Sometimes I despair for the kids these days, I really do.
I didn’t expect to feel this way at the tender age of 42. I was supposed to find them puzzling, with their Snapchatting and their Venmo and never looking up from their phones. I was supposed to think they were having too much sex or doing too many drugs and not listening to their wiser elders, gosh darn it. I was supposed to grouse that young people are always getting themselves into trouble.
Instead I’m worried that they aren’t getting themselves into enough trouble. They seem so fragile. They can’t read Ovid without a trigger warning and a pair of latex gloves, or go off to college without calling their parents to check in. Did no one ever take them aside and explain that college is for abandoning your parents, leaving them to worry about what you are doing with their money while you forget to call them for a month at a time ? There is something truly terrifying about a generation of younger people that craves more adult intervention into their lives. Yet, that’s what everyone from teachers to employers reports: a rising number of kids who seek to be tethered to their parents, and don’t seem to know what to do unless Mom or Dad is hovering nearby.
I know, I know. People have been worrying about The Kids These Days since time immemorial. And yet, older people I talk to — ones old enough to remember seeing the low-speed, low-stakes train wreck that was my own generation hurtling through college and into the workforce — confirm my impression that This Time Really Is Different. The upper stratum of the Trophy Kids really are going into college expecting to live in a sort of Nerf universe where nothing ever really hurts, and there’s always an adult to pick them up and put them back on track. And they’re coming out into the workforce expecting the same sort of personal concierge service from a world that, as I was myself dismayed to find 20 years ago, really doesn’t have time to care how they feel.
Not that I blame the kids for this. Their parents are the ones who did it to them, hovering over them every spare minute — and in those rare moments when they have some time off from the endless commute between soccer practice and enrichment activities, calling the cops on anyone who leaves an 11-year-old outside to play basketball for an hour, so that their parents will have to hover too.
Megan McArdle, “Helicopter Parents and the Kids Who Just Can’t”, Bloomberg View, 2015-07-07.
August 7, 2015
QotD: Kids these days
Comments Off on QotD: Kids these days
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
