t want to hand them anything. They will never be able to do the job. They are babies jt
I agree.
A few family members are teachers in K-12, the stories they tell about kids - amazing, and they agree, all of the blame resides with the parents.
Boot camps run by retired Marines.
A great alternative to artsy sleep away camps.
Or maybe we should re institute the draft, although with our Military being run by the likes of Thoroughly Modern Milley, it's probably the same coddling and relaxed standards we see in colleges. Especially when they're purging the actual war fighters.
Sad but true, Sir Bruce.
That was then, this is now. Can't wait for tomorrow.
Pathetic students like those described in this pathetic article should not be in college. They should be in boot camp, along with their failures of parents.
And take away the cell phones.
The military does a great job training these soft young men into adult, and it does it very fast. It did it with me. Looking back, in 12 to 15 weeks, the military can convert a soft 18 years old into someone who can get up early, work for 12 hours or more, take responsibility. Some people failed at this but they are in the extreme minority. Most took the responsibility in stride.
Reading that, I can't help but think of Full Metal Jacket.
A great movie !
Life-altering. Like "Deliverance", you don't come out the way you went in.
I think there’s an article on common sense/the Free Press about the military having troubles recruiting enough people, because they are either too overweight or have drug problems in their past, so they don’t qualify for the military.
There are several things I tell young person who goes to college:
- Pick degree that will land you a Job, that means STEM, not some "studies" that will guarantee you unemployment and student debt but not thing else.
- Don't pick college based on following => Their sports team(chances is you will be financing this BS from your tuition with no benefit to you), how campus looks (you are financing it from your tuition with little benefit) or how "college experience is"
- Pick college that offers best ROI, if local in state collage costs couple thousand, its is financially irresponsible to pay $50k for college in different state. If you are not attending Harvard or some other Ivy league, there is 99% chance that after you get your first job, nobody will ever ask you where you got your degree.
- Get the degree as soon as possible=>Your goal is to get the degree (peace of paper), that will get your foot in the door for well paid job, your goal is not to experiment or have collage experience because if you finish fast, you will be able to earn income and do what every you liked on your own dime without going in to debt or wasting money.
- No mater what your university admin says to you, that you are "family" and other BS, know they will get rid of you as soon as you cant pay and will try to milk you until last $. So after you finish, you don't owe anything to your university, you paid everything to them trough your tuition, there is absolutly no need to give them another dime afterwards.
- Due to all woke BS that is currently going on campuses, be carful don't engage in some "revolutions" or other BS that is going on on campus, because every revolution eats its own, today they will be with you, but one wrong thought you will be burnt on the cross.
Other than that, good luck, and the faster you finish, faster you can enjoy your life, and belive me better to be young and have income and do what you want, than be young broke and settled with college debt.
Don't got into STEM if you don't have the aptitude or had not put in the hard work in high school. I went to aerospace engineering in the 90s, and after the freshman year, 1/2 of the class dropped out of engineering and went into business or other crap.
We don't want stupid people or people who don't work very hard in STEM. Solving science, engineering, and high mathematical problems is hard work.
In my experience (15+ years in a rail engineering firm), nobody solves "high mathematical problems" any more. Software does that. I also observed that being a junior engineer isn't necessarily all that good a job. And those people who went into business? Some of them end up managing the early-onset STEM folks. You don't need to be an engineer to be a good project manager or executive.
The nature of today precise engineering cannot rely on close form equations anymore. They are are used in the undergrad to teach engineering concepts. For more real life complex problems, computer modeling is needed but they are based on the fundamental mathematical concepts. Good modelers are also good at math, more often they have higher degrees because they know about BS in, BS out. The rest just push buttons.
Project management people requires good planning and good financial skills. Some are better at it than others, and some prefer never having to do it.
When I was in college for the first time, back in the 80s, several of my male friends were planning to major in Engineering. But there was a specific calculus class you had to pass in order to get into the Engineering program. It weeded out a LOT of prospective engineers, including some of my friends. It was intended to, I think. I'm not sure that it was that the subject matter was that hard, but rather that it was taught in such a way as to discourage those without the necessary grit from continuing with a challenging course of study.
I think that most engineering students find freshman calculus is hard. Very few of us got A. While the majority passed but it was the test of fire for those who still wanted to pursue the engineering school. Then we went on to differential equations, Laplace transform, Fourier transform and everyone struggled with them. Not until we were in the senior year, or graduate school that we understood why they were taught.
