Don’t Pick Up: Why Kids Need to Separate From Their Parents
There was a time kids came home from school with ‘I’m home!’ announcement and proceeded to disappear into a world of their own- friends, drawing, Lego building, bike riding, ball playing and whatever else were the interests and priorities kids set for themselves. Like so many other things that kind of lifestyle is seemingly gone.
Now, parents decide what extracurricular activities their children participate in and monitor (read: demand) success milestones and achievements and endless practice, practice, practice. For many children the interests of the parents trump the interests (and often, talents) of their kids. Far too many kids have come to believe parents needs or desires trump their own needs to explore their own interests.
So what happens when the young adult flies the coop and doesn’t achieve the expected success on the expected schedule?
What happens when those helicopter parents insist on continuing to manage their child’s life?
What happens to the development of the young adult?
Don’t Pick Up: Why Kids Need to Separate From Their Parents « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
Time: last year. Place: an undergraduate classroom, in the airy, well-wired precincts of Silicon Valley University. (Oops, I mean Sun-Kissed-Google-Apps-University.) I am avoiding the pedagogical business at hand—the class is my annual survey of 18th-century British literature, and it’s as rockin’ and rollin’ as you might imagine, given the subject—in order to probe my students’ reactions to a startling and (to me) disturbing article I have just read in the Harvard alumni magazine. The piece, by Craig Lambert, one of the magazine’s editors, is entitled “Nonstop: Today’s Superhero Undergraduates Do ‘3000 Things at 150 Percent.’”
As the breaking-newsfeed title suggests, the piece, on the face of it, is anecdotal and seemingly light-hearted—a collegiate Ripley’s Believe It or Not! about the overscheduled lives of today’s Harvard undergraduates. More than ever before, it would appear, these poised, high-achieving, fantastically disciplined students routinely juggle intense academic studies with what can only seem (at least to an older generation) a truly dizzy-making array of extracurricular activities: pre-professional internships, world-class athletics, social and political advocacy, start-up companies, volunteering for nonprofits, research assistantships, peer advising, musical and dramatic performances, podcasts and video-making, and countless other no doubt virtuous (and résumé-building) pursuits. The pace is so relentless, students say, some plan their packed daily schedules down to the minute—i.e., “shower: 7:15-7:20 a.m.”; others confess to getting by on two or three hours of sleep a night. Over the past decade, it seems, the average Harvard undergraduate has morphed into a sort of lean, glossy, turbocharged superhamster: Look in the cage and all you see, where the treadmill should be, is a beautiful blur.