Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Why are American kids so spoiled?

Elizabeth Kolbert argues, in The Atlantic, that American kids need two things: to be given less supervision, to be given more responsibilities, and to be told "No." Wait, verily, those are three things.

Kolbert contrasts the situation with the way children are raised among the Matsigenka tribe, and in France. Some flava:
[In a study in the United States, it was observed that] an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, "How am I supposed to eat?" Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.

[A boy was observed to be unwilling to tie and untie his own shoes. His father did it for him.]

... [The] French believe ignoring children is good for them. "French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them," [Pamela Druckerman, an American ex-pat] writes. "To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can't cope with frustration." One mother, Martine, tells Druckerman that she always waited five minutes before picking up her infant daughter when she cried. While Druckerman and Martine are talking, in Martine's suburban home, the daughter, now three, is baking cupcakes by herself.

... [Among the Matsigenka,] toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, ... while "three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives." Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood.
We've had this discussion before, over and over; I once observed that the reason that we came out OK was because our parents let us play in the street. Kolbert thinks so, too, and worries about the future of the Republic. We're doomed.

Read it all.

24 comments:

  1. Not just American kids.

    I have students who look like superstars based on their international O/A-levels results who refuse to even try and learn a concept or an idea.

    Since they are all brilliant, any failure is that of their instructors.

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  2. Well there's a Free Range Kids movement that calls for less restrictions on kids. Unfortunately, most of the parents on a website I read about it awhile ago are constantly shamed by other people and even have the cops and CPS called on them for things like letting their kids ride their bikes up and down the block without being outside with them, or letting them walk to school unsupervised. Since I'm planning on being more of that kind of parent myself, these things worry me. I don't worry about my future sproglets getting into trouble--no, I worry about being shamed for letting them do things unsupervised. :/

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    1. They need to shame these idiots right back, and throw the social science research at 'em in support.

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    1. I feel a Life of Brian moment coming upon me.....

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    2. "Wait, verily, those are three things..."

      (Crash!) NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

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    3. Actually, that's a line from the Knights of Badassdom trailer. It looks geekerific.

      Oh, and did I mention it stars Summer Glau? <pant,pant>

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  4. In Germany during the 1940s it was a common HJ* drill to send a kid (ages 10-13) blindfolded into the forest, drop him off, and order him to make it back to the HJ camp before dawn. The boy was armed with a knife and a compass.

    You can loathe the Nazis, but you have to admire them for one thing: physical training for adolescents.

    _________________

    * The Hitlerjungend or Hitler Youth. Yes, the training was to make strong soldiers and strong mothers (the BdM girls) that would produce broods of future soldiers.....why can't the democracies do similar things for peaceful ends?

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    1. ".....but you have to admire them for one thing: physical training for adolescents."

      And the Type I Volkswagen.

      Damn, that's a car.....

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    2. They were good chemists, too: they invented sarin, methamphetamine, and the Fischer-Tropsch process. Still, the price for all this was much too high.

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    3. The Boy Scouts do similar things. Not quite so extreme... but there is a Wilderness Survival merit badge, and you can't make First Class without knowing how to use a map and compass.

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    4. "They were good chemists, too: they invented sarin, methamphetamine, and the Fischer-Tropsch process. Still, the price for all this was much too high."

      - Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno

      I dug myself into a hole there, didn't I? My point was that it's a shame that such training was used for war purposes and support for the crappiest government in Europe. I should have used DOSAAF instead, but they never did the "wilderness survival as initiation rite" bit.

      Introvert.prof, the only problem with the modern BSA is that it's been taken over by the Mormons, which is why you see all the emphasis on gay people (which was never an issue before the 1980s-1990s.)

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    5. Yeah, that's true to some extent. But the number of Mormon troops in our council, one of the few in the entire USA that is growing, can be counted on the fingers of one wrist stump.

      The Mormons use BSA as their youth group, but that doesn't mean it's just Mormons. And if you think it was the Mormons who decided that gay men are not appropriate to have around attractive teenaged boys in rather isolated conditions, there's a fair bit of BSA history you are overlooking.

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  5. The WSJ did a piece a while back on a similar theme, called "Tiger Mom Meets Croissant Mom":
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html

    Nevertheless, I remain a little skeptical. Articles like these always seem to pit the worst of one group against the best of another.

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    1. Ha! It wasn't actually titled that. Someone else referred to it that way and it stuck.

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  6. "Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood."

    Indeed. As the adult child of a single parent who practiced mostly-benign neglect while pursuing a demanding career, this rings absolutely true to me. But it's very hard to explain to parents today -- including members of my own generation -- that my childhood really wasn't all that unhappy -- that, in fact, losing a parent early in life actually offered some benefits in the form of opportunities for increased autonomy and competence. Not that I recommend that; the ideal, of course, would be to still have two parents, but to have them watching unobtrusively from the sidelines. I try to teach in that style, but that's getting harder, too, because if I make students figure things out for themselves, then it's hard to tell, just from reading my class materials, what I'm teaching them (because there are questions, and directions for figuring out the answers, but not the answers themselves). The students, interestingly enough, don't seem all that distressed by the approach (well, only a few of them do), but fellow teachers sometimes do.

