Anxiety Parenting and Liberal Democracy
Safe thinkers don't make good citizens
The part of my news feed that’s not being consumed by post-election postmortems is mostly videos of animals doing funny things. One depressing exception this week is the case of the Georgia mom arrested a few days ago for allowing her 11 year old son to walk to town in their safe rural Georgia town. I have a lot of thoughts on this modern horror show, but I’ll throw a few down and see what sticks. There may have to be a more organized part 2 next week.
For starters, as with many things, there are class issues at play. While the majority of parents who get involved with CPS are lower income (for complicated, depressing and often unjust reasons), the kind of safety surveillance we’re seeing in this case is much more common in middle and upper middle income neighborhoods.
When my husband and I lived in the city, gaggles of kids ran wild throughout the neighborhood. It was usually only the middle class parents who hung out bored on benches while their kids played at the playground (or worse, hovered anxiously under their kids as they moved around the play equipment). The rest of the parents were working two jobs and trying to make ends meet. Their 6 year olds tagged along after their 12 year olds and everything was usually fine. The surveillance state style of parenting is very much a luxury.
Not all of this hyperparenting is freely chosen though. In a very unscientific survey of moms in my local mom group from a few years ago, the majority of these middle and upper middle class parents said they felt forced to hang out on benches at playgrounds because they were worried about being reported to the cops. And Georgia mom’s experience shows that’s not an irrational fear. There’s a vicious circle here between cultural norms and policing that bears investigation as well.
Over-parenting and Academic Decline
Whatever the cause, we do know that over-parenting is one luxury that’s actively harming our kids. Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy have done all the work on the mental health harms of over-parenting, so I don’t need to get into that here.
On a personal level though it has been deeply concerning to teach modern 18 year olds, especially as the parent of three young kids. My students are deeply anxious, deeply pessimistic and largely incapable of much independent thought or agency.
The last semester I taught, which was right when ChatGPT was coming out the year before last, I had a group of smart mostly 18-20 year olds who were, on many measures, a delightful group. They were quirky and smart and polite. They were also emotionally exhausting and required hand-holding through every step of almost every assignment.
This wasn’t unexpected, because I’d seen the problem growing for years. Every year that my students came to me more protected and less independent, my syllabi would get a little more detailed, with assignments broken down into bite-sized pieces to avoid triggered an anxious flood of emails from students who didn’t understand how to write a thesis and ever-more-detailed policy sections to address every possible consequence about every possible late assignment. At the same time, I also received a growing list of accommodations for this anxiety from our Disability Services Office, accommodations that now include things like flexible attendance and flexible due dates for assignments. The anxiety arms race is on and it’s a race to the bottom, destroying students’ ability to navigate their landscape on their own.
As an administrator, I see this from the top now too, with an increasing number of parents emailing administrators - often, somewhat shockingly, the President or Provost - about their adult child’s progress in college. Part of me has a prematurely Boomer reaction to this kind of activity, but the other part of me recognizes that kids really are different these days than they were when I was in college.
To be clear, I was also an anxious and depressed mess in college, as were most of my peers. But I had to take my lumps and deal with it because my hippie Boomer parents were certainly not going to get involved in their adult daughter’s failure to attend ancient Greek (the only class I came close to failing and the only D in my entire college career. Sigh.). I was forced to muddle through and came out on the other side stronger. I absolutely could have used more thoughtful support, but I definitely did not need and would have been actively harmed by the kind of hand-holding that’s now routine for parents.
It’s this distinction between support and accommodation that we’re failing miserably at right now (more on this later).
And because we’re failing at it, kids actually *are* different now. They suffer from growing rates of anxiety and depression, as Haidt points out. And they’ve also almost never been left to their own devices long enough to know how to handle complex social problems, how to navigate conflict with an employer or even how to manage a multi-part homework task. But even more concerning, the entire social and academic fabric is working hard to cocoon them from their anxiety and prevent them from being prepared for exactly the kinds of conflicts and tradeoffs and difficult conversations about their values that they will face in future relationships, the workplace, and life generally.
Even though it’s not Gen Zs fault, it’s 100% their problem. And of course, ours too.
The Anxious Generation and Radical Moderation
This generation’s anxiety and relative helplessness has enormous implications for the radically moderate world I’m trying to help us rediscover, but it also has more banal implications for modern civic life.
Young adults who have been shielded from conflict tend to do a few things that are actively dangerous for the future of civil society (I’m feeling a bit catastrophic today, but bear with me):
They retreat from conflict generally. We see this most obviously in the rise of influencers jettisoning “toxic” relatives who are often just people who love them and who are worried about them. But I also saw it daily in the classroom with students who refused to hazard any answer to any question in case it might trigger conflict with another classmate or the professor. Conflict avoidance might seem sort of neutral at first glance until we remember what universities are for. Complete conflict avoidance means students don’t know how to foster the good conflict that generates new ideas, breeds scientific discoveries, and leads to innovations that save human lives and support human flourishing. This is another post in itself, but I also wonder whether the rise of academic misconduct isn’t part and parcel of this discomfort with conflict. If you plagiarize a paper or falsify your data you can’t really be blamed if people don’t like it, right? Even apart from misconduct, it seems likely that the rise of scientific censorship is directly related to increased discomfort with conflict, particularly among our most elite young people.
