{"id":32916,"date":"2015-09-30T02:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T06:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32916"},"modified":"2015-10-10T11:26:42","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T15:26:42","slug":"helicopter-parents-have-raised-a-generation-of-needy-emotionally-fragile-young-adults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/09\/30\/helicopter-parents-have-raised-a-generation-of-needy-emotionally-fragile-young-adults\/","title":{"rendered":"Helicopter parents have raised a generation of needy, emotionally fragile young adults"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Psychology Today<\/em>, Peter Gray<\/a> looks at how universities are unequipped to handle the anxieties and emotional neediness of today’s students:<\/p>\n

A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services to join other faculty and administrators, at the university I\u2019m associated with, for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a \u201cbitch\u201d and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.<\/p>\n

Faculty at the meetings noted that students\u2019 emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such \u201cfailure\u201d as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades\u2014they weren\u2019t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, \u201cBuck up, this is college.\u201d Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students\u2019 neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, the head of Counseling (who has now moved up to another position in the University) sent us all a follow-up email, announcing a new set of meetings. His email included this sobering paragraph: \u201cI have done a considerable amount of reading and research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college students. Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence\/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-to-day basis. The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal development of students.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In my next essay in this series I\u2019ll examine the research evidence suggesting that so-called \u201chelicopter parenting\u201d really is at the core of the problem. But I don\u2019t blame parents, or certainly not just parents. Parents are in some ways victims of larger forces in the society \u2014 victims of the continuous exhortations from \u201cexperts\u201d about the dangers of letting kids be, victims of the increased power of the school system and the schooling mentality that says kids develop best when carefully guided and supervised by adults, and victims of increased legal and social sanctions for allowing kids into public spaces without adult accompaniment. We have become, unfortunately, a \u201chelicopter society.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we want to prepare our kids for college \u2014 or for anything else in life! \u2014 we have to counter all these social forces. We have to give our children the freedom, which children have always enjoyed in the past, to get away from adults so they can practice being adults, that is, practice taking responsibility for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Psychology Today, Peter Gray looks at how universities are unequipped to handle the anxieties and emotional neediness of today’s students: A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services to join other faculty and administrators, at the university I\u2019m associated with, for discussions about how to deal with the decline […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,66,41,13],"tags":[906,956,375,139,764],"class_list":["post-32916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-health-science","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-mentalhealth","tag-millennials","tag-parents","tag-psychology","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8yU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32917,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916\/revisions\/32917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}