I was good at math and those calculus classes were very hard. Really need a good teacher for that.
I knew some people at my firm who had really fine minds and all-the-way through technical expertise like you're describing. I don't think the work could have gotten done without them, but also it couldn't have been done with them alone, because they are just too time-limited and expensive. The drones were needed to turn the crank. Project management is less constrained: it is a talent and a personality type, but there are more people of different backgrounds who can do it. I admired the construction project managers the most, just because of the high-stakes physical aspect and relentless schedule of what they were doing. They really had to be at the top of their game all the time. These were not always engineers, sometimes they had a trade school background with years on the railroad.
Yeah, my kid got a Chem E degree, same thing. Majoring in ChemE was referred to as “pre-business” for a chunk of the kids.
I had a liberal arts education at a top-ten liberal arts college and wouldn't trade it for the world. As a vehicle for mental training and development it is unbeatable. An honors-level capstone in History or English literature is one of the most intellectually demanding things you can do, much harder than anything you'll likely face on the job. But this kind of education has to be of the best, most demanding quality. A few soft humanities classes mixed with "activism" won't do it.
For most people, professional training should come later, when one's mind and experience are fully developed to take advantage of it. In my lengthy career, I worked with many STEM people who only knew how to do the narrow thing they were trained for. Many of them were engineers, so presumably they had passed courses in higher mathematics, but they could not write, reason, or problem-solve independently. In my career I was always busy, always developing new things, always moving into new fields and taking on new responsibilities, for which my education made me very well suited. I found there was a lot of value in the business and technical world for this kind of capability.
To be fair, liberal arts is not for everybody, both for money reasons (it is best to avoid loans for this) and because it usually takes a while longer to establish yourself in a career. A lot of people don't have the privilege of being able to do this. It can't be the model for a national educational system, but it should be a respected option.
1970s STEM graduate here… went back in the liberal arts post retirement. I was expecting what you said, but got a lot of indoctrination, what to think rather than how. If you ask a STEM prof in general, “how do you know that?”they have an answer. If I asked “how do you know that” to one of these it was seen as a provocation and an indicator of incorrect thinking.
Things have decayed massively on the liberal arts front since I was an undergraduate (mid 1980's). In fact, I wonder if there is even such a thing as a liberal arts *education* anymore, judging from the communications from my alma mater. The guts of historical study is the seeking for full understanding and everything now seems oriented to propaganda for causes I am out of sympathy with. So I'm now in a STEM program instead.
Many people who excelled in STEM field do not have the personality traits for dealing with long winded people. I wish they are more liberal arts minded but they aren't enough of them. The soft minded STEM are too often promoted into management because we can't trust them to do the actual engineering work. I've taken enough personality tests to know.
I also met a lot of liberal art types who aren't logical at all, can't argue well, and they do yell a lot when you disagree with them. I was told liberal arts is the best degree because you can do anything. Only a few can learn new skills but most can't fix a simple plumbing job. Liberal arts study isn't what is was 40 years ago.
From experience, 90% of the people at work, from technical to publishing, they all want to learn A job and nothing else. They don't learn other new skills. Only a small percentage of them do. They usually do one job for a long time and wonder why they can't find the same job after they are laid off.
This is why I qualify my comment. Studying liberal arts subjects is not the same as getting a liberal arts education. I never imagined that my liberal arts degree gave me the ability to do just "anything," only that I could do some valuable things that more directly-trained people could not. If anything, it's given me respect for true expertise (not least because I have had to work with those experts to get things done). History helps a lot with that, you see a lot of different personalities facing a lot of different challenges in the history books.
I didn't mean to sound as I disagree with you. I would love to study history, the arts, but as a foster kid growing up and joining the military after high school, at 22, I needed to get into a career field that pays well and to allow me to pursue other interests. I study history in my free time, because I wanted to know more, to learn how people deal with the same problems centuries ago for example.
Oh, I think we're fundamentally in sync, sorry to have given the impression otherwise :) I read history (especially military history) for those same reasons (also because I'm fascinated with obsolete technology and how people built and used it). Fortunately, history is something that gets better with age and experience.
So you promote them for not doing their jobs? That's a management problem, not a STEM problem.
