Human Nature is not Malleable

I found myself thinking that again and again as I read "A Nation of Wimps" by Hara Estroff Marano of Psychology Today magazine. I came upon the piece via a post by Russell Moore at Mere Comments; he, in turn, found it via the commentary section of the Wilson Quarterly.

The thesis of the article seems beyond debate: young people, beginning in the late 1980s, have become increasingly fragile psychologically because their parents seek to protect them from the vicissitudes of life while demanding of them great achievements in every field of endeavor. It's a recipe for mental breakdown, early depression, binge drinking at college, and an extended adolescence. We're left with too many young people who, discovering that life isn't fair, and that genuine success takes hard work, find themselves unprepared to cope. With Mommy and Daddy only a cell phone call away, and knowing that they can count on them to defend their actions, no matter how much in the wrong they may be, they don't know where to turn when the passing years bring the challenges that all of us must face sooner or later.

Marano's article is worth reading in its entirety, but here's a taste:

No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps.

What follows is an examination of the over-parented child, who can become fragile through no fault of his own. When parents live vicariously through their children to such a degree that experimentation becomes a risk, the results of any act -- play, drawing, using the imagination, exercise, sports -- aren't usually worth the effort. As one psychologist says, "If every drawing is going to end up on your parents' refrigerator, you're not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes." Living under a microscope makes kids self-conscious and withdrawn, and not without reason. It's also why they strike an ironic pose, even though, I'd add, most of them probably don't know what real irony is. By distancing themselves from an over-protective world, they carve out a bit of room for their own lives.

Yet those lives are hardly fulfilling, and here the college experiences of these hyper-parented kids becomes key to their futures in the world of work.

Parents are always so concerned about children having high self-esteem, [child psychologist David Anderegg] adds. "But when you cheat on their behalf to get them ahead of other children"--by pursuing accommodations and recommendations--"you just completely corrode their sense of self. They feel 'I couldn't do this on my own.' It robs them of their own sense of efficacy." A child comes to think, "if I need every advantage I can get, then perhaps there is really something wrong with me." A slam dunk for depression.

[UVA religious studies professor emeritus John] Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in--less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.

Part of this weakening is expressed in delays in reaching adulthood and marriage. That's in part because, the article argues, child's play has been micro-managed by anxious parents. "'The precursor to marriage is dating, and the precursor to dating is playing,' says [Indiana University Southeast's Frank] Carducci." In such a world, it's little wonder that "hooking up" replaces traditional dating. Take away the play, and people still need the time to discover themselves and the real ways of the world from which they've heretofore been sheltered.

Another element of this I've seen first-hand is the madness of the college application process. A multi-billion dollar industry has sprouted to help parents -- not necessarily students -- get into the best possible college. From serial rankings by US News and World Report, Newsweek, and other magazines, to test-prep companies such as Kaplan and the Princeton Review, students are taught that their future success and happiness depend on getting everything right from the start. As one anxious parent once told me (I'm not making this up), "Everyone's saying that we have to get him into the right kindergarten!"

This hyper-competitiveness, though, not only induces stress or more serious psychoses, but is largely manufactured by the same hyper-attentive parents who're terrified that little Susie will fall and cut her knee on the playground. Putting college-bound kids through an emotional meat-grinder serves no purpose beyond generating profits for the college-prep industry. I'm not claiming a conspiracy here. It's just that, having seen more than a few utterly stressed-out kids whose parents expect from them a degree of perfection they could never approach themselves, it's time for us to acknowledge what all the totalitarian systems of the past century denied: human nature is not malleable.

Parents who try to force perfection onto their kids, whether on the playground (no competition lest someone's feelings get hurt, no recess in 40,000 schools in America, no acknowledgement of gender differences, and on and on) or at college (only the best will do, profs who give Cs are at risk of ostracism or worse, majors tailored to place "self-esteem" over the study of an unruly world) are vainly trying to wipe out the rules by which socialized people must live. These rules include, of course, moral precepts, tradition, and the liberty to fail. Remove these, and we're left with a litigious society in which inwardly fragile people slug it out for the "right" to exist unencumbered by their natures. It'll never work, of course, but until we acknowledge its failure, we're going to hurt far more than the feelings of a few tender souls.