“Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyper-concern has a net effect of making kids more fragile.” -Hara Estroff Marano
Fragile. Snowflakes. Wimps. Babies. Weak. These are just a few of the words I have heard used to describe the current generation (Generation Z). The issue I have is that they are kids so they only people we have to blame is ourselves because we are the adults who should have been leading them.
So how did we get here?
Tim Elmore, president of Growing Leaders, after speaking to over five hundred thousand educators, parents, coaches, and employers found two emotions expressed consistently by these adults:
- Frustration with their kids
- Fear for their kids
Frustration with their kids
Elmore mentioned that this was usually due to the rapid pace of change taking place in our culture that kids embrace quickly and adults do not (10).*
Just ask an adult about TikTok, Snapchat or any social media platform and listen to their response. Most of them express some sort of frustration with these apps. I believe the frustration is due to the fact that most adults do not understand the world of students or care to take the time to learn about it so they just call it dumb and move on.
Mark Oestreicher, a partner in The Youth Cartel, asks this question, “Do you see students as a problem to be solved or a wonder to behold.”
Fear for their kids
We all fear for our kids, if we did not it would be concerning. The issue these days is that the fear has been magnified due to our access to worldwide news 24/7. It seems that we forget that news stations are ultimately TV shows. This means that they depend on people watching in order to stay on the air so of course they will show the news that sells. Unfortunately, most of the time it is the most horrific, frightening, rarely happens stuff that sells. No, I am not jumping on the “fake news” bandwagon. I am just making the point that what sells is the bad stuff. Parents need to spend less time watching the news and worrying about what might happen and more time on what they can control. The issue though is many parents have allowed this fear to control how they raise their kids.
Parents have become so consumed by fear for their kids that their natural reaction is to overprotect their kids. Now, wanting to protect your kids is not a bad thing but wanting to protect them from everything is a bad thing. With parents controlling everything, kids feel like the have no control over their lives so their anxiety goes up.
“When you feel your fate is up to another person, doesn’t that make you feel just a bit unsettled?” (19).*
Tim Elmore
Think about a high school student you know. Think about their life. Just about every hour of their life is planned for them. Wake up early for practice or some extracurricular activity, go to school, go to practice, go to another practice for some elite club, eat (maybe), do some homework, spend a few hours on your phone connecting with friends, nap (let’s be honest a few hours at night is not sleep) and then repeat it all the next day.
Have you talked to a high school student lately? They all are exhausted. They have so many demands on their lives put there by loving parents who only want the best for them but don’t realize that in doing so they are stressing them out. They are stressed out because they don’t want to let anybody down so they believe that if they don’t meet all the demands then they have failed. The result? Stressed out kids who are afraid of taking risks.
In her book The Gift of Failure author Jessica Lahey sums up the paradox we now face, “If we teach them (our kids) that messing up means the world will crumble around them, we only succeed in reinforcing fear of failure.” **
So how do we help our students overcome their fear of failure so they begin to take responsibility and grow as leaders? We will dive into these questions next week.
*Elmore, Tim, and Andrew McPeak. Generation Z Unfiltered: Facing Nine Hidden Challenges of the Most Anxious Population. Poet Gardener Publishing in Association with Growing Leaders, Inc., 2019.
**Lahey, Jessica. Gift of Failure. HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.