@Raziel 💯. Every kid should read this.
We have slowly backed ourselves into this corner of helplessness. It is much bigger than something which can be solved by institutions and supporting organizations, but that is clearly part of the solution.
It is no surprise to anybody paying attention that we have coddled and smothered a generation of children. Whether it was the indulgences of the first children coming out of the baby boomer families or the more recent developments attendant to various statuses, we have put all the focus on the individual and individuals’ rights in our society. Does anybody really know a teenager with an afterschool job? This is the society that you get when everybody is supposed to be at SAT prep class in the afternoon. We have also seen a steady increase in older parents and smaller families, neither of which is conducive to developing the type of strong and well developed children that should be leading their generation. An older parent is an insecure parent. A parent of a single child is even more protective of their progeny. Those children, who make up a larger part of our emerging generations, are their family’s trophies. And like the trophies we gave all of those kids for simply growing up, they are inherently fragile.
If you peel back the onion deeply enough, you realize that what we are witnessing is a slow unraveling of the nation’s confidence. More focused on protecting the gains in their wealth over the past generations, American families slowly began to worship the wrong things. They chose to race forward and collect things rather than developing in their children character. That is not going to be repaired by more deans on college campuses, many of whom dig in and double down on the same strategies that put us into this mess in the first place.
@mainstream Also the concepts that have been pushed for years are never truly attainable. Work-life ‘balance,’ ‘fulfillment’ and so many terms that are thrown around but are guaranteed losers because they never come to fruition. Latest is finding ‘meaningful’ work, which is great but for most people you’ll work many, many jobs that don’t fit that description before you find one that does. But now that means you don’t take any job seriously until you find that meaningful job. It’s a constant set up for dissatisfaction, especially for young people.
I recently hired a new admin assistant. My previous assistant wanted “work-life balance” which turned out to mean she wanted to do the absolute bare minimum and run out the door at 5:00 on the dot. I interviewed several people and they all had the same requests: benefits, a six-figure salary and “work-life balance”. All I heard was they wanted to be grossly overpaid and would never put in the effort to get the job done. I hired a 23-year old woman who grew up working on her parents farm and she never mentioned any of these things. She’s been amazing so far and is a really hard worker. There’s a huge difference with how we raise our kids these days. So many people today are inherently lazy and believe employers should cater to their every need. I worry what this will look like in another few years.
This is one of the reasons U.S. organizations are outsourcing work to India, the Philippines etc - almost scary work ethic (okay, and lower wages).
Our kids will be competing with Indian kids for routine office work soon, at least in midsized and larger companies, given that the pandemic validated the WFH model
“…will be…soon….”
Nope. Been happening for some time now. A couple examples:
1) I used to use D.C. based patent people to do searches before I filed. A few years ago my patent lawyer suggested I try an Indian company. They took about a week, deliver a far superior search, and charge less than a third of what the Americans do.
2) We’ve been dealing with an Indian engineer to do CFD (computational flow dynamics) studies for us for about the past year. Mohit doesn’t look like he’s old enough to buy a drink, but he’s smart as anything. $20/hour, and no excuses, just results. He reminds me of Asok, the Indian intern in Dilbert. Asok gets the job done, even when nobody helps. He could easily run the company.
Indeed. My point is that more and more mainstream American companies will move large parts of office work to India, like they moved production work to Mexico and then China. Either moving entire functions, or - just as significantly, if not more do - splitting existing jobs into onshore/offshore pairings when existing onshore employees leave.
I’ve worked for two companies that have progressively moved work to India and in one of these organizations it reached the stage where every type of non-manual work was assumed to be a default mixture of onshore/offshore unless there was a good reason why not. So, offshoring permeates the entire organization.
I think this is still only done by a minority of companies, but will soon become mainstream, which will put young people in America under a lot more pressure to perform.
I'm going to go ahead & push back on this one.
My husband is a Senior Technical Architect. His company luckily does NOT have H1B's & they have hard working U.S. citizens (who are paid well).
He has had to do projects/consulting work with other companies who hire H1B's in India to cut costs. H1B's are ATROCIOUS. They quadruple everyone else's work with their incompetence. Deadlines cannot be met. Projects go wrong and have to be redone, over and over again.
