Helicopter Parents, Latchkey Kids, and The Boogey Man

Hi. Boy, are these Millenials sad or what? Kids, come out of your safe spaces because pretty soon mommy and daddy won’t be there to hold your hand when you have to remember to put a cover sheet on a TPS report! Suck it up, buttercup or you will get knocked on your ass in the real world! Now if you will excuse me, I have a fantasy football draft to attend to.

Boy that’s fun to do. Too bad it’s mostly BS. I stopped taking seriously  “these kids today are pathetic” arguments sometime in college after I read an older guy's complaints about the weak, shallow and self-involved younger generation he saw before him. A real collection of selfie stick using snowflakes! Knowing the future was going to be placed in their hands, he was positive this spelled the imminent end of civilization. He said this in ancient Greece in about 410 BC. That’s when I said, “Oh, this has always been a thing. Older people always think the young are this way. Before Millenials were the obvious harbingers of societal decay, it was Generation X, and before Generation X it was Generation Omega”. Part of the problem is we probably cast our younger selves in a better light than we should. We didn’t actually walk uphill barefoot through three feet of snow. We weren’t as cool as we think. Our youthful coolness was often like a garage band that hadn't learned how to play in tune yet, they had just learned how to turn the amp to 10.  We weren’t as good looking as we think. (What’s up with all those zits? What’s going on with that gut? A tucked in shirt without a belt? Holy hair gel!?). And, yes, we were positive the world revolved around us too. Scorn for the young is mostly a refusal to see our younger selves as we were vs. the semi-mythical beings with limitless potential our nostalgia filled minds create.  

But….that’s not to say there are NO generational differences, but I say if you don’t like Millenials, don’t blame the kids; blame their helicopter parents. If stories are true and some of them are still doing laundry for their college aged children, picking their kids’ college courses for them, and negotiating salaries for their adult children, well….is it really the kids’ faults if they are spoiled and lacking in self-reliance? A leaf doesn't fall far from a tree and a snowflake doesn't fall far from the sky.  

But the closer you look at things the harder it is to totally judge. Who are these helicopter parents of today? They were the latchkey kids of yesterday: the kids with both parents working, or possibly only one (working) parent in the house after a divorce, who were left on their own after school got out and before their parents got home. And the summers? Forget it. Teachers and parents: who are they? 

I was a latchkey kid. We even had a chain under the light switch in the garage where the house key hung. (I guess we operated on the hunch that burglars would never think to look in the most obvious place). I can ever remember getting home one afternoon when I was still in elementary school and a strange dog I had never seen before was on our breezeway barking like a maniac. I was so scared I ran to the neighbor’s house instead of grabbing the key and trying to get in the house without getting eaten alive by Cujo.

But I did live.

I also wandered aimlessly all around the neighborhood and town, rode my bike around (without a helmet), played street whiffle ball games, driveway basketball games, Nerf football games,  and Smear The Queer. I explored the woods with the other neighborhood kids who were also home after school unsupervised—and we sometimes got lost in the woods without GPS or a cell phone in sight!, took up temporary residence in the partially built houses down the street, hung out in our neighbor's fort up the street (containing dirty magazines) got into snowball fights (including a black eye from a close range iceball) and got kicked directly in the family jewels by my brother’s very drunk friend after I made a smart remark. Also someone had the brilliant idea to set up huge piles of snow in our backyard. No, not for a snowman; instead everyone trudged through my room, climbed through the open window onto our garage and dove off the roof into the snow pile. Solid, constructive, character building after school activities! When I finally got the nerve to dive myself, I believed I could fly. I believed I could touch the sky. God must have been our helicopter parent because no bones were ever broken.

I’m proud to have been a latchkey kid. I don’t think I would trade it for the more structured and supervised life kids seem to live now. I never got hurt, I was never kidnapped or murdered. In those days, I think parents’ security blanket came from making sure they bought a house in a safe, quiet, sleepy town. After that, they pretty much assumed their kids would be safe. Not anymore. The life I led as a kid apparently barely exists anymore.

And this is apparently because the parents of today have cast a negative vote on their own youth by raising their kids in a very different way. In Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections he shows kids living their lives as a correction of the flawed ways of their parents’ lives--all lives and all points of view are maybe only one side of the two sided coin of life. Children of alcoholics become teetotalers, children of teetotalers become lawyers, children of hippies become hedge fund managers, children of hedge fund managers go on Phish Tour… And it seems modern helicopter parents of today—recovering latch key kids of yesterday-- are playing out this same dynamic.

