By David French
Saturday, May 14, 2016
It’s hard to doubt that legendarily entitled Millennial
social-justice warriors will finally go too far, and not even The Onion will be able to sufficiently
parody their aggressive fragility. In a campus culture saturated with
controversy over trigger warnings and so-called micro-aggressions, my favorite
story comes from Brown University.
Even some of Brown’s coddling administrators had to shake
their heads at the student response to a debate between leftist feminist
Jessica Valenti and libertarian Wendy McElroy. A campus debate is usually a
tame-enough event, but this debate would deal with the alleged campus-rape
crisis, and McElroy was expected to depart from college orthodoxy and dissent
from the myth that women at American universities are uniquely in danger of
being raped.
To help students “recuperate” from the debate, student
activists set up a “safe space” that featured coloring books, cookies,
Play-Doh, and videos of puppies. Yes, adult students at one of the world’s most
prestigious universities intentionally re-created a day-care center for one
another.
Conservatives often alternate between laughing at
Millennials’ fragility and expressing alarm at its long-term consequences.
Viral videos show the campus meltdowns in living color and students so eager to
demonstrate their tolerance that they can’t bring themselves (in one famous
example) to say a five-foot-nine white man is “wrong” to self-identify as a
six-foot-five Chinese woman.
Yet in attacking Millennial activists and their
administrative enablers, we not only mislabel their malady — they’re not nearly
as fragile as they claim — we also fail to identify the real culprits.
Snowflakes aren’t spontaneously generated. They’re made, formed largely by
parents who’ve loved their children into the messes they’ve become.
***
The upper-middle-class American style of parenting is
creating a generation of children who are trained from birth to believe three
things: first, that the central goals of life are success and emotional
well-being; second, that the child’s definitions of success and emotional
well-being are authoritative; and third, that parents and other authority
figures exist to facilitate the child’s desires. If the child is the star of
his own life’s story, then parents and teachers act as agents, lawyers, and
life coaches. They are the child’s chief enablers.
Parents, for their part, didn’t set out to raise fragile
children. Instead, they desperately desired that their kids first be safe and
happy. Then — later — safe, happy, and successful. Faced with kids they loved
and perhaps still reeling from their own childhood problems, including growing
up during the first massive wave of divorce and in an era of increasing crime,
Millennials’ parents (younger Boomers and older members of Generation X)
decided that they were going to get parenting right.
The superficial displays of their parental care and
caution are there for all to see. Out of exaggerated fear for their children’s
physical safety, upper-middle-class mothers and fathers devote themselves to
“helicopter parenting,” hovering and doing all they can to smooth the bumps of
life, well into their offspring’s young-adult years.
New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
has dubbed this phenomenon the “flight to safety” and sees its manifestations
in parents who “pulled in the reins” to keep their children from roaming as freely
as kids in generations past. Playgrounds were redesigned. Schools put in place
“zero tolerance” policies to squelch even the hint of violence. The message was
simple: Even in a time of declining crime and exploding prosperity (especially
for upper-income families), the world was dangerous and full of terrors.
But why are such fragile, fearful children simultaneously
so aggressive? Isn’t such strident activism inconsistent with the fear
hypothesis? Haidt ascribes much of their ideological aggression to having grown
up in an age of increasing polarization. Simply put, Republicans and Democrats
hate one another more than ever. Writing in The
Atlantic, Haidt and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president
Greg Lukianoff note that “implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as
strong across political parties as they are across races.” Thus, “it’s not hard
to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of
protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations
past.”
This analysis rings true but seems incomplete. In
addition, a lifetime of experience has told student activists that complaints
to parents and teachers get results. Thus, the paradox of the modern Millennial
snowflake. In the name of their own alleged vulnerability and fragility, they
engage in dramatic protest, seek conflict, and relentlessly attack opponents.
These snowflakes are dangerous.
***
How does this happen? Think of the dilemmas that parents
face because of their children. Their children participate in sports and run
into a coach who is perceived as too angry or who doesn’t give the child a fair
chance. They go to school and inevitably encounter teachers who don’t teach
well or who teach subjects they find irritating or challenging. On the playgrounds,
they face their first bully or their first physical conflict. And at each
stage, they do what kids do: They tell their parents.
When I went to my parents with these dilemmas, the
response was often some form of “Suck it up.” I once told my dad that my coach
threw a basketball at a kid’s head when he was talking during practice. My dad
laughed. When I broke my right arm in fifth grade, I asked if I could get a
break on homework while I learned to write with my left. My dad told me the
struggle would teach me how to work hard. If parents ever intervened in
playground conflicts, the shame was deep and enduring.