These companies think they are saving money but they are actually losing money b/c it takes so much longer with these incompetent fools. Also: another fun trick played by H1B's in India: the resumes are completely falsified & they often have someone ELSE interview in their place. To hide the fact that they have no skills & are incompetent. They literally have Another Person Interview in place of them!
At one of these companies, they have 75% H1B contractors & 25% American employees. The H1B's know nothing & do nothing. They screw projects up constantly. The few American employees are literally scrambling to fix the work these fools are messing up.
Thanks, Sally Sue. What you are talking about here is immigration scamming - people so desperate to get into North America that they lie about their abilities and end up hopelessly underperforming.
But separately there are tens of millions of smart, hardworking and English-speaking people in places like India who are happy to stay there and earn good money as remote co-workers laboring alongside onshore people.
There certainly can be cultural issues using offshore labor (e.g. around proactivity and around "pushing back" and challenging co-workers and clients) that sometimes that create inefficiencies and can reduce the value of offshoring, but companies are learning how to avoid or minimize these. Money will find a way to solve these problems.
I bet India has the same 'normal distribution' of talent as anywhere else, and with a population of 1.4 billion people (more than the whole of Africa) and with English as the language of educated people, it's going to produce a lot of competent office workers over the next few years competing with our WFH kids.
My apologies, I did not clarify/specify:
I am talking about both H1B's here in the US & also Off-shore Tech in India.
Yes, the off-shore tech is more than happy to stay in India, they earn high salaries & can afford numerous household servants.
The Off-shore Tech is horrific & quadruples everyone's work. Companies think this will save them money but it ends up costing much more. Project delays. Incompetence which causes failures. Everyone is Cleaning UP the mess created by these off-shore morons. I am sure that people who are not directly involved on the technical side cannot see what is going on. Ask any U.S. software developer about their personal experience working with an off-shore team & they will tell you it is a nightmare. Everything goes wrong.
And they get it done while we sleep.
Results may vary....
This! So much this! This crap being fed to all of us that so much meaning has to come from our job. Sometimes it’s just a damn job! Just do it, get paid, pay your bills and shut up already!
Wait, PL, you’re not ‘following your passion ‘and ‘doing what you love and the money follows’ ??? What???
🤣🤣
I think my dad (Greatest Gen) would have been appalled at the idea that work was supposed to give his life "meaning." He worked in a steel mill, for wages that allowed him to save money for the things he wanted to do. We took "vacation" vacations at least once a year, in addition to driving to Colorado twice a year to visit my favorite aunt (my dad's sister). My dad found his "meaning" in tending his yard, interacting with his friends, and participating in local union leadership and state and local politics (but not as a candidate).
We've had to de-program our adult kids from the notion--absorbed from culture and their peers--that work is *meant* to be fulfilling. For the vast majority of people, work is what you do so that you have the money to enjoy other aspects of your life. It's best if you don't HATE your job, but it's just a way to put food on the table. It doesn't have to be (and probably won't be) some kind of meaningful career.
💯
The other lie they feed to kids is "You can change the WORLD!!"
And that's about all the kids wanna do.
I agree with you mostly. There are a few that end up in jobs they love. Not me lol, but there are some.
It is very true and despite what I wrote I do believe that everyone should have meaningful work. Just from my experience, the people I’ve seen who enjoy their work the most are older and have either come up the ranks in their current industry or have changed industries over the course of their working life. What concerns me now is young people who are led to believe they should have that level of career satisfaction right out of the gate and don’t realize that a lifetime of work has its ups and downs like everything else. Or if you’re not following your dreams right now, your current job is meaningless. I’ve worked in a few different industries and I did learn skills and made contacts and friends through all of them. There was value even when I knew the job was not for me.
That’s why I believe that in many ways the narrative that the only way to work is on your dream ends up hurting more people than it helps.
FYI, I’m a single divorced mom who had my daughter at 34. She’s 16 now, an A student, gets herself up and out bed and to school on time. She also works part-time. Just saying’ we’re out here. 😀
I think single moms have it the toughest. Good for you!
But too many can't be the great mom you are. Single parenting is one of the reasons so many kids end up in trouble. I can't imagine juggling a job (or two!), parenting, household chores, and activities. I blame the fathers who abandon their kids, and our society who so readily allow that to happen.
Well, our difference is that her father is still very much involved and has been in her life still. We co-parent - we just didn't want to be married to each other anymore. And, I agree - too many missing dads!
