Posted 12/09/2004 05:33:00 PM by Douglas

I found this article pretty damn interesting for two reasons. First of all, I tend to agree that kids today are total pussies and their parents are afraid of anything bad happening to them. Sure, no one wishes ill upon their children, but ya gotta fall down before you learn how to get back up. What I found even more interesting about this article is that there was absolutely NO mention of parental guilt as the cause of this overprotection. Guilt about not spending time with the kids, guilt about dumping them in day-care from the day they were six weeks old. Surely, that's got to be a factor of this parental hyper-protectionism, no? But what's the result?

"Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."

How does that old saying go? "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience, however, comes from bad judgment." Pretty much a fundamental truth of the Human experience, and all the padded jungle gyms in the world aren't going to change that. So what's different now? Anything?

Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.

Well they can't do it forever. At some point, every chicky has to be pushed out of the nest to fend for themselves. It's occurring much later now (mid to late 20s, from those I know), but children can't live vicariously through the life experiences and security of their parents forever. Can they?

Forgive me for asking, but I have to say it: "Won't somebody please think of the children!" What do they think about this excessive pampering?

"Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."

"We don't know what to want"??? Excuse me while I bust out crying for a few minutes.
Ok, I'm better now. The thought that someone would make such an asinine statement is a perfect example of how supine this generation really is. What are they freakin' waiting for?

It's called "the World", Elise, and it's not going to be featured on MTV's top 20 Video Countdown. It's waiting for you, outside your front door. Waiting for you and the rest of your whiney generation to go out there and get it all figured out for the rest of us. Oh, and by the way, let us know when you're done. The rest of Humanity would like to know, too. Not that we stopped looking for the answers, but we're pretty sure it's not going to be found on the 32nd level on an X-Box game.

Ok, the second great question this article raises is why is it that every generation thinks the next generation is nothing more than a bunch of languid slackers waiting for their next hand out? If every generation is substantially worse than the previous one, then well. . .hold on a sec. Ok, nevermind. I just turned on the TV for 15 seconds. It is substantially worse.

Sleep tight, kids!

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Update! Got an email from Elise Kramer:

As you may have surmised, I am the Elise Kramer who is "quoted" in that Psychology Today article, and I was quite surprised to find myself being insulted by a complete stranger on the internet (that is, outside of the context of the hatemail I occasionally receive in response to my college newspaper column). For the record, I was also quite surprised to open up Psychology Today and find my name in one of the feature articles, providing a voice for fabricated quotations. I spent the summer writing news articles for Psych Today, and at one point the editor asked a bunch of us college students some questions about college life -- however, the quotations attributed to me in that article don't even come close to anything that left my mouth.

So even if someone did make such an asinine statement (a thought that frightens me as much as it does you), that someone was assuredly not me. I hope that comforts you to some extent.

-Elise

Sorry, Elise.