How we are raising tomorrow’s adults

How we are raising tomorrow’s adults

An Essay based on

Detoxing Childhood by Sue Palmer

Written by

Marcial I. Enginco

For

Dr. Grace S. Koo

Professor, EDFD 206 Affective Learning

SUMMARY

Toxic Childhood is a book written by Sue Palmer that details her observations and concerns about how today’s children are growing and developing in a society that does not promote healthy values, views and attitudes through the improper and often misguided use of technology, compounded by a “me-first, me-now” lifestyle as dictated by market forces, and shifts in familial and social structures as an unintended offshoot of inconsistent parenting and growing gender equality in the family and society.

The book examines the toxic elements that critically affect a growing child’s learning and development in areas such as play, diet, education, care, communication and behavior.  The essay Detoxing Childhood contains a letter Palmer and a lobby group of more than a hundred experts and academicians signed to petition readers, especially governments, educators and society in general, to train their sights on  issues raised in the book, with the end view of starting a discourse intended to find solutions to the same.

Palmer is a writer, broadcaster and consultant specializing in children’s education.  She is, according to her words, a cockeyed optimist.

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At no point in mankind’s history has living been more convenient for humans than now, where everything – including knowledge, food, even happiness or at least how it is defined by today’s generation – can be had at the click of a finger.  The leaps in technology over the past two decades have radically changed society and the lifestyles that govern the mainstream that it has practically ensured that the generation being raised now, those in the age range of 1 to 25 (or those who have opened or will open their eyes to the internet age), will grow into a breed of adults that no one has ever seen before.  And I am not excited to find out how they would fare once they take the rein.

Or maybe, that is just me – having grown at a time when man was transitioning from reading books by flipping pages to scanning the world by rolling the mouse, I, perhaps, am simply caught between the nostalgia of my growing years and the present reality that is strange and largely different from what I was used to.  Or maybe, and I strongly suspect, that I have a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed not by just me, or the teachers, or parents – but the society as a whole, working as a community to undo the entanglements that modern living has unwittingly inflicted on our children.

A lot of the issues that Sue Palmer raised in her book Toxic Childhood, from which she based her essay Detoxing Childhood, strongly resonates with observations I routinely make of how today’s children think, act and behave, and how parents ignore, tolerate and even enable such behavior.

For one, Palmer points out and I concur that a child’s normal brain development is not just ready to absorb and process (with emphasis on process) all the information that adults bombard him even before he could utter his first word.  The rapid advancement in technology and its ready availability has a lot to do with this.  To illustrate this point, a video recently circulated on Facebook showed a toddler deftly operating an iPad, and when she was handed a glossy paper magazine, she promptly moved her fingers over the page as if it was a touchscreen.  I know that it was just a harmless, meaningless video posted by proud parents but it is an indication that kids are growing more intelligent by the generation, which is not bad at all if this rapid intellectual maturation is equaled in pace by parallel emotional, social and psychological developments.  This, however, is not so.  I know a lot of kids, from three to preteens, whose idea of play is swiping their fingers across a flat, lifeless screen.  And we adults marvel at how children are so quick to adapt to hi-tech without acknowledging that we are compromising their motor skills development which is best honed by physical plays like running, jumping, sliding, crawling and kicking, to name just a few traditional but neglected activities.  What’s even more alarming is that these children miss out on actual, face to face, interaction with other kids or playmates which serve as the basic foundation for inter-personal communication and relationship-building.  It is interesting to note that the more technology-savvy the kids I know are, the less willing and capable they are of sustaining social interaction even with family, and more so with strangers.

It does not help either that parents, as Palmer also pointed out, are increasingly becoming risk-averse.  Many busy parents view any form of activity that would expose their children to any foreseeable physical or emotional harm should be avoided at all cost, and that situations such as bullying or altercations where children’s physical, emotional and intellectual vulnerability are surreptitiously or deliberately exposed, should be dealt with a combination of livid protestations and a protective blanket rather than treating it as an opportunity to equip the young with the necessary tools to face and overcome adversity by explaining to them what the incident was actually about and what they could do in such situations.  No one is ever going to avoid adversity in his lifetime.  I shudder at the thought of future adults cowering from a problem and looking for solace that is not coming.  And I shudder more when I think that these adults will be tasked to shepherd the generation after them.

