037: Generation Me

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Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an episode coming up today on a topic that I find fascinating – the cultural issues that underlie our parenting.  I actually think this issue is so important that I covered it in episode 2 of the podcast, which was really the first episode after the introductory one where I gave some information on what the show was going to be about.  But recently I read a book called Generation Me by Jean Twenge, a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, which discusses some of the cultural contexts that have led to the generation of people born since 1970 to develop a certain set of characteristics that sometimes seem very strange to those who were born before us.  Today I want to discuss some of those characteristics and what implications they have for the way we parent our own children. I should be clear that as Dr. Twenge defines it I am a member of Generation Me – she says Generation Me starts in 1970 and I was born in 1979.  I do think that some of the characteristics she defines as being integral to Generation Me apply to me, but I also think that these have become stronger over time and so are more pronounced in people who are younger than me.  I should also remind you (in case it isn’t obvious from my rather strange accent) that I was raised in England and not the U.S..  I think that the Generation Me characteristics apply to some extent to people who weren’t raised in the U.S. but they are based on surveys of Americans so Americans are definitely at the core of the Generation Me characteristics.  Dr. Twenge doesn’t discuss non-American countries but we can probably assume that English-speaking, Westernized countries exhibit these characteristics to a slightly lesser degree, with “non-Westernized” cultures perhaps looking a bit different, depending on the extent to which American culture has permeated them. I also want to use this episode to poke a little bit at some of the decisions I’ve made as a parent, and think through whether the ways in which I parent are in line with the goals I have for parenting, because reading the book made me realize that I need to be a little more conscious in this regard. So what really characterizes Generation Me? Firstly, members of Generation Me feel as though they don’t need anyone else’s approval.  People used to wear uncomfortable suits to many workplaces simply because it was expected – and because a person aimed to ‘fit in’ with the expected social norms.  People dress up to make a good impression on others and to seek approval, but members of Generation Me don’t feel required to seek anyone’s approval – about half of the members of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team wore flip flops with their quote demure skirts and dresses for their 2005 meeting with President George W. Bush at the White House.  One of the student’s mothers, though, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying “Don’t even ask me about the flip-flops – it mortified me” – a clear example of the difference in standards across generations. Adults who wanted to get divorced 50 years ago would have worried about what others would think of their decision and they would have been ostracized, and in some cultures today that is still the case – but today a couple will divorce if they think it’s the right thing to do – and it’s not that they do this in the face of society’s disapproval; it’s that society in general doesn’t really have an opinion on the issue. One aspect of this lack of concern for societal approval that concerns me is the lack of manners I notice in children and young people, and I know I sound like an old fuddy duddy when I say this, but it really does get to me.  And I’m not just talking about saying “please” when you ask someone to do something or “thank you” when someone holds the door open for you, but a general concern for other people’s comfort and even safety.  Perhaps this is most obvious when we’re driving; it isn’t just in New York any more that the person behind you will honk if you wait more than a second after a red light changes to green, and speeding up the inside lane and then cutting off someone passing a truck is now commonplace on the freeways where I live. One researcher by the name of John Trinkaus found that 92% of cars observed going through a school zone in 1998 were speeding, with the highest percentage speeding in the morning when children were likely to be walking to school than in the evening, when they had probably gone home for the day.  89% of drivers sped through the same school zone when it was surveyed three years earlier, so I wonder if that number is now up to 100% given that two decades have passed since it rose to 92%.  The same researcher found that in 1979, 37% of cars made a full stop and 34% made a rolling stop at a certain stop sign in a suburb in a New York suburb, but by 1996 only 1% of cars came to a full stop, 2% made a rolling stop, and the other 97% didn’t stop at all.  Now when I first read these statistics in Dr. Twenge’s book I felt kind of indignant and that not stopping at an intersection was pretty irresponsible.  But when I went and found the paper for myself I saw that the stop signs had been put up to discourage the flow of through traffic on local streets the one that was surveyed wasn’t at an intersection at all (and Dr. Twenge never tells us it is, but she doesn’t tell us it isn’t either) – so they’re the kind where if you look all around but don’t stop, the chances of getting into an accident are essentially nil.  