These are small but telling examples from life’s little
challenges. My parents’ priority was building character, not maintaining my
happiness. They wanted to raise a child who would love God and live by the
Golden Rule. So I had to learn that I wasn’t the center of the universe. I had
to learn that I was often wrong. And I had to learn the daily courage necessary
to confront and overcome problems on my own, without constantly appealing to a
higher earthly authority for aid and comfort.
Presently, however, many parents view their child’s pain,
anger, or inconvenience less as an opportunity to teach the child a lesson
about character and perseverance than as an imperative to come to the child’s
rescue. Thus, parents themselves confront the angry coach, find all the help
the child needs to succeed academically (including sometimes even doing
homework for the child), talk to the
principal about playground conflict, and negotiate with teachers to optimize
the child’s classroom experience.
The parent emerges first as savior, then as friend. All
decent parents covet a relationship with their child, but there are countless
times when parent and child naturally clash, and — especially as those children
get older — the clashes can strain or fracture the relationship. Parents
preserve friendships with their kids in countless small ways: extending curfews
on request, purchasing items that strain the family budget, excusing minor
infractions of family rules. If the choice is between confront and consent,
parents consent again and again, each time vowing to themselves that they’ll
stand up to their child if the issue is “truly” big.
Not long ago, I was speaking to the headmaster of a large
Christian school who was lamenting the extraordinary power children exercised
in the parent–child relationship. In the aftermath of the Obergefell decision, the school was considering changing its policy
handbook to clearly state that the school teaches that marriage is the union of
a man and a woman. The headmaster said that he’d already received pushback from
parents, not because the parents had any real conviction on the issue (and
those who did were generally quite conservative) but because their children demanded the parents take
a stand. The definition of marriage had become a strain in the parent–child
relationship, and parents deferred to their children to remain “friends.”
Stories like this are legion. Impose virtually any limit
on a child’s desires and there is sure to be a parental revolt that begins with
the phrase, “My child wants . . . ” The rest of the argument flows entirely
from the child’s desire, which overrules all other reasoning.
We mislabel them as fragile because their unhappiness
comes so easily and their tolerance for adversity is so low. But they are not
weak. They’re instead doing exactly what they’ve been taught to do since that
first bad soccer practice or kindergarten conflict. They scream as loudly as
they can for Mom and Dad — for the teacher or the principal, acting in loco
parentis — and the authority figure duly obeys. And why not? When happiness and
friendship are the goals, when comfort is the highest calling, the response
will be immediate. If it’s not, then kids will find new friends.
***
Graduation season is upon us. At countless dinners,
emotional parents and children will reflect on their journey, and two sentences
will be uttered time and again: “Mom, you weren’t just my mother. You were also
my best friend.” Those words, tearfully delivered and gladly received, are the
reason that the present cultural trend is likely to endure, at least for the
foreseeable future. Parents are raising exactly the children they want to
raise.
But it cannot last. Life is too hard, and authority
figures are ultimately too weak to guarantee enduring joy and success. So the
aggressively fragile generation will face a choice: either greater anger and
aggression as they desperately flail for the utopia that can never come, or a
rediscovery of the virtues that enable perseverance.
In the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, we see the flailing.
Out from under their parents’ roof, out from under the watchful eye of
sympathetic administrators, who’s the parent now? Who has the authority to
address their grievances and ease their fears? Responding to the fear and
uncertainty, a geriatric socialist (a fatherly sort of fellow) steps in with
his call for free health care and education (neither in fact free), and
protection from the rough-and-tumble world of liberty and markets. In other
words, Sanders wants to make the entire country a “safe space.”
College campuses are centers of Sanders support in large
part because they represent small examples of the world he wants to build.
Tuition represents an extreme form of progressive taxation as rich families
fund generous breaks for the poor, and everyone enjoys the same, often
luxurious facilities. Each student has access to an immense social-welfare
infrastructure, complete with diversity offices for every ethnicity and easy
access to doctors and counselors. College is the ultimate nanny, and many former
students miss her warm embrace.
It’s a popular sport to scorn entitled Millennials — I’m
guilty of it myself — but when people live as Millennials were raised to live,
where does the lion’s share of the blame lie? Parents placed their child’s joy
first in large part because it made them happy. It seemed win-win. Parents and
children enriched each other’s lives as parents fed off the joy they provided
their kids. Life as an adult is not a problem so easily solved.
Eventually children leave home (and Brown and Yale), and
when they do, they find that temper tantrums are not so well received,
authority figures don’t prioritize their joy, and the hard work of building
character must be started now, years late. Even Bernie Sanders cannot heal the
hurt to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment