Love this New York Observer article (that Joanne found way before I did) on the immense self-esteem suffered by upper-middle-class kids who have been coddled all their lives:
[Too Much Positive Reinforcement] has now officially reached epidemic proportions...After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgement of his talents, it’s no wonder we need television shows like American Idol and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, The Apprentice. These shows are delivering the spanking—sorry, the time-out—that our culture of bloated self-evaluation is subconsciously craving...
We’ve become so inured to the idea that a person’s self-assessment need not be changed by a little thing like repeated and utter failure that no one was the least surprised when Joe Lieberman took so long to throw in the towel...Jon Stewart on The Daily Show put it best: "When did our elections become the Special Olympics? You’re not all winners. Not everybody gets a hug. You guys got crushed."
Manhattan these days may just be Ground Zero for the TMPR epidemic. With two—and now three—generations of privileged parents "correcting" the sternness (or imagined sternness) of their own upbringing by telling their children they can do anything they put their minds to, upper-middle-class kids now routinely think they have no weaknesses, and that they have every right—not just every chance—to succeed. Bring on Manhattan—if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere!
"Kids will come in wanting to be a staff writer at Esquire right out of college," said Eliot Kaplan, editorial talent director for Hearst Magazines. "I had this girl come in from this failed dot-com one day—that was her only experience. I interviewed her and asked her how much money she wanted, and she said $300,000. I couldn’t help it—I laughed in her face." Mr. Kaplan added: "We’re happy to bring them back to earth."
I'm sure they are. But those "down-to-earth" experiences for spoiled kids used to come when they started school and learned the world didn't revolve around their needs. Now, even colleges are trying to protect pampered students from the real world:
"When I was at Andover in the 1940’s, one in every third kid would not make it," said Dr. Paul McHugh, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. "Now in a school like that and even colleges, it’s really hard to fail out. They pick you up, prep you, dust you off."
It’s the work world that increasingly functions as the personal reality-check service for TMPR victims...
The psychologists have a word for it: "overindulged child syndrome":
"One of my pet peeves is to hear parents praising a child’s accomplishments as if they’re professionals," he said. "A child who draws very well is a great artist, a child who dances very well is a great dancer. That implies that they are able to replicate every good performance. Instead, I’d like to hear parents praise the event, what they did. That’s a very different compliment; it doesn’t fill the child with expectations of being a great artist," he added. "You’ve built up the popinjay to the point where they don’t have the credentials and skill to prove it"...
Not surprisingly, the cult of self-esteem clashes with the cult of accountability and "back-to-basics" in schools:
If the teacher doesn’t give you an A, have Daddy pay! If you can’t get into Yale, put a check in the mail! "The extreme obnoxious example is the child who has a fit when she doesn’t get an A, and the parents go to the school and raise hell about the teacher’s unfairness and the grade gets changed," Ms. Murphy said. "You’ve done that child a huge disservice." Mr. Flamenbaum added...
Joanne also linked to an Education Next article about the dangers of the "Gentleman's A":
Our results indicate that students benefit academically from higher grading standards. However, these results were not uniform: high-ability students appear to benefit more than low-ability students from high grading standards. Moreover, initially low-performing students appear to benefit more from high grading standards when they are placed in high-achieving classrooms. Likewise, high-performing students appear to react best to high grading standards when placed in low-achieving classrooms.
And grade inflation benefits no one, especially now that so many standardized yardsticks exist for comparison:
It turns out that the grades teachers assign are highly correlated with students’ ITBS and FCAT scores. But teachers also tend to grade far less stringently than the state standards indicate they should (see Figure 1). For instance, just 9 percent of students who were awarded A’s by their teachers attained a score of 5 on the FCAT. In fact, just 50 percent attained even a 4.
Even those students whose talents coincide with their inflated self-esteem might not do well in adulthood. This 2002 research report correlates childhood overindulgence with adult temperament. The results aren't pretty, because, as the authors note, overindulgence of children is done not for the child's benefit, but for the parental ego, and lack of responsibility due to parental pathologies can also translate to overindulgence:
Overindulgent parents inundate their children with family resources such as material wealth, time, attention, experiences, or lack of responsibility at developmentally inappropriate times (Bredehoft, Mennicke, Potter, and Clarke, 1998). Overindulged children grow up in an unrealistic world and as a result they fail to learn skills such as perseverance, coping with failure in effective ways, and getting along with others. Parents overindulge to meet their own needs, not the needs of their children (Bredehoft et al., 1998)...
In this first study (Bredehoft et al., 1998)...the findings...paint a less than happy picture for adults who were overindulged as children. A high percentage of ACO’s [adult children of overindulgence] came from violent homes and homes in which parents were addicted to alcohol, drugs, work, or food. ACO’s reported the following life problems which they associated with their overindulgence: not knowing what is enough, overeating and gaining weight, money management problems, parenting and childrearing conflicts, conflicts with interpersonal boundaries, difficulty in decision-making, poor self-esteem, poor health, and being involved in excessive activities. As a result of being overindulged ACO’s reported mostly negative feelings: confused, embarrassed, guilty, and ignored.
Sadly, the problems tend to repeat themselves across generations:
...dysfunctional attitudes are closely associated with a variety of negative attributes ranging from the need for approval, being self-critical, perfectionism, poor social adjustment and depression. Parents who were overindulged as children subsequently believed in fate, that their child controlled their life, thought that they were less effective parents, had little control over their child’s behavior and have a more chaotic family system.
All the more reason for firmer discipline in schools, both in terms of classroom discipline and effectiveness of teaching. Why should students have to wait until they're faced with the working world to get a valid assessment of their capabilities?
Posted by kswygert at February 23, 2004 01:13 PM