{"id":22925,"date":"2019-05-16T20:12:02","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T03:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=22925"},"modified":"2019-05-16T20:12:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T03:12:02","slug":"finally-something-is-not-the-millennials-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/finally-something-is-not-the-millennials-fault\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally something is not the millennials fault ;)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to start this with a simple question, raise your hand if in the past 5 years, you have seen some ugly trend and not blamed the group known as millennials. My guess is most of us have done this with some sort of eye roll and derisive statement. In their book\u00a0The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure<\/em>, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt lay out a heartbreaking look into what is happening with American youth (College and younger) and how we have brought this on ourselves.<\/p>\n

Howard Doughty states “Lukianoff and Haidt make a sincere effort to untangle the story of the enormous growth of mental torments and clinical disorders on campus, and to make what connections they can to the overall political culture of the United States. To these ends, they take note of political polarization, the routinization of children’s play and the regimentation of recreational activities, the much discussed phenomenon (sometimes labelled the “addiction”) of social media, the plethora of rules of respectful speech and codes of proper conduct, and the overall corporatization in both theory and practice of the contemporary academy.”[1] The idea of just weak mindedness of the students is to surface level of an accusation. The blame is laid at the feet of parents who have, for lack of a better word, blanketed their children and not allowed them to form a hard outer shell. So when they arrive at a campus, they do not know how to react when something does not go their way.\u00a0 Devon Frye also sees the book as hitting the mark, “In the The Coddling of the American Mind, he and psychologist Jonathan Haidt argue that in urging colleges to turn away polarizing speakers or shaming others for ill-considered words, many students treat emotional safety as an absolute right-to the detriment of their own well-being.”[2]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As someone who leans to the right politically (fyi I do not watch Fox or any mainstream media channels, as they all are interested in making money and fostering anger to the other side), I have been swayed into thinking the left leaning professors were to blame. Haidt and Lukianoff argue for a different place for the blame to lay. First, as we have read in other books during our course the rise of social media and our attachment to our phones has some blame. They give a quote from Sean Parker explaining the early years of Facebook, “The thought process that went into building these applications…was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’…And that means we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit”[3]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I actually got to experience this on a smaller scale in the last two weeks. The school my sons go to is a small Christian school with 225 kids. The school recently decided to use Yondr. Yondr is a pouch that you put your cell in and it is then locked with a magnetic lock. It blocks all signals and does not allow you to get the dopamine hits Sean Parker spoke of above. The product was originally designed to be used in the entertainment industry. Graham Dugoni started the company after he was at a festival and in his words, “In 2012, at a music festival in San Francisco, he witnessed a pair of strangers film a drunken guy obliviously dancing; they then posted the video to YouTube. Appalled, Dugoni started thinking about how he could have prevented these strangers from making a public spectacle out of someone else\u2019s private moment.”\u00a0[4] The first day of usage for the school was also the day a rep from the company came to answer any questions parents might have. There were parents who said their child literally came home from school “bawling their eyes out” because they did not have their phones all day. When I got home and told my boys that I was ll for Yondr, the anger that flashed in their eyes told me it was the right thing to do. As Parker also said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brain”[5]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The authors tell us that “when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation.”\u00a0[6] The inability for them to be able to focus on anything other than their screen has hampered their ability to cope. Added to this was the fact they are blanketed by their parents against anything they might disagree with and this continues on campus and you get the perfect storm.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I am grateful this book has laid this problem out for the world to see. I have already suggested it to several parents and educators I know. I also am grateful I have allowed my boys to be confronted with ideas that are not just mine, and we can discuss where we can find common ground. This book is well worth the time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0Doughty, Howard. “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” The Innovation Journal 23, no. 3 (2018): 1-14.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[2] Frye, Devon. “PLAYING IT SAFE.” Psychology Today 51, no. 5 (2018): 18-4.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[3] Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff.\u00a0Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure<\/i>. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018. 147.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[4] Gregory, Alice. \u201cThis Startup Wants to Neutralize Your Phone-and Un-Change the World.\u201d\u00a0Wired<\/i>, Conde Nast, 15 Feb. 2018, www.wired.com\/story\/free-speech-issue-yondr-smartphones\/.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[5] Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff.\u00a0Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure<\/i>. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018. 147.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[6] Ibid. 148.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to start this with a simple question, raise your hand if in the past 5 years, you have seen some ugly trend and not blamed the group known as millennials. My guess is most of us have done this with some sort of eye roll and derisive statement. In their book\u00a0The Coddling of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22925"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22964,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22925\/revisions\/22964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}