From the article:
Experts in education and adolescent psychology speculate that in the past 30 years our culture has put less emphasis on individual responsibility and too much on individual satisfaction, creating a culture of adult children who don't know about delayed gratification.
Diane Ehrensaft -- a developmental and clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and author of two books -- was moved to write her second book when she realized "that something profound was occurring in our culture that needed explanation." In "Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Their Children Too Much -- But Not What They Need," Ehrensaft explores the many contradictions that define today's parents.
"How could this same group of parents be simultaneously accused of being the most self-centered and self-indulgent, and also the most child-centered and overly indulgent, generation of parents in modern history?" she asks. "Can it be both ways?"
The answer is affirmative. Describing times of rapid cultural flux, Ehrensaft posits that there have been dominant directives about raising children for many decades, from habit training in the 1930s to the more permissive approaches of Benjamin Spock in the 1940s and 1950s. No clear directives exist today. Limited time for "parenting," overburdened two-income parents with fragile emotional ties, fear for our children's future and a generation of "Peter Pan" parents are some of the factors that contribute to today's "crisis in parenthood."
"Consumed by their own stress and worries, feeling more afraid, alone, and professionally insecure than parents in the past, mothers and fathers attempt to bolster their own self-esteem by having precocious and high-achieving sons and daughters," writes Ehrensaft. This confluence of stress and insecurities has created a sort of freakish adult-child, perhaps best typified by Jessica Dubroll, the cheerfully officious 7-year-old who lost her life while attempting to fly solo across the country.
Children are both pushed to progress and overcoddled
As the trend toward being more grown-up starts at a younger age, a curious parenting permutation has emerged. Children are both pushed to progress and overcoddled, not by parents who are selfish or uncaring but, as Ehrensaft points out, "by confused parents who have no clear picture of what a child is and are unconscious of the vacillations between hurrying our children and holding them back. As a result, childhood is simultaneously contracting and expanding in some bizarre fashion."
Equally bizarre is the phenomenon in which parents who push their children to grow up fast are often the same Peter Pan parents who never really wanted to grow up themselves, and thus have a paradoxically well-intentioned but myopic view of parenting that fetishizes, glorifies and commodifies childhood. Parenthood, which comes as a shock, becomes a high-investment, high-risk endeavor instead of a natural, evolving developmental process.
The best specialty schools function with a high awareness of dysfunctional parental dynamics and require parents to participate in a series of increasingly complex personal development programs for the duration of their child's enrollment. Says Katie Brown, a CEDU alumni, "Parental involvement is crucial. Lots of parents send kids off to be fixed. These kids aren't necessarily broken, but the parents are."
So are teens truly more defiant and troubled than ever before? Or are we experiencing a sort of cultural déjà vu that harks back to the '50s, when the sexually and morally "degenerate" influences of rock 'n' roll, among other things, set off waves of parental panic throughout the nation?
"Absolutely," says Ponton. "There are a number of parallels here." The first similarity is statistical: There was a big boom in the teen population during the '50s. Beyond that, there is a remarkable replay of old perceptions that the parents of today's teens once rejected as irrational and unfair.
"These things are definitely culture based. Teens are once again perceived as risk takers, as dangerous," says Ponton. "When society is doing well economically -- as was also the case in the '50s -- people tend to dump on teens. You'd think economically good times would be good for teens, but they're not."
:nworthy:
