I keep a little virtual sticky note on my computer of ideas for my blog. A long-running idea is summed up with “kids are different these days,” something someone said to me. I’ve been pondering it. Clearly something is different, but what is it?
A friend e-mailed me because she saw a banner ad on Yahoo that said, “Is your child happy in school?” and it occurred to her that such a question probably never was asked in her grandparents’ generation. I’m sure that’s true of my family: Neither of my parents had much choice in schooling. They went, and that was it.
As far as my schooling was concerned, we didn’t have a lot of choices. I never heard of homeschooling. There was a Catholic school in town; my parents tried it for my oldest sibling and then switched her to the public school, and all five of us went straight through public school. There was no “school choice,” no “alternative education.”
On the other hand, my husband, who grew up in a much more densely populated area, chose to go to the “alternative” high school in his town. So alternatives were growing in the seventies, but they were generally alternatives geared to what parents wanted rather than what children needed.
I have to fast-forward over all those years that I was neither a student nor a parent to this century. Things have really changed. Certainly I know that a lot of people, perhaps the majority of people, still send their kid to the neighborhood public school, and the most choice they feel they have is to fight for the teacher they like in each grade. But there has been a quiet and deep change in our attitudes, and I think that kids are reflecting that.
First of all, there’s the change in parenting. I truly believe that parents now are actually thinking about being parents as something that involves choices; I’m not sure that was true in previous generations. Certainly before Dr. Spock came along, people pretty much did what their parents did. But now, more and more parents are actually considering what each individual child needs. Instead of “this is what parenting is” (the old approach) or “this is what I think is right” (the “new school” approach), we have “this is what I’ve determined is right for this child at this time.”
I’ve met so many parents who say that school is a year-by-year thing. This year they’re homeschooling, but next year remains to be seen. This year they’re fine with the neighborhood public school, but they’re keeping a close eye on how things go.
So back to the question: Is this a change in kids, parents, or society? I think it’s all three. Kids are living very different lives than they used to. I wrote a series of articles for Growing Up in Santa Cruz about behavioral problems in kids and some new ways of treating them. Almost all of the practitioners I talked to noted the incredible change in lifestyle that kids today have from their parents’ upbringing: a complete lack of unstructured time, very little time in nature, scheduled days that have them running from one activity to another, lots of time in highly structured environments, in close quarters with a lot of kids.
Parents are also changing. Pretty much every parent I know has tried out one theory or another: Positive Discipline, Attachment Parenting, etc. There are probably lots of theories I don’t know because they don’t appeal to me! This is a huge change from when my parents were parenting; they had their memories of how their parents did it, and if they didn’t want to take that as a model, they just had to figure it out for themselves.
Finally, society has opened up so much. I would guess that some things are largely the same for families in the small Midwestern towns I knew when I was growing up, but one major thing has changed for all of us: We are less connected with our physical neighbors and more connected with like-minded people regardless of location. Living in Santa Cruz is a good fit for me; there are lots of families here who have similar values to ours. But if it weren’t a good fit, I would still have a virtual community that could offer me advice and support, which they do every day.
It’s a whole new world, really, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging it “better” in every way. But in some ways, we have come a long way, baby. By paying attention to each child’s needs, parenting has been made all the more complicated, but (I hope!) all the more effective.
