I generally agree with your points here. I would like to add a couple of perspectives from my own experience. First, this extends beyond Gen Z, although it has hit them the hardest. I had a student back in the 1990s who was extremely annoying, entitled, and whined about everything. The staff even referred to him as Sean the Whiner. One day when he was complaining about never having been told that X, Y, and Z would be required of him at the University, I went full on Zen-master at him and loudly mocked him in front of the whole room: "Waah! No one told me I would have to THINK FOR MYSELF!" He looked shocked, but most unexpectedly, he actually took the lesson to heart and became a focused and productive student. Not overnight, of course, because long habits take time to wear away. So there were students like this in previous generations, but it wasn't an epidemic, as it is now.
Second, I have observed in my students whose parents are East Asian immigrants, that the parents take a very firm hand in guiding them. Yet these students do not seem nearly as anxious and entitled as their counterparts with American-born parents. I think that this arises from a cultural difference: in many more-traditional Asian societies, the family is the primary unit, not the individual. The student is an extension of the family, and it is this tradition, rather than anxious helicopter-parenting, which accounts for the parents' high level of intervention and involvement.
The key here is anxiety. If the parents are interventionist, but not driven by anxiety, then the students may turn out to be less independent, yes, but they don't have the same psychological problems around identity, self-worth, anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness that I see in other students. I'm speaking in generalities of course; many individuals will have different experiences. But in general, I think that helicopter-parenting in America is driven by the parents' anxiety, and children learn about the world by observing their parents. If their parents are constantly anxious over their child's welfare, constantly stressed over the child's prospects, constantly worried that something bad might happen to their children if they are unsupervised, then what view of the world is the child going to form? It is going to harm them; it is going to reject them; it is dangerous. They are learning the anxiety modeled by their parents. But in students with equally interventionist parents who are driven by cultural norms rather than anxiety, you get a completely different outcome for the child.
I suppose my point is that there are generational and cultural contexts for your post, which broaden its scope without invalidating your basic points.
Sensitive and smart, thank you Liza. The best thing I did before starting University was to hitch by myself around the sunnier parts of Europe for 10 weeks, living on the money I earned as a truck-driver's assistant. It taught me to trust my own judgement. Not that I got everything right, far from it, but I owned my decisions and learnt from the screw-ups.
The worst thing I did? Not taking a gap year. The horizons of those who did were so much broader, especially in the first couple of terms.
This reminded me of the summer I worked the first-year registration help desk at my (public, non-elite) university. We were not supposed to talk to parents about their child’s course registration, but many tried to call in anyway. The worst were the parents whose children had not been admitted to their desired limited enrolment program (such as engineering or commerce) and instead had been admitted to an open enrolment program like Econ or Science. They wanted to interrogate the admissions decisions instead of letting their child talk to me about course selection. It didn’t help that they insisted their child take the same or similar courses as the students in the desired program in the hope they could transfer in after one year if their grades miraculously improved in university. We called this “shadowing” and it almost never succeeded since the child of an overbearing helicopter parent will rarely perform better in an unstructured university environment than they did in high school with their parents and teachers breathing down their necks.
I’ve seen this first hand. It was difficult to let our child fail , but we did. And he became a confident person, able to take on challenges, and able to deal with failures. Other children his age, and in a similar demographic, were helicoptered. Parents who interfered with grading. Parents who , when dropping off kids at college, cleaned their rooms (the dorm room) every year, and shared airline checkin in so that they could check in their kids for a flight home. Those kids stayed dependent for years.
I generally agree with your points here. I would like to add a couple of perspectives from my own experience. First, this extends beyond Gen Z, although it has hit them the hardest. I had a student back in the 1990s who was extremely annoying, entitled, and whined about everything. The staff even referred to him as Sean the Whiner. One day when he was complaining about never having been told that X, Y, and Z would be required of him at the University, I went full on Zen-master at him and loudly mocked him in front of the whole room: "Waah! No one told me I would have to THINK FOR MYSELF!" He looked shocked, but most unexpectedly, he actually took the lesson to heart and became a focused and productive student. Not overnight, of course, because long habits take time to wear away. So there were students like this in previous generations, but it wasn't an epidemic, as it is now.
Second, I have observed in my students whose parents are East Asian immigrants, that the parents take a very firm hand in guiding them. Yet these students do not seem nearly as anxious and entitled as their counterparts with American-born parents. I think that this arises from a cultural difference: in many more-traditional Asian societies, the family is the primary unit, not the individual. The student is an extension of the family, and it is this tradition, rather than anxious helicopter-parenting, which accounts for the parents' high level of intervention and involvement.
The key here is anxiety. If the parents are interventionist, but not driven by anxiety, then the students may turn out to be less independent, yes, but they don't have the same psychological problems around identity, self-worth, anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness that I see in other students. I'm speaking in generalities of course; many individuals will have different experiences. But in general, I think that helicopter-parenting in America is driven by the parents' anxiety, and children learn about the world by observing their parents. If their parents are constantly anxious over their child's welfare, constantly stressed over the child's prospects, constantly worried that something bad might happen to their children if they are unsupervised, then what view of the world is the child going to form? It is going to harm them; it is going to reject them; it is dangerous. They are learning the anxiety modeled by their parents. But in students with equally interventionist parents who are driven by cultural norms rather than anxiety, you get a completely different outcome for the child.
I suppose my point is that there are generational and cultural contexts for your post, which broaden its scope without invalidating your basic points.
Sensitive and smart, thank you Liza. The best thing I did before starting University was to hitch by myself around the sunnier parts of Europe for 10 weeks, living on the money I earned as a truck-driver's assistant. It taught me to trust my own judgement. Not that I got everything right, far from it, but I owned my decisions and learnt from the screw-ups.
The worst thing I did? Not taking a gap year. The horizons of those who did were so much broader, especially in the first couple of terms.
Yes! My nom taught me to be independent and I went to Yale.
Truly excellent advice!
This reminded me of the summer I worked the first-year registration help desk at my (public, non-elite) university. We were not supposed to talk to parents about their child’s course registration, but many tried to call in anyway. The worst were the parents whose children had not been admitted to their desired limited enrolment program (such as engineering or commerce) and instead had been admitted to an open enrolment program like Econ or Science. They wanted to interrogate the admissions decisions instead of letting their child talk to me about course selection. It didn’t help that they insisted their child take the same or similar courses as the students in the desired program in the hope they could transfer in after one year if their grades miraculously improved in university. We called this “shadowing” and it almost never succeeded since the child of an overbearing helicopter parent will rarely perform better in an unstructured university environment than they did in high school with their parents and teachers breathing down their necks.
I’ve seen this first hand. It was difficult to let our child fail , but we did. And he became a confident person, able to take on challenges, and able to deal with failures. Other children his age, and in a similar demographic, were helicoptered. Parents who interfered with grading. Parents who , when dropping off kids at college, cleaned their rooms (the dorm room) every year, and shared airline checkin in so that they could check in their kids for a flight home. Those kids stayed dependent for years.