And then I realized that those are exactly the kinds of stop signs I routinely roll through myself after first slowing down and making sure I’m not going to hit anyone or anything. We cheat more often now as well, even when you might least expect it – in 1998, about 90% of church-goers who lit a votive candle paid for it; by 2005, only 26% paid, so 74% of people who are religious feel it’s fine to cheat the church!  Cheating is also on the rise in high schools and colleges, and students in the late 1990s just seemed resigned to it when they were surveyed; three times as many high school students in 1969 said they would report someone they saw cheating compared to 1989. This was somewhat recent data when Dr. Twenge’s book was written in 2006 and data published since then indicates that the rate of cheating may have fallen more recently, although that’s probably due to an increase in the use of tools to detect cheating rather than a change in the overall view of whether cheating is right or wrong.  And it’s not like people stop cheating as soon as they get out of college; Dr. Twenge cites the Enron scandal as a prime example of people going to work for a corporation that cheated other people, but even more recent is the effort of staff at Wells Fargo bank to boost their sales numbers by opening accounts in people’s names that they didn’t ask for.  Some people at Wells Fargo knew it was wrong and spoke up or tried to speak up, but plenty of others went along with it or encouraged it, apparently including the CEO.  And even where no legal wrongdoing occurs, corporations now essentially seem to see employees as a disposable resource rather than as a person worthy of respect.  I’m always shocked when I hear examples of companies treating employees like crap because, really, companies are made up of employees – none of whom likes to be treated like crap, and yet different standards seem to apply as long as it isn’t *us* that is getting treated like crap.  And I don’t fully excuse myself here – my day job is to work for a large consulting company trying to reduce our client’s environmental impacts, but there are branches of my company that outsource American’s jobs to India and make the American employees train the new Indian ones as a condition of getting severance pay.  I find the indignity of that absolutely astounding, and yet I still work for the company because it helps to pay my mortgage and take care of my family and I believe I do good work myself.   And it’s not just large-scale cheating that’s on the rise, it’s the little everyday things that niggle me – when you travel reasonably often for work it doesn’t take long to see this in action.  People cut in front of you in line to get onto a plane earlier when the plane won’t leave until everyone is on it.  And in the crush to get off the plane at the other end people will squeeze by someone struggling to get a bag out of the overhead bin in the rush to get off ten seconds earlier instead of helping the person to get the bag down.  People wander, shouting, down hotel hallways in the middle of the night and slam doors as if nobody else on the floor was sleeping. I’ve actually been thinking about this issue for a while now, and wondering what kind of decisions we make as parents lead children to grow up with this sense of their own importance.  As I searched around for answers I would keep coming back to Japan, because I have the impression that Japan has a very much more interdependent culture than the U.S. at the moment, where people do still have manners and more value is placed on the ability of a society to succeed than of any one individual to succeed more than everyone else.  When I met a Japanese parent at a gathering recently she said that my impression was pretty accurate, but that Japanese society achieves this interdependence by not allowing anyone to stick out and be different, and that if anyone does stick out they are hammered down until they don’t stick out any more.  And as I was reading Generation: Me, I also realized that it’s not just Japan who has this interdependent society – the U.S. had it as well until about the 1950s, when things started to shift, although perhaps to a slightly lesser extent than Japan had it as succeeding on one’s own does seem to have been a valued trait here since the Protestants came over from jolly old England, at least.   Second on Dr. Twenge’s list of things contributing to the characteristics of Generation: Me is that children today are told they can do their own thing, whatever that thing is, and not care what everyone else does.  In a psychology experiment that was first conducted in 1951, a psychologist called Solomon Asch asked seven people sitting in a room to identify which of three lines of different lengths drawn on a chalk board are the same length as a fourth line.  One of the first three possibilities is the same length as the fourth line; the other two are clearly not the same.  The six people who go first are called confederates, which means they’re in on the experiment, and they all say the much longer line is the same length as that fourth line.  What would you do if you were the seventh person to answer the question?  