They don’t know how to talk to people who have different values. Part of what’s weird about this generation is that so many of them want to be influencers and so many are comfortable putting themselves online. I suspect this online courage is preferable not only because it’s always available but because it’s easy to dismiss anonymous disagreement on the internet as “haters” rather than actually grappling with the reality that there exists a complex and often confounding diversity of thought on almost every social issue. But when you’ve grown up entirely supervised in controlled environments like classrooms, coached sports teams, and school plays, the capacity to handle diversity of thought is never actually developed. And it certainly withers away even further online.
They tend to seek out “safe spaces” where people share their values, which leaves them shocked and often lost when they discover - as after this election - that an entire world of people outside of their bubble disagrees with their worldview. For what it’s worth I have much more nuanced views of safe spaces generally, so this isn’t a blanket condemnation of the concept. But you can’t live your entire life in a “safe space”, at least not in a modern liberal democracy.
They are safe thinkers. Scared of conflict and and concerned about what other people think of them, my students are terrified to hazard any kind of opinion that might be even remotely controversial. My classroom management these days isn’t about helping students navigate conflict. There isn’t any to manage because they don’t have anything other than safe opinions. It’s mostly about - first - getting them engaged enough to even think about entertaining an idea and - second - getting them comfortable enough with me and their classmates to muster the courage to utter it. I’m working to build intellectual courage from the ground up. That’s hard to do with 18 years of intellectual cocooning to undo. Teaching now is emotionally draining in a way it wasn’t twenty years ago.
They live in siloes, in person and online: This one is a bit more hypothetical, but I’ve noticed a difference in communication style between my privileged and my less privileged students that I think relates back to intellectual courage and over-parenting. My lower income and first gen students often seem more comfortable throwing out ideas or dropping unpopular thoughts in the classroom. Meanwhile, my anxious middle and upper middle class students, who have been largely shielded from conflict, find out that people don’t agree with them and completely fall apart. They don’t understand where the differences come from for two reasons: they’ve never really been exposed to risky thought pluralism because of the way we structure kids’ lives; but they also don’t understand what to do with it because they don’t know how to have conversations about conflicting values or ideas. They get anxious and they retreat further.
I don’t want to blame the entire 2024 election on over-parenting, because there’s obviously a ton of other things going on here as well, but it’s definitely true that the class divide in politics is growing. It’s also true that Americans from different classes no longer know how to talk to each other let alone understand each other’s perspectives. It’s also true that college educated Americans often feel sanguine that the other side of the aisle is just ignorant blue collar folks.
But we should also face up to the reality that blue collar folks and the first gen students they create are sometimes the only people engaging in honest conversations about difficult things. And they’re doing it because they’ve never been protected from hard things in the first place. They don’t know how to avoid conflict because that’s never been a luxury they could afford. My first gen students are almost always my most honest students and I don’t think that’s an accident.
Radically Moderate Parenting for a Better Politics and World
Because I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note, I’ll end by saying that there are a lot of wonderful things about Gen Z kids, including the over-parented ones. They’re much more accepting of differences in identity than the Gen X/Millenials I grew up with. They’re conscientious if a little clueless. They care about their families and are concerned about the future. They want to be nice and they care about the underdog. They genuinely want to do the right thing.
But if we’re going to empower them to take on the challenges they face ahead of them, we need to get our parenting and education straight.
I’ve run across a few resources lately due to things my own kids are struggling with that might be helpful for other parents blundering through this mess. My husband and I were recently referred to the ADHD Dude and as a general review, his webinars are really fantastic for kids of all abilities, not just kids with ADHD.
One suggestion we found really helpful as we try to undo our own under/overparenting whiplash is a way scaffolding behavior that works with kids of all ages and for a variety of different tasks. It looks really obvious (and maybe it’s obvious to every parent reading, in which case I have nothing to offer you on this topic moving forward), but it provides a framework for parents to think about how to scaffold behavior, moving toward letting go.
It goes like this:
Do X (like loading the dishwasher or doing laundry) for your child until they’re physically and mentally ready to start learning the task themselves (spoiler: start #2 sooner than you think because most of the time they’re ready sooner than you think they are).
Show your child how to do X. Explain your thought process as you do it to help them see how executive function works in the real world. Verbalizing how you’re thinking about problems and tasks helps them see how they can think about them too.
Do X with your child a couple times, still verbalizing the process and how you’re thinking about it.
Watch your child do X a few times and provide constructive feedback.
Let your kid do X and only intervene in cases of serious and irreversible harm.
This scaffolded approach avoids the mistakes my Boomer parents made (lovely though they are) of kicking us out of the nest at 18 to figure things out for ourselves without much - if any - scaffolding or preparation. But it also avoids the current over-parenting that has kids stuck at #1 over and over again.
After watching these videos, my husband and I realized that we were making the mistake of telling our kids to do X and not going through 2-4 with them. This led to lots of yelling and tears. We were basically Boomers in Millennial bodies. We were overcorrecting from over-parenting, but going too far in the other direction. We’re actively working now to scaffold the tasks we need our kids to do independently like make lunches, do their own laundry, ride bikes safely into town, and - eventually - drive and manage money and everything else.
None of this solves the broader systemic problem of people calling the cops on parents who are trying to do the right thing.
And none of this addresses what schools and universities can and should be doing to help students become intellectual risk-takers and learn how to engage in the good conflict that drives discovery forward.
Both of those are topics for other posts. But there are some very small steps we as parents can take to build a more radically moderate world and practicing scaffolding is one of them.
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