If the subject is kids and how they’re raised, it seems our culture has exactly one story to tell. Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines, or blogs -- or attends dinner parties -- will already know it by heart: Parents today, we’re informed, either can’t or won’t set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they coddle and dote and bend over backward to shield them from frustration and protect their self-esteem. The result is that we’re raising a generation of undisciplined narcissists who expect everything to go their way, and it won’t be pretty -- for them or for our society -- when their sense of entitlement finally crashes into the unforgiving real world.
The words are by Alfie Kohn. If you read the Outlook section of today's Washington Post you will encounter Complaining about a generation of spoiled kids - again on B2. I have quoted from the beginning of the expanded version of the same piece on Kohn's website, from which I take my title. I invite you to keep reading.
Let me dispose of some formalities. I am using the expanded version because (a) when I suggested I might write about it Kohn pointed me at it, and (b) I am not limited in how much I can quote without violating fair use provided I offer these words:
Copyright © 2010 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name).
Having done so in pointing you at the Post version, let me now turn to my exploration of and reflections upon that longer version of the piece.
As my user name indicates, for anyone who does not already know, I am a teacher. I have been in public school secondary classrooms since 1995-96, long enough to see some evidence of generational chance among the students I teach, and among their parents. I previously was a teacher intern in a Quaker secondary school in 1974, and I still have clear memories of my own school days. I think I have a reasonably good appreciation of commonalities among and differences between generations of students.
Kohn begins his article with the common wisdom. The problem, as is so often the case, is that the common wisdom is wrong.
I am now going to have you read, uninterrupted, a section that would violate fair usage if not taken from Kohn's website with the statement I have already quoted. I will then return to some of my ruminations.
Read ten articles or books on this topic and you’ll find yourself wondering if a single person wrote all of them, so uniform is the rhetoric. The central premise is that the problem’s dimensions are unprecedented: What’s happening now contrasts sharply with the days when parents weren’t afraid to hold kids to high standards or to allow them to experience failure.
That’s why no generation of teens and young adults has ever been as self-centered as this one. Take it from journalist Peter Wyden, the cover of whose book on the subject depicts a child lounging on a divan eating grapes while Mom fans him and Dad holds an umbrella to protect him from the sun: It’s become "tougher and tougher to say ‘no’ [to children] and make it stick," he insists.
Or listen to the lament of a parent who blames progressive child development experts for the fact that her kids now seem to believe "they have priority over everything and everybody."
Or consider a pointed polemic published in The Atlantic. Sure, the author concedes, kids have always been pleasure seekers, but longtime teachers report that what we’re currently witnessing "is different from anything we have ever seen in the young before." Parents teach "nothing wholeheartedly" and things come so easily to children nowadays that they fail to develop any self-discipline. Forget about traditional values: Today, it’s just a "culte du moi."
Powerful stuff. Except now that I think about it, those three indictments may not offer the best argument against today’s parents and their offspring. That’s because they were published in 1962, 1944, and 1911, respectively.
Somehow when I encountered that last paragraph I am reminded of a terrific book by Otto Bettman, founder of the eponymous photographic archive. It bears the title The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!. I am also reminded of a important lesson learned studying the Odyssey with George Kennedy in Classical History at Haverford in the Fall of 1963. Kennedy pointed out that the Greek understanding of that Homeric classic was that there had been an heroic age during which the events recounted had occurred, and mankind had gone downhill ever since. Perhaps the simplest form in which we encounter this perpetual human attitude is when an adult begins a statement to a child "When I was your age. . ." And of course we see its political reflection in movements like the Tea Party that claim they want to return to some previous and therefore better time in our nation's history and culture.
Let me return to Kohn. He asks us to consider three questions :
Are parents unduly yielding (or overprotective)? Are kids today more narcissistic than earlier generations were? And does the former cause the latter?
He has combed the historical record and talked to scholars and the result? Let's start with today:
Scholars have no idea how many parents these days are permissive, or punitive, or responsive to their children’s needs without being permissive or punitive. (The tendency to overlook that third possibility is a troubling and enduring trend in its own right.)