But beyond our desire to be the yin to our parents’ yang, what else created this? Is there a feeling deep down that maybe it wasn't a perfect way to grow up? Admittedly, there was a lot of down time, a lot of unstructured time. And while a lot of my time was spent with friends, I have to admit I was home alone a fair amount of time too. Listening to the radio. Watching World Premiere Videos on MTV...kind of wasting time. "While you were sitting home alone at age 13 your real daddy was dying", sang Voice Of Generation X Eddie Vedder. A lot of us were home alone at age 13. Maybe Millennial parents are just trying to correct that imperfection. Being a latchkey kid was a cool way to grow up but it was flawed and it was the heads to the tails that is the current child rearing model. So that's being corrected until the next generation corrects it again. The only problem? Whenever we try to plug a hole in one imperfection we often just create a different imperfection as a result. Life is hard. But now more day care, more structured after school activities for older kids, less time for them to fend for themselves. I looked up extra curricular activities at my old high school and there seems to be way more options than when I was there. They even have guitar lessons!? So maybe this does represent progress in some ways. 

But I think there's also a less healthy impulse driving this shift. Fear. Many think the beginning of the end of parents’ sense of a safe, secure suburban Eden where no harm could come to their children was a 1983 made for TV movie called Adam. It was viewed by 38 million people on its first airing alone. It was based on the actual kidnapping in 1981 of a six year old boy in a Sears in Hollywood, Florida named Adam Walsh who was found dead two weeks later. (His father John Walsh went on to host of America’s Most Wanted). Soon after this, missing kids started showing up on the back of milk cartons from coast to coast. Our culture of fear was born. 

Fear probably isn’t all bad. It alerts us to dangers. But what if we are afraid of the wrong things? And are misplaced fears viruses of the mind rather than helpful mental alarm clocks? The fearmongering media loves to quote a chilling statistic: 38,000 kids go missing every single year. But this is very misleading because it includes 17 year old runaways, kids abducted by a parent in a custody battle, and kids who get lost at the beach and are found an hour later. Slightly less alarming is the fact that 99.8 kids who go missing are found and the number of kids who are kidnapped by a stranger a la Adam Walsh is just 100 per year--and 50 of those kids return home in one piece.  

“But that’s 50 too many. It’s horrific no matter what the number is”. True. But about 700 kids aged 14 and under die every single year from drowning, yet we still don't have legally mandated swimming lessons for all. An estimated 155 kids die every year from accidental shootings. More than 3,000 people die every year from distracted driving—many of them teens. I think I can confidently state that it’s not an opinion but a fact that guns, cell phones, and swimming pools are far more dangerous for kids than a stranger. Yet we have changed the very way kids are raised out of stranger danger but it seems like we look the other way with much greater risks.

But fear is not a thought or a statistic. It’s perhaps our most hard wired emotion lying in a more primitive part of our brain than rational thought. Maybe the fear of a stranger stealing and harming a child just strikes to the core of people’s deepest darkest fears more than anything else and no facts can shake people away from that. But it’s not just parents. I can remember getting lost a couple times when I was young. I was terrified a stranger would nab me and I was now an orphan. Was I afraid of dying in a car accident? Nah. 

We also have a culture in which we are always listening to experts. Huge mistake! The experts thought Tom Brady was a backup QB at best. The experts thought Hillary was a shoo in. Yet we run to them anyway. And life coaches—be they therapists, social workers, self-help gurus, Oprah, or Ted Nugent—so often give you a “you’re doing it wrong!” brand of advice. You can find countless experts bemoaning the current helicopter parenting style—in fact the term itself came from a 1990 book authored by a pair of experts. They claim we’re suffocating kids and depriving them of developing self-reliance. They say parents are forgetting that parenting is a job in which the object is to put yourself out of a job. Who can argue? But I found an article originally published in People Magazine in 1982 in which an expert of the day declared the permissive parenting style that allowed for latchkey kids was “a national disgrace”. Give the experts credit: they stay on message. You’re doing it wrong—even if you’re doing it the opposite of what they formerly said was wrong. It’s an “expert” game of bait and switch. Remember kids, if you’re doing it right, why do you need an expert? Experts need to eat too!

Then is a slightly less nightmare inducing fear: the fear our kids are falling behind in school. OMG. Kids in Singapore are scoring higher in math and science? RIP America. We will be a 3^rd World banana republic hellhole by next Tuesday. So we’ve decided to shift our education strategy: more homework, more teaching to the test, more rote memorization. But is this going backwards or forwards? This debate is nothing new. In Hard Times by Charles Dickens, a teacher sums up this scholastic strategy: “Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals with facts; nothing else will be of service of them”. Life does imitate art, doesn’t it? This is a fictional teacher in a book published in 1854, not a Common Core advocate in 2017.

