I've been thinking about a contradiction.
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I've been thinking about this contradiction: our children are the safest they’ve ever been, and parents seem more frightened about them than parents have ever seemed.
When they were growing up, Becky and I taught our children how to be safe in crosswalks and riding their bikes, while climbing on jungle gyms and using sunscreen and, especially, in dealing with predatory strangers. But when they left the house, we made it our practice not to say to them Be careful, but to say instead Have a great time, no matter what they were headed off to do.
When they stepped out of our home and into the world, we wanted them to see it as an inviting place, full of friends and adventures and wonderful surprises. When they asked us if they could do something new, we told them we’d try to find a way to get to Yes, though for some requests it might take us a bit of time. What we didn’t want was for them to be afraid of the world and what life might bring.
The world kept its promises; it was a welcoming, life-bearing place. By the time they were in their teens, they didn’t have a curfew but told us when they expected to be home and called if they were going to be late; they took road trips without us; one of them travelled to Europe with sixteen-year-old classmates, unchaperoned. They had a blast, they told us, though we’ve never known (and have never been certain we want to know) all the particulars of what having a blast entailed.
Like most kids, ours thrived in this improving world and made it into adulthood without debilitating trauma. They had scrapes and bruises, broken hearts and personal disappointments. But mostly they had lives they look back upon now with smiling delight. Two night ago, I asked our fifty-two-year-old son when he was happiest, and he said it was in his late teens into his twenties. [By the way, this is an interesting question to ask of yourself, and of anyone close enough to give you an honest answer When were you happiest in your life.]
I remember the first time the instructions to have a great time were interrupted. When he was fifteen, our younger son met a fourteen-year-old young woman at school and they feel as deeply in love as young people can. They ate lunch together under a campus eucalyptus tree, hung out every afternoon at her house or ours, and spent weekends sometimes with friends, often just the two of them.
Her mother often called our house asking if her daughter was there, which she sometimes wasn’t. So her mom solved the worrisome problem: she got her daughter a pager. Now when she and our son were at our house, the damned thing would buzz and she’d have to call home. I thought it was the cruelest thing that could happen to a teenager trying to learn to live from the inside out, not the outside in, learning to trust herself to make decisions and not have her mother tracking her, monitoring her, and trying to control her every choice.
As many of you know, it’s now much worse. Now it’s not pagers but smartphones, which date from 2007 and now have apps on them that electronically track kids’ every move; one of them is called Life360, as in I’ve got you surrounded, no matter where you go. Parental fear has led to this kind of surveillance, all in the name of keeping kids "safe," when the real purpose is to reduce parental anxiety. Parents may know where their kids are, but even the most invasive app cannot yet detect what they’re doing at one another’s homes or in their cars or at the mall. And certainly this permanent umbilical cord restrains our teenagers’ development of personal responsibility as thoroughly as it protects them, perhaps more so.
Although there has been no shortage of ink spilled on how smartphones are destroying the mental health of our next generations ["Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?" The Atlantic], most kids and grandkids, like mine and hopefully yours, navigate our parental controls in ways that lead to pretty healthy adult lives. For that, thanks be to God. But a growing percentage of kids wind up with a particular handicap that inhibits their transition to adulthood and, if not treated, may cripple them for life.
In their twenties, a decade we now refer to as their Odyssey, most young adults will make three decisions that will shape their lives. They need to find work that is truly satisfying, a partner with whom to build a future (or the choice to build it alone), and a set of personal values that don’t just mimic their parents’ values but reflect their own unique discoveries of what matters most to them. It’s a large task which requires the willingness to take responsibility for your own adult life. It requires a substantial amount of personal agency, this capacity to live from the inside out, not the outside in.
Among my peers and colleagues who deal with such families, there is a startling rise in the number of young adults who lack this agency. If I’m constantly connected to my parents, if they’re monitoring where and when and with whom I’m spending time and shaping my life, I never learn to act responsibly on my own. If they provide a solution to whatever problem I face, if they rescue me whenever I fall in a ditch, I never learn to solve my own problems or climb out of the ditch I’ve fallen into. I never learn to trust myself with life’s decisions.
The umbilical connection abides, wrapping ever more tightly and squeezing the life and breath out of our kids.
When confronted with the mounting evidence of this developmental crippling, parents refuse to acknowledge that their children are safe enough or can be trusted to make their own choices. These parents believe that they alone know the boundaries and habits that will keep their children safe, that will teach them to behave properly, that will get them into the best schools and graduate programs, so that these kids wind up with the lucrative careers their parents believe is what matters most.
But the financial collapse of 2008 has made that path less accessible for their children than it was for their parents. Higher college and grad school costs, fewer career opportunities, and an uncertain financial future are serious offramps in what once was a smoother route to success.
In addition, something parents have difficulty understanding is that fewer and fewer kids see the value of this path. They have older siblings or friends whose college and graduate school degrees have not led to well-paying careers; they don’t want the load of student debt; they are less materialistic than their parents and value the quality of their lives - caring about the planet, investing in friendships, cultivating a meaningful life - more than they care about sixty-hour work weeks and weekends at the office.
But despite the evidence, these parents refuse to turn off the tracker or deal with their own anxiety. Kids may be connected to smartphones in ways that seem problematic, but their real danger is parents who keep their children from shaping their own futures or learning to live independently.