A related article which recently appeared in Time Magazine entitled “Me Me Me Generation” characterized today’s youths -- which author Joel Stein called Millennials-- as a lazy, narcissistic and entitled batch.  Contrary to Palmer’s assertion that today’s children are angst- driven, Stein describes them as rather free-spirited, and less prone to moping or contemplating unhappy thoughts, which my personal observations tend to support.  This kind of passive behavior, I would like to conclude, is a result of the way these children are raised by over-protective parents in a world where everything should be ready and available at the click of a button.  I see this pattern of attitude a lot in the college students who use my wall climbing facility for their Physical Education classes.  While a lot of them look physically fit for such a vigorous activity, a majority of them would rather sit at one corner and mingle with one another than engage in an exercise that would leave them tired, sweaty and sore all over, never mind the sense of accomplishment that comes with achieving something out of one’s hard work.  The value of hard work and the strength of determination seem to be alien and unimportant concepts to these kids who are so used to the reset button and thus, not worth the effort to discover and experience.  To their credit, they diplomatically turn down the adults’ effort to impart such life-defining traits by smiling and politely saying, “Sir, nakakapagod” before turning to their gadgets to play their preferred games.

I don’t know if this is the kind of spirit that should carry humankind forward into the unknown future.

So what can be done to stem the tide?  There is no one single solution.  But I know that it should extend beyond Palmer’s recommendation that society questions and debates about child-rearing in the 21^st century so that insights extracted from such discourse can be infused in future policies to address the issues.

Some solutions are so obvious and so fundamental that they are ignored because they are so.  To look forward, one must look back at some of the old practices that have been proven to shape truly well-rounded children. I admire parents who have the confidence to keep technology away, instead allowing children to learn the old way – by reading and experiencing, to explore their creativity and discover their potential by dabbling, experimenting and questioning outside of the house, and to grow and gain physical strength by running, playing and, if it can’t be avoided, falling and failing.

To this end, parents should be made to understand, not only by schools but also the government, the gravity and impact of their roles in tempering the onslaught of technology and modern lifestyle in the personality development of an entire generation.  Adults should themselves step back, slow down and assess what truly matters to them, and what values they want their children to have.  Society has dictated that happiness, though fleeting, comes with a price tag and preferably, very quickly.  Such emphasis on the instant has rendered value-formation market-driven.

Nothing is easy.  And that’s the beauty of living, at least in the age I grew up in.  While the rapid developments and breakthrough in technology will no longer be abated, we the adults can still do something about how it impacts the youth, and how modernity should complement and enhance a child’s development, and not allow it to take over their lives completely.

Palmer considers herself as a cockeyed optimist.  I, too, am an optimist.  But my eyes are open and they blink and squint because they see that the signs are ominous – a new generation will be taking over the world, one that was raised by a generation of parents who care and mean well but simply just don’t have the benefit of a manual on how to raise 21^st century children.  Parents and adults now, I think, are simply overwhelmed by how fast things have changed, and are thus left aware of what’s happening to their children but powerless to do anything about it, like a deer crossing a road that has become immobile because its eyes caught an oncoming car’s headlight.

Until the next generation discovers how ill-prepared they were to face tomorrow’s complex adversities can they truly comprehend the problem and its consequences, and in the process painfully acquiring the knowledge and experiential wherewithal to formulate solutions based on known variables.  I suspect that the children being raised today by a minority of parents who believe old school is still the best pedagogy will be most suited to steer their way emotionally, socially and psychologically across the labyrinthine landscape of the future, and that the children who are today allowed to wander aimlessly into unknown terrain will look up to them for guidance, leadership and how to raise children the old fashioned way.  Then, the next generation will be in better hands.