In 1951, 74% of people sitting in that seventh seat would go along with the group and say that the long line is the same length as the fourth line on at least one trial, and 28% of people would go along with the group on the majority of trials – the researchers explained that the social nature of humans and our need to conform overrode our need to be individual, or even just to be right.  When researchers replicated the experiment in 1980, the results were completely different, and far fewer people were willing to conform to what the group thought.  Solomon Asch, who designed the experiment, thought that the willingness to go along with others was an immutable indicator of our nature as a social species, but it turned out that the need to go along with what other people thought was a child of its time – and today’s children have been taught that they don’t need to do this. And the third important characteristic of Generation Me-ers is that children today are told they can be anything they want to be.  American children today are taught from birth that being different is good – that the obedience, loyalty to church, and good manners that were so important back in the 1920s are now essentially irrelevant, replaced by a much higher value placed on independence and being open-minded.  This individuality is celebrated from before they are even born, as we decorate expensive nurseries with decorations that spell out the child’s name in 12-inch tall letters.  Dr. Twenge cites a passage in the book Culture Shock USA, which is a non-satirical guidebook to American culture for foreigners, and I did look it up to check because I’ve seen satirical guidebooks to American culture before that are pretty funny.  So the non-satirical guide says “Often one sees an American engaged in a dialogue with a tiny child.  “Do you want to go home now?” says the parent. “No,” says an obviously tired, crying child. And so parent and child continue to sit discontentedly in a chilly park. “What is the matter with these people?” says the foreigner to himself, who can see the child is too young to make such decisions.” It’s just part of American culture, the book says: “The child is acquiring both a sense of responsibility for himself and a sense of his own importance.”  Dr. Twenge goes on to point out that we ask one-year-olds if they want milk or apple juice, and that as they get older we let them pick their clothes out in the morning and if the kid ends up wearing red polka dots with green and blue stripes then it’s OK because they are “expressing themselves” and learning to make their own choices. Now I have to say that this one hit home for me more than many of the observations in the book, because giving choices is something we have done from a very young age.  In fact, an article by Janet Lansbury – who is probably the most well-known advocate of the respectful approach to parenting that we practice has a blog post on setting limits for children which opens “Children need lots of opportunities to be autonomous and to have their choices respected.”  Now respect for my daughter is one of the founding principles of my parenting, and I’m not saying I’m going to give it up anytime soon.  But it’s not the first time that I’ve noticed that this respectful approach to parenting is very much rooted in the child’s individual growth and development and their rights as people.  And strangely enough, it isn’t even a modern American idea – it was brought to the U.S. by a Hungarian immigrant, Magda Gerber, who learned about it from the Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler in the 1940s. Professor Duane Alwin at the University of Michigan believes there are a couple of key reasons for this shift toward greater individualism, including that parents see how complex the world is today and want their children to not just survive, but to succeed in it.  Every day we’re told in the newspapers of more jobs being outsourced, and the jobs that stay are the ones that require that a person can think for themselves.  Secondly, more parents today have a higher education, which – nominally, at least – encourages you to think for yourself so you go on to see that as a valued trait in your child.  A Psychology Today article that summarizes Dr. Alwin’s work describes a mother from Michigan who says “I’ve treated Alexis as if she had a mind of her own ever since she was a baby.  When she was six months old and sitting in her crib, I used to ask her what she wanted to do next, what she wanted to eat or to wear.  But now that she’s four, sometimes I really want her to mind me.  The other day I told her, “Alexis, you’re going to do this right now because I say so!” She looked up at me astounded – as if to say “What’s going on here?  You’re changing the rules on me!”.  Dr. Alwin himself said “For years, my wife and I have urged our kids to think for themselves.  Now, when we want them to do something, we have to appeal to their self-interest, their sense of fairness and logic.  I probably use the word “obey” once every six months.  But sometimes it’s frustrating when you want them to go along with you.” I already argued in episode 20 of the podcast, called “How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?” (which, I should note, I titled a bit facetiously), I don’t believe it’s possible to have a child who can both think for themselves AND who will be obedient 100% of the time.  But what I want to know is whether it is...