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Friday, December 10, 2004
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENT TODAY
An essay in the latest issue of Psychology Today presents a catastrophic account of contemporary American college students. Fragile, dissociated, tattooed from tit to ass, this country’s university students stumble around the quad dribbling into their cell phones and trying to decide whether to die from drink, drugs, or depression. Fifteen percent of them, the author announces, are clinically depressed right now : “Psychological distress is rampant on college campuses.” Students are “riddled with anxiety.” And yeah, fine, okay, rampant, riddled…. The PT crowd has long been in the business of scaring the crap out of us so we’ll sign up with them, and this writer‘s no different…. Yet her essay turns out to be an odd sort of self-consuming artifact. She blames the ghastly situation she describes on the soul-crushing over-solicitude of psychotherapy-mad parents. By allowing themselves to be spooked by experts who kept telling them how brittle everyone’s psychological health was, how likely they were to make mistakes in bringing up their children, these parents conveyed to their sons and daughters a terrible, smothering, insecurity, which produced the fearful, dependent, disengaged people we now see crawling about our campuses. The author tries out a number of phrases for this phenomenon (one of these phrases will eventually appear on the cover of the book she no doubt has in mind to write): hothouse parenting, parental protectionism, parental hovering, overparenting (nice Nietzschean ring to that one)… But whatever the name, the culprit in this reduction of the youth of America to pathetic wraiths is precisely the sort of upbringing that involves things like biweekly sessions with therapists. The author concludes in this way: Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they’ve maintained over their children. The goal of parenting…is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later… most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity. Parents may find it easier to give up some control if they recognize they have exaggerated many of the dangers of childhood… Yet the author overlooks the history of that phobic worldview. Therapists themselves, cynically hyping the physical and psychic dangers of life, contributed significantly to the creation of this mess. Anyway, UD is intrigued by this new “leave your kids alone, dammit!” approach. She will even confess to having tinkered with some possible book titles of her own…. She envisions a two-book series, in which the first book would be Piss Off: Fundamentals of Parental Neglect, and the second Fuck Off: Advanced Parental Neglect. |