@PL
Of course you are!
We take the measure of any society by its median (or mean) cohort. Same should be true in all things.
I am still hopeful. But we are steadily ceding too much power to people who follow very temporal pursuits.
My thoughts exactly...well said! It all started with "participation trophies". We need to allow children to work through their disappointments and failures. We learn when we struggle and we also know what success feels like when we improve.
Noted Atheist, Sam Harris, speaking for rational materialists,says that our goal across humanity should be to minimize UNNECESSARY suffering.
Sam and his cohort must know the redline after which we pass into necessary suffering.
When you see a generation growing up with a profound illiteracy around the taproots of our civilization, the so-called NONEs will fall under the sway of guys like Sam and their CRT-advocating professors.
Never has a nation gambled so big on so many untested theories.
Trophies, very interesting observation indeed.
I am always proud to display my two trophies. Two daughters, one is a PhD student in Physical Chemistry @ Berkeley, the other is a Junior @ UVM carrying a 3.8 GPA in Environmental Studies, with a minor in Italian (she is fluent in Italian). My pride and joy.
You would think that the parents we speak of, who fail their children, would have the foresight to understand that their children will one day represent them. And that terrible parenting would come home to roost. They either can’t see this, don’t care, or don’t have the skills to do otherwise. They are tarnishing their trophies.
Older parents are not insecure parents. They are the parents who actually remember what it was like to have a paper route and babysit and have weekend jobs during high school. They’re the parents that worked during college. They’re the parents whose children read lots of books. They are the parents whose children get A’s because they are expected to live up to their full potential. They are the parents that are more likely to complain that the kids aren’t working hard enough at school and that they need more work—not that they need to get out of it. They are also the parents that wonder where recess has gone. Their kids are super involved in sports and other activities, and they don’t have the drug and weight problems that lots of students have these days. Their kids are the leaders in the class because their parents value education and work ethic.
Okay..I’m 65 and don’t have kids, but…maybe 30 years ago when I saw this phenomenon evolving all I could think was ‘these are the kids MY generation raised’.
On the other hand, I never thought it would get this bad.
And last, now that we’ve heard all the sad stories about why we need to forgive student loans, mostly so they ‘can get on with life’, this is telling me that they are NOT ready for big world responsibilities of mortgages and the like, and probably never will be.
Ok, edit: this piece is the culmination of all we read here in Common Sense. Cancel culture and misinformation at the hands of children who can’t tie their own shoelaces.
Not sure I can stomach another article about the neutering of the nation’s future. I need more trauma-informed reporting.
Great piece for telling us what we already know: we have a generation that is peppered with self-centered, egotistical half wits who are the direct result of "helicopter" and or "bulldozer" parents who themselves are living with a lot of delusions. There are many young people who do not fall into this category but we never see or hear anything from them, and there is a reason for that.
Most kids are sensible but … if you get rewarded for whining, attention seeking and playing the victim, it’s almost irrational not to do so.
It’s about perverse incentives created by well-meaning policies whose unintended consequences that have not thought through.
Very true. You have essentially defined neoliberal government the past 50 years; good intentions, poor executions.
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it but Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind...goes over most of this. While no doubt there are children that do indeed have legitimate mental health issues, Haidt and his co-author ultimately blame helicopter parents and social media for a lot of it. Millions of parents have tried to protect their children from everything, not just physical harm but any kind of negative experience. These are the kids that get to college and can’t stand to have their views challenged because “words are violence.” Couple that with the fact that millions of kids grew up without physical social interaction because their entire social life is through social media. They’re not prepared to interact with thousands of strangers with face-to-face dialogue.
Sadly the proposed solution appears to be more coddling. Safe spaces, canceling, censoring, etc. At some point these kids are going to need to enter the real world where they won’t be coddled. Then again, MSM cancels and censors every day so maybe these kids will be alright.
I just graduated college. I know many people who have had serious mental illness during. It almost cost me my best friend.
What I didn’t understand throughout this was the lack of realization that maybe going to a university a couple hundred of miles away from home wasn’t the answer. Peoples parents and themselves kept pushing them to stay in the environment they were in, at whatever cost to their friends around them watching them suffer. I’m all for being resilient and Working through problems, but when your kid is needing hospitalization , why not just throw in the towel? Perhaps this isn’t for you?
It seems weird to me that people are so attached to a degree from a specific university, or so attached to a plan they made when they were 18, they are willing to go through suicide attempts, starvation, hospitalization, etc in order to get it. I don’t see that as honorable, I see it as not being realistic about what environment you actually thrive in.
Course corrections are a part of the maturation process. The key point is the decision making process that leads to the course correction.
I thought this was a useful and well written article.
My comment is about the comments. If you want to think seriously about an issue, you have to accept the irrelevance of your own particular experience,in this case either as a college student or the parent of a college student. It's a single data point among millions of data points.
The author has a plethora of career data points and professional experience backing up her observations and suggestions. Accordingly, she has a better grasp ion the situation than any non-professional.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that for a second. Actually, You're just plain wrong. As a general principle the idea that we should "just trust the expert" falls on its face.
I liked the article. It was interesting and covered a deep difficulty in, not only college, but our society. And I think the author, tho part of the problem, understands how they got in the difficulty they're in.
But I was gonna post that I enjoyed the comments as much as the article. Because the people in the comments have mostly identified where the problems lay:
Bad parenting ruining the lives of their unstable children. Read "The Coddling of the American Mind" if You don't believe me. Rather, trust *certain* experts. After validating what they say against common sense (like You see here).
Bingo, 1000%.
No, parents are parents and should stand on their own two feet. Experts should be consulted only when there is a problem the parents can’t deal with, like a medical or mental challenged. Everyday stuff like being a responsible person is on the parents.
When I've been asked if it was helpful to me to have access to professional parenting advice, my reply has been "Absolutely!"
I think it’s great when someone is aware of their own limitations and seeks help. It’s a very important part of being human. I assume you took that advice and molded it to your own situation, your child perhaps. You did good as a parent in that case. Though there are many other situations that you knew intuitively as well.
Absolutely right….and wrong! Personal experience has limited utility across a spectrum of people. But, the “professionals” suffer both from personal experience AND institutional myopia and insularity. They can’t be objective about their industry. And the industry has no real competition to challenge it. Most businesses have competition to keep them fairly objective. Universities and social work do not. There is no Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in these two fields. Just more money pouring in, with worsening outcomes. JMVHO
I am not a fan of the industry at all. Its desperately needs reform.
But this article was aimed at giving advice to parents and their kids given the status quo, not at what we all wish college would be.
Two completely different matters.
Oh please, differing to the author because they're an 'expert'?
Sorry, but that's what got us to this sorry state.
Stop, I can't take the pain of these poor, poor children suffering at college. Oh for the good old days when you got drafted out of high school, told to shut the F up as your new Mom was now called the TI. Your new family was your unit and your life could depend on supporting each other.
Now not saying we need the draft, but how many kids today even work or are required to help do anything? Everything is emotional and requires guidance and support. Our son's went to college and were told, graduation, military or get a job. One got military and one graduated. Did we, yes the actual parents help him work through it? Of course we are parents and no counselor, scream room or support person knows our kids like we do. How about time to have the talk. You need to decide, are you and us willing to borrow and actually pay back loans? Are you going to realize you need to accept responsibility for yourself but understand we are still here for support? Come on America we are stronger than this and let's kick the whinny you need special support because life is hard. Look at the rest of the world and be thankful you are not forced to live in poverty or work from early childhood. Now dry your tears and get your ass back into life.
"Come on America we are stronger than this...", I can hear Bernie Mac saying this.
Is this piece a joke?
Yeh right.
That these suggestions are even considered on campus is a tragedy.
I think it must be.
Sadly... *Very* sadly...
(nup)
I thank God every day my parents worked three jobs to pay the Catholic school tuition for me and my sibs K-12. The nuns taught 50 kids per classroom, and we still got a great education, as well as a sense of duty to family and community. To get into trouble with the nuns was a horror since Mom would be called, and we’d catch hell again when we got home. No bringing shame on the family by failing or screwing around at school. But this was all a long time ago, and now the nuns and Mom would be charged with child abuse.
My wife still has 'nun nightmares' at 65.
You?
Not really. They were tough at times, but all the stories of beatings aren’t true. They would shame kids for bad behavior, that was effective since no one wanted that embarrassment again. Some of my nuns were pretty brilliant actually. History, Latin, Literature, Chemistry. They were inspiring.