But aren’t facts good? Armed with facts, won’t kids be better equipped to sift out the facts from the alternative facts? No! I think that comes from critical thinking skills. It comes from having some working knowledge and insight into how the world works. Reading and writing sharpen those skills, but blind memorization of facts which may come in handy on a standardized test fosters little of that on the unstandardized test of life. And why are we turning education into some type of arms race with Asian countries? Our educational model created the most booming economy in the world after World War II. Why are we so insecure that we think our way has been the wrong way and their way is the right way? What if our way is right for us and their way is right for them? Everyone is claiming Tom Brady is the greatest QB of all time, but he isn’t perfect. He’s brilliantly accurate with short, quick passes but he’s actually fairly average at throwing the ball deep. Had he been in an offense which called for long bombs all the time, he would probably have zero Super Bowls instead of five. Different players have different skills. Maybe different cultures have different educational models that best suit them.  Is our current system a foolish attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Boy am I in danger of losing the overall thread of this blog! Must be my pre-Common Core education that created my tangential thinking and writing style! Anyway....has an education model rooted in anxiety and fear of falling behind infected kids of today? All day kindergarten. Less recess. Less gym. No home ec? Where will be football pillows of tomorrow come from? And then we get this: “Our kids are all hyper! They all have ADHD! Better get them diagnosed and medicated fast!”. Or maybe go back to a school day that actually remembers that kids are kids and not short adults? Maybe they won’t be so stir crazy that way? Maybe helicopter education is the culprit, not kids' scattered, defective brains that can only be fixed with pharmaceuticals? 

Another apparent facet of helicopter culture: the self-esteem movement. This began in the 80’s and it argued outcomes might be better if we valued “personhood rather than outcomes”. This brought with it those much maligned participation trophies. Graduation ceremonies for kindergarten. Grammar school. Middle school.... Is this bad? I mean isn’t self-esteem a good thing? Critics argue that while self-esteem is of course a good thing, it can’t be given to someone like a gift, it can only be earned. All of us—including kids—are hard wired to feel confident when, and only when, we succeed, not when we merely show up and are praised for it. So let’s say you’re a basketball coach and you tell your players, “You can do it! You can make this shot! I know you can!”. The kid shoots….and bricks the shot. The coach says, “Nice try! So close!”. Then he gives him or her a trophy. But the kid knows they sucked. And they will feel bad about sucking no matter how much you attempt to sugar coat it and encourage them. Maybe a better approach? Tell kids they can make the shot but teach them proper shooting mechanics. Teach them to release the shot at just the right time in their jump. Don’t just encourage them to succeed, teach them how to succeed. And if it works, kids will have genuine self-esteem, not just whitewashed insecurity. And well intentions as it might be, maybe participation trophy culture too often offers little more than whitewashed insecurity. Do participation trophies not breed self-esteem at all but merely a sense of entitlement? Two very different things. There's a certain humility to earned self-esteem because the person who earned it knows they had to work for it, but there's nothing but arrogance to entitlement because it says you should be rewarded regardless of whether you worked or not. 

Fostering real self esteem is like providing a really good corrective lens, fostering fake self esteem is like handing someone a beautiful pair of rose colored glasses that just cause them to bump into everything and stub their toe. Does the self-esteem movement create kids who aren’t very good at anything but think they’re great at everything? And let’s be honest…..that type of person is just kind of annoying.

Besides, kids aren’t dumb. If you give them a trophy but they see you gave every kid a trophy—even the kid who squirts milk out of his nose every time he tackles a milk carton in the cafeteria at lunch  ---how is that trophy supposed to make them feel special? If everyone gets a trophy, does no one get a trophy? Isn’t it like that episode of Seinfeld where a guy calls Elaine “breathtaking”. Her self-esteem goes through the roof! Then she learns he calls every woman breathtaking. She feels crushed and betrayed.  

In summary, according to this self-appointed expert, you’re doing it wrong! But I know what I’m talking about. My lack of teaching experience is perfectly complimented by lack of parental experience. But if I know anything, it's that we need to stop being so afraid! We're afraid of strangers, afraid of terrorists, afraid of scoring below Hong Kong in standardized math tests.... Fear leads to the Dark Side! 

On inauguration day, a woman I work, a doctor born outside of the US, said she wasn't worried about Trump's election. She said she knows it won't directly impact her life very much but she worries about the world her grandchildren will be left with. She then said we have a world where you can't even speak or look at someone else's child without them assuming you're a kidnapper or pedophile. How interesting that that's the thing she singled out. But it's so true. We have a world where people don't seem to talk to their neighbors as much. A world where we're all afraid of each other. We've come full circle since 1983. The movie Adam taught people to be more on guard about potential boogey men, but I think we're  so on guard that we are in a "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" phase. Maybe our society needs some type of correction on this. With constant fear of strangers, you can still have friends and family, but you can't have a community. And does a society need some degree of a larger community to avoid running off the rails? Laws are just the boards and windows of a house, community is the foundation. 

Final observation. (I promise!). I read Bruce Springsteen's autobiography a few months ago. Bruce didn't learn to drive until he was 22 years ago. This is funny because he wrote so many songs about cars and driving all night on that thunder road. But how did he get by before that without Uber or Lyft? He hitchhiked. This was once a common, fairly mainstream thing! People actually trusted each other enough to let a stranger in their car! Or to get into a stranger's car! I'm not saying hitchhiking is necessarily advisable. (I would never attempt it in a million years). But just maybe hitchhiking is a thermometer which measures a society's health and right now the patient has a fever. Bring back the hitchhiker!