Further, if one wants to consider the possibility of change over time
Not surprisingly, then, no one has a clue as to whether parenting has changed over the years – and, if so, in what direction.
Let's stop for a moment and ponder. Everbody "knows" but the experts can assure you they do not, that there simply is no evidence to say, either for our own time or for any previous period in our history.
People will offer anecdotes to make their arguments. For this I have a certain amount of sympathy. First, we tend to want to universalize our own experience and perceptions. Second, we have an all too human tendency to select examples that reinforce our already held opinions. Third - and this is important - instinctively we know that it is easier to have people relate to stories of individuals rather than reams of data. Ronald Reagan and Joseph Stalin both knew this (and no, that does not mean I am comparing them). Reagan would offer his anecdote of the one woman coming for her welfare benefits in a Cadillac, and Stalin told us that of a single individual was a tragedy but the death of millions merely a statistic. I recently wrote a review of a book on education which gains a great deal of its power by the author's use of individual examples to illustrate and illuminate. I have taken a similar approach in some of my own advocacy writing. The difference we use these to illustrate and illuminate, but do not automatically imply they are universal, that they explain all.
Let me return to Kohn. He uses the issue of helicopter parents to show that despite the scores and more of articles on the phenomenon the total lack of any data on its prevalence.
Or consider this:
What we do know about discipline is that corporal punishment remains extremely popular in this country. In a 1995 poll, 94 percent of parents of preschoolers admitted to having struck their children within the last year, a fact that’s not easy to square with claims that parents have become softer or more humane. (Of course, even if spanking had become rarer, that wouldn’t prove that parents were permissive or even necessarily less punitive.)
Kohn goes on to point out how the great majority of contemporary parenting books have an emphasis on discipline, that even the words of praise that are to be offered have as their intent compliance to adult authority.
So how are the kids now being spoiled?
As a teacher, and one who is quite familiar with educational trends over time (more so than many involved in making policy), one trend that is unmistakable is the increasing structure of time for children to the point that free time begins to disappear. Show an interest in a sport and your parents will put you in a competitive and structured program at a very young age. I saw this when I coached soccer: some of my players were on travel teams that played at least two times on weekends, on top of the practices and games during the week. It can be too much for developing bodies - some argue one reason people like Wayne Rooney were ineffective in the recent World Cup is the lack of any rest, with the long English Premier League Season, the FA Cup tournament, the Champions' League, and the National team training and games. (I might note that one of the best freshman I ever coached did not play school soccer for the next two years because his club coach convinced the parents that if he couldn't do both he would develop more in club soccer than with the school team. As we saw when he returned to us as a senior, in his case it was not true.)
Kohn addresses the issue I have just been discussing in this paragraph:
Critics also tend to lump together a bunch of alleged problems that are actually quite distinct: kids are said to be overscheduled, they’re pushed too hard to achieve, they get A’s too easily, they’re micromanaged by their parents, they’re shielded from failure, they’re not disciplined sufficiently, and so on. This conceptual sloppiness helps writers to get away with broad, unsubstantiated claims. And the goal is usually to move parenting in the direction of being even more traditional and controlling than it already is.
I would note that beyond the intellectual sloppiness involved in such reasoning, I am prepared to argue that my generation, where we had free time, where we learned to organize ourselves into our own games without adult supervision, was (a) more humane; (b) gave us an ability to develop some ownership of our actions and some skill in doing so; and (d) would almost certainly be labeled by some contemporary critics as spoiling us by not providing us with proper rigor and discipline - and I use those terms deliberately because I see in that mindset a great deal of what is wrong in our approach to educational policy as well, although that is not the focus of this posting.
Kohn addresses the question of self-centeredness in today's children:
When the conversation turns to what the kids themselves are like, we notice a similar goulash of complaints: they’re rude, lacking in moral standards, materialistic, defiant, self-centered, excessively pleased with themselves, and more. Again, these characteristics are very different from one another, and the existence of each would need to be demonstrated.
