The Kids Are Not Alright

So why not?

Is it an exaggeration ot talk about "kids these days" and how broken they are?

Yes, sometimes. Sometimes it is just big headlines that sell papers, magazines and juice boxes. Sometimes all we do is exaggerate in our overblown culture of MORE.

But sometimes it is the truth. It seems like we go to extremes as a culture. La Petite has friends who are left alone like wild children, fending for themselves, and friends who are so overscheduled that she only sees them on Instagram. I have had students whose faces are drawn from the stress of the helicopter parent who follows their every move, filling their days with "enrichment" and extra classes, and students whose faces were drawn from their steady diet of Pop-Tarts, videogames and absentee parents.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath. This article argues that if we would just stop evaluating and measuring kids all the time, formally or informally, kids could relax into themselves a little. While that is not the solution for absentee parenting, it certainly would help those overstressed, overscheduled kids that I tended to see in the gifted classes I taught in public school. We need to find some sort of balance in our childrearing, somewhere between Tiger Mom/Dad and no Mom/Dad.

Maybe some kind of intervention for both types of parents?