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  7. Doesn't how undergraduates are treated at research universities have a lot in common with this? I'm beginning to think that "sink or swim" has a lot to be said for it, since the hand-holding we get roped into doing has so little obvious effect.

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    1. Indeed, and it probably explains why I was quite happy as an undergrad at an R1. I was ready to spread my wings, and to take advantage of the amazing resources the place offered, without a lot of guidance. The main place where I needed guidance, and received it (from advanced graduate students), was in doing jr/sr independent work. Of course I came out of the experience thinking I was more independent than I was, and not recognizing that I needed more guidance in conceiving and producing a dissertation than my grad department gave me, but I'm not sure that was the fault of my undergrad institution. One danger of thriving under benign neglect is that one doesn't always realize when the neglect has crossed over from benign to harmful.

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  8. Is this really true of all children, or does it come down to socioeconomic differentiations? I mean the Matsigenka group being researched kind of has a socioeconomic need to have their children be self reliant. Middle and upper class Americans, not so much. Their children have the luxury of being able to be helpless into their 40s.

    Same with college: if students are helpless, there's always a support group or a service to help them along. Is there any NEED for self reliance?

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    1. Fuck yeah. These are kids that won't tie their own goddam shoelaces.

      We complain about it all the time: kids who have to be told what points they're supposed to pick up from a reading; kids who have to be told to do the homework; kids who won't do a fucking thing unless there's a grade attached to it, even if we tell them that the exams (worth 99.999% of their grade) will be based on the "free" work.

      When they get out into the world, employers are going to expect them to be somewhat independent. Your boss is not going to get your fucking silverware for you, fool.

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    2. It's definitely socioeconomic. At a school with a high first-generation college and/or American/lower-middle-class population, I see far fewer helicopter parents than many here do. The downside is that many of my students have to spend too much time working for money to truly pay attention to their studies, and are liable to miss class to tend to younger siblings, elderly relatives, and/or the family business.

      And, not to knock the two-working-parent family, but I strongly suspect that it has something to do with the trend away from chores and similar expectations. When one's trying to get out of the house in the morning, or get through dinner, homework, and a bedtime routine in a limited time in the evening (all while doing a load of laundry or two and keeping up with communications from the office), it's simply easier,and faster, for a parent to do many things rather than guide the kids through doing them. But the other side of this is that such families seem to spend an inordinate amount of their limited free time chauffering their kids to activities -- especially sports -- meant to build, among other things, teamwork skills and a sense of competence and mastery. Maybe they'd be better off if they spent the time cooking dinner and doing other household chores together?

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  9. My mother actually raised me in the crappy American way back in the 80s. I had no chores, I did nothing to earn money, I was not allowed to spend my own money, I often got in trouble for doing things like getting my own dishes out of the cabinet when I was in my teens, she sat in her car and watched my corner when I was a Safety.... and god how I hated it.

    Most of the children I went to school with had chores, jobs, and responsibilities. They knew how to do shit I didn't know how to do. To this day, my mother wants me to move back in with her, quit my job, and simply let her take care of me so she has someone to hang out with and talk to. It. Drives. Me. Crazy. No one in my family (or my husband's family) was meant to move away from home. It was simply unheard of. "We don't do things like that," they say. Those things include things like moving out of state and getting a tenure track job (yep, did it, and it pissed both our families off!)

    I cannot understand today's students because they aren't mortified that their parents come to orientation. I wanted to hide my mom in a closet during orientation. I wanted to be out meeting new people. But she was there, and she was angry at me for not spending all my time during college orientation with her. She cried. She told me I made her feel unwanted (well, duh, 18-year-old me wanted to be a college student without a parent present). Today's student does not seem to mind the parent intrusion.

    And I had always felt that way--always. When she or my dad would help on projects in grade school I was always embarrassed about how much better mine were than most of the other students. The other kids would break them as well, saying they knew my mom did it for me. But she wouldn't let me do it alone, and I didn't have the supplies or resources to do so anyway.

    I wonder what it was that made me so frustrated and belittled at this treatment when so many of my students are treated the same way and don't feel like that at all?

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    1. My sympathies.

      At a meeting last night for scouts preparing for a high adventure trip (only First Class rank or higher allowed, so we assume some competence and independence) one boy's mother was there. She wouldn't let him handle his own paperwork.

      The boy is one of our problem children; he's spoiled rotten. But somehow or other he passed his First Class requirements... And if his mom's not around, he eventually comes around to being an OK kid.

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    2. Well, there are going to be crazy (possibly personality-disordered, I'd guess, in your case, but I'm no psychologist) parents in every generation -- and, fortunately, sane kids who manage to disentangle themselves from such situations. The societal (as opposed to personal) harm comes when over-investment in/identification with one's kids becomes the norm.

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