One issue that must be addressed is whether it is appropriate to lump all people in a thirty-year period into one "generation." But there is a more important issue, often missed in discussions like this: we tend to look at teenagers and see narcissistic behavior and then, improperly, draw the conclusion that we are seeing an increase in such behavior in the younger generation. As Kohn points out, we are seeing behavior characteristic of that age group at all times, only we have grown out of it yet somehow have forgotten now narcissistic and self-centered we were at that age, and thus draw an improper conclusion. Let me allow Kohn to speak to this issue:
To that extent, they continue, "when older people are told that younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for generational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcissistic than they are. The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individuals will agree with the Generation Me argument despite its lack of empirical support."
In short, "every generation is Generation Me. That is, until they grow up."
There is more in Kohn's article. It is worth reading the longer version from which I am drawing and considering what he has to say.
This past school year I had almost 200 students pass through my care, finishing the year with just under 180. They ranged in age from 13 at the start of the year to almost 19 at the end. They encompassed a wide range of personalities and of human behavior. Some WERE extremely self-centered. Others were very much other-oriented, willing to help struggling classmates, volunteering with me at a free dental clinic. Some had controlling parents and some had parents that gave them room to fall and then try to pick themselves up, stepping in only if the child was still struggling, or demonstrated an inability to handle freedom and self-responsibility. I talk with all my parents at the start of the year, and have fairly regular contact during the year. There were several dozen students where, having taught or coached older siblings, I already knew the parents. My experience of the past year, which I acknowledge is still anecdotal, fully supports the thrust of Kohn's piece. I found this past year's students no more nor less spoiled, selfish, self-centered, ill-behaved than any previous year's collection. Fifteen years of teaching adolescents, 11 in the same building. Both long enough periods to see trends were there any.
The one set of trends I am seeing are academic, and not positive, but very much a result of having ever increasing portions of their previous education under the rules imposed by No Child Left Behind. But that is academic, and the issue before us is not, although academics are affected by student behavior and attitude. Kohn does address this in his penultimate paragraph:
Even if a researcher did show that today’s youth were unusually self-centered, we might be inclined to attribute that to an extraordinary emphasis on achievement and winning in contemporary America, schooling that’s focused on narrowly defined academic skills, excessive standardized testing, copious amounts of homework, and a desperate competition for awards, distinctions, and admission to selective colleges. Indeed, earlier research has shown that competitive individuals -- or people who have been instructed to compete -- tend to be less empathic and less generous.
That COULD be the case. It is not my experience. The students in my Advanced Placement classes are mainly from our Science and Tech program, admission to which is competitive. Many of them will be applying to the same colleges and universities, seeking the same scholarships and honors. And yet I do not see them as any more competitive or selfish than the kids in the so-called comprehensive classes. I see a fair amount of collaboration, of wanting to help their classmates. They form Facebook groups, they share their food, they study together, they play on sports teams and sing in choir and act or do tech in plays. They are kids, some are selfish and very competitive, some are not. In my 11 years in this high school I see no change of overall pattern. Nor do I see such changes in the students I encounter doing admissions volunteering for Haverford (although I acknowledge that the kind of student interested in my alma mater may be a self-selecting group that would exclude some who were more selfish).
Alfie Kohn has been one of the most important voices on issues affecting students. He has always been willing to talk with experts, to examine the data, to go against the conventional wisdom. He has done so not to be contrary, but because his focus is the well-being of the young people in our schools. It is one reason he continues to question our heavy reliance upon homework. It certainly motivates his writing the piece I am examining.
I began as Kohn began. The only appropriate way to end is as he ends, so I offer you my final salutation now:
Peace.
And now to Kohn:
In any case, neither logic nor evidence seems to support the widely accepted charge that we’re too easy on our children. Yet that assumption continues to find favor across the political spectrum. It seems, then, that we’ve finally found something to bring the left and the right together: an unsubstantiated critique of parents, an unflattering view of kids, and a dubious belief that the two are connected.