My nine year old daughter is at sleep away camp this week. It’s a pretty classic summer camp, with things like archery and canoeing and horseback riding and pellet gun shooting, along with more familiar things like arts and crafts and yoga. My daughter would do all of them if she could, but we encouraged her to focus on the activities she can’t really do at home, so last we heard, the plan was to sign up for windsurfing and woodworking, which seems like a great combo to me. She’s only gone for a week and we won’t have much contact with her, but I’m excited for her to have the independence. I hope she mostly doesn’t really think about us while she’s there. I hope she picks up some cool skills and challenges herself and does some things that are kind of scary without the safety blanket of mom and dad.
I’m married to someone who’s been teaching fourth grade for 17 years. That’s long enough to see some things. Those things include trends in both kid behavior and parent behavior. Some of those trends include: Kids - generally more risk averse, less capable of handling discomfort and uncertainty, attention spans nil; Parents - gentle, helicopter parent-therapists who say “no thank you” when their toddler bites someone. An anxious generation raising an anxious generation? (I say that compassionately, as someone with anxiety that I just tend to bury deep down and/or process on the page, here! For all to see!) We all have conversations about how they need more independence and need to be able to take more risks, but we also continue to overschedule them and track their locations with Apple watches. They act out in the classroom and we hand them fidgets.
(As an aside, I would LOVE to know if there are any solid studies about the pros and cons of fidgets in the classroom. I get that a small group of students can benefit from certain kinds of sensory stim. But I also think that fidgets might be a psyop of the toy industry, a way to dupe us therapist-parents into buying even more plastic junk for our kids. Anyway, I digress… sort of.)
Husband and I probably worry about these kid/parent trends for slightly different reasons. For him, classroom management looks very different than it did 20 years ago. Having to hand-hold your students through nearly every assignment because they either can’t listen well enough or won’t act without knowing precisely how to do each and every step sounds exhausting.
I worry because privileged parents like us live in comfortable, frictionless worlds and our kids are growing up in comfortable, frictionless worlds and none of us are prepared for a future of material scarcity, uncertainty, and emotional and physical challenge. Sometimes I think gentle parenting can be too gentle.
Most of us don’t know how to fix things when they break. We can’t tolerate indoor temperatures outside of a narrow, 4 degree window. We don’t know how to grow food and we don’t know what it’s like to go to a grocery store and see empty shelves. We don’t have to deal with walking or riding a bike to get somewhere in the rain. We’ve forgotten how to read a map and navigate without GPS. Many of us parents don’t remember life before 24/7 on-demand entertainment, and our children will never know it. We check our Ring camera to know whether to open the door to the stranger knocking.
I often think about all the skills we’ve lost, both the hard skills and the social-emotional skills. Mending clothes, building shelves, fixing the wiring in that flickering light in the bathroom, interacting with strangers at the check-out, talking to our neighbors. I also think about the extraordinary things our ancestors did, navigating across entire oceans with nothing but a compass, chopping down trees and building a barn without YouTube, shearing sheep and spinning wool and dyeing it with plants and turning it into a sweater or a dress. This complicated, labor intensive stuff was just the mundane, everyday work of living. Say nothing of the things people invented and discovered… without computers or any sophisticated tools at all.
Yesterday’s geniuses designed steam locomotives and invented photography. Today’s geniuses are what… crypto and AI bros saying vacuous things on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon? All day long, our ancestors were problem-solving. Their lives were nothing but friction. Mine is frictionless. I have the knowledge of the entire world at my fingertips, but I can’t do anything. I goof around on the internet and watch people fight in our local community groups on Facebook.
Everything is convenient and comfortable, and my mind feels dulled, foggy, slow, and resistant to challenge.
I at least got to grow up before things got really bad. My kids don’t have that luxury. And their frictionless lives are made even more comfortable by parenting philosophies that put children at the center of everything. I, personally, want my kids to deal with hard stuff. I want them to have to figure out some of their emotional challenges on their own. When they fall and hurt themselves, I want them to learn when to walk it off and when they actually need help. I want them to have time to be bored, not overscheduled, overparented, and overstimulated. I want them to learn how to solve problems on their own, not look to some other person or some technology or some service they can pay for to do it for them. Partly because I recognize some of these are skills I’ve lost, or never had in the first place.
The hotter it gets, the more I think about the dangers of comfort, the insidiousness of ease. Despite the fact that the “worst case” climate scenario has been canceled (5+ degrees of warming), what we’ve got now is a climate crisis that is accelerating faster than most scientists thought it would, and we’re hurtling into a 3 degrees warming scenario. If the worst case scenario is essentially the extinction of most life on earth, the 3 degrees scenario is still beyond nightmarish. It means the collapse of global agricultural systems, the collapse of the global economy, widespread disease and starvation, huge parts of the earth uninhabitable and billions dead. The disappearance of modernity as we know it. Not a future the comfort class and our children are even remotely prepared for. Not a future we’re willing to confront honestly.
David Wallace Wells recently said on Democracy Now:
“Well, these days, what worries me most is that global warming is accelerating past thresholds that we used to consider unacceptable. Not that long ago, 2018, the U.N. published its 1.5-degree report that showed the difference between 1.5 degrees of global warming and 2 degrees of global warming. And the difference between those two levels was considered so significant that it terrified the world into action…
Now we are basically already at 1.5 degrees right now, and because of the effects of El Niño, we may see something close to 2 degrees of warming as soon as next year. And that’s not a long-term average, but in the long term, almost certainly, we will be blowing past that 2-degree threshold, which, again, in 2018, 2019, 2020, terrified the world. Now we’ve made that future inevitable.”
Sometimes I think I should stop clinging to the hope that I can help my kids build the skills they need to survive and make meaning in a future of extreme suffering. After all, those are skills that I don’t have, so how am I supposed to teach them? Sometimes I think about the fact that we’re already living in a present of extreme suffering, and perhaps they’ll be largely untouched by it in the future, as they are now. Maybe I’m spending too much time worrying about preparing them for something they could just ignore if they wanted to. Though, I desperately hope they don’t do that.
Sometimes I think that the present is all we really have, and if I can teach them to find meaning and resilience and community now, in whatever this moment looks like, then that’s all I can really do.
But what I do know, what I feel in my bones, is that building a life that is comfortable, frictionless, and always safe for my kids - or for myself - isn’t building a life of meaning or resilience or community. These things don’t feel like goals to achieve if you want to live a good life, they feel like barriers.
So I will continue to do my best to chip away at our cocoon and open our eyes to the fullness of life outside the comfort zone. My daughter getting to spend a week windsurfing and woodworking, free of parents, screens, and fidgets, seems like a good start.
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