We have got to cut it out.
From the Dad who shot his daughter’s laptop to the Mom who made her son stand on a street corner with a sandwich board sign. May as well be a scarlet letter.
These methods don’t work.
And we know that’s true, these gimmicks, these attempts to help/punish, but we don’t know what else to do. That’s what we hear the parents always say.
I don’t know what else to do!
We know better, but we also feel stuck.
So let’s get unstuck. Let’s begin by not shaming children. Our children and all children.
We know the first most important reason to stop shaming children is that shame causes long-term damage to children. Brené Brown’s research shows that the evidence of the lasting impact of shame extends long past childhood and is the primary cause of later emotional and psychological problems, trouble with addiction, and increased likelihood to commit crime.
And it is pretty lousy at changing behaviors in the moment, too.
We know this.
What we don’t seem to know is the second most important reason.
We punish others for our own problems.
As Petula Dvorak recently publicly shamed her own children in a column for the Washington Post, we make a terrible habit of shaming children for being children.
Only now, we’ve added public shaming to the arsenal.
Pieces like this one, in which she trashes her own kids for being lazy goof-offs with no sense of responsibility, are often composed with the chiding marmish “kids these days!” tone and the smug superiority of adulthood and the experience of a completely different upbringing.
When I read these kinds of drivel, I’m always left wondering why they are even complaining.
One of my young children is going through a defiant phase, but I’m not defining his character at 4 years old, nor am I attributing defiance upon an entire generation. He is four. And he is acting four.
Rare is it that 10 year-old wants to shovel 3 feet of snow for strangers. To work their butts off for sub-minimum wages. They don’t want to do it and don’t have a reason to do it.
“I can’t feel my toes and my hands are blistered and my face is chapped, but I got $5!”
Let alone doing that while adults sit inside with hot chocolate and Netflix. That’s what they want. And why wouldn’t they? It’s what all of us want!
These kids she’s complaining about are her own, but she speaks about their behavior as if she has no influence on them at all. She has raised them to be precisely as they are because they live in this particular environment. If anyone should be criticized about the laziness of children, it is their parents and their culture.
But let’s be more precisely than that. This issue with public shaming is really about our priorities. It is the things which we make more important than other things. If one believes there is a deficit in personal responsibility, it is because we’ve created it and it is we adults who are responsible for it. And chances are, there is a surplus somewhere else: in the place we value much more.
For instance, if we look at the way parents go after teachers on behalf of their children and the pressures we all put on all of our children to achieve as students, it is clear that achievement matters more than honesty, more than effort, and more than all the other tools in our toolbelt, such as empathy, compassion, or creativity.
For the system we have created, good grades will get a child much further than their being a decent human being. So mass cheating, poor sportsmanship, and entitlement are all inevitable consequences, for each helps a student achieve more and succeed in an objective, though unethical education-to-work system.
Generations are formed by their environment.
We think things are so age specific. We like to say
“when I was your age…”
which is not as helpful as saying
“when I was your age in 1984…”
For the time and the culture matter just as much as the age in question. It isn’t only biology. It isn’t only developmental stage. It isn’t only the genetic material of the child and it isn’t something so rational and sequential as simply knowing how to do things all on our own.
It is also about context, environment, and location. In other words, it is about what we teach our children to be.
The most striking piece of Dvorak’s column is that she criticizes her children for their poor technique, unfamiliarity with shoveling tons of snow at once, and for their whiny disposition. But how has she trained them for such a task? How much teaching did she do before and how much teaching is she doing in the moment? How quick is she to fly off the handle, to whine at them for whining at her?
Why wouldn’t they rather go inside? Why isn’t this taken as a rational response to being shoved outside in the aftermath of a freak blizzard? For it is only sensible to not want to shovel out the walk or the drive.
Seeing children not know how to shovel or wanting to go in and play video games isn’t illogical. What is illogical is that their mother expects them to spontaneously know how to shovel, have the initiative to go up to complete strangers to pitch their services, and do so for a couple of bucks and the good feeling of completing a good day’s work without ever sharing any of those values with them. Is illogical to expect those behaviors from children without fostering those behaviors in our homes, our neighborhoods, or our communities.
If you believe young people today are lazy, it is because they’ve been trained to be lazy. By parents, adults, a whole system which have changed the rules and the goals of the game without thinking through the consequences.
Or perhaps you are wrong. Perhaps they aren’t lazy. Perhaps they are strong and have the values we’ve instilled in them. To study hard and get along with one another. To play and collaborate. To share with family and close friends with great generosity. Those seem to be the values we’re passing on as a culture.
No more shame, no more blame
But don’t put this at the foot of the school system, which has spent the last 30 years or more constantly doing more with less and the added burden of increasing poverty, unprepared children, and heightened expectations from high-stakes testing and the constant threat of having their budgets on the chopping block (or if you are Detroit, raided by the Emergency Manager to balance the city’s debt). People who receive our children on empty stomachs and often have to feed them twice per day while caring for the health and well-being while also teaching and encouraging them.
And don’t blame the parents of today, wrestling multiple jobs, childcare, decreasing wages and no savings plans, who are far more stressed and strapped than our parents were.
Don’t blame the media: TV, movies, video games. Don’t scapegoat technology or the things in our environment.
Don’t scapegoat anything or anyone. No one thing did this. No one thing gets us out of it.
We have done this. Whatever this is supposed to be. We have built a world in which our problems are thrown at the feet of the young without regard to the generations doing the throwing.
And certainly without regard to a sense that we are all in this together.
We trashed Generation X for being “slackers,” but it is a generation who has turned out to be anything but.
We trash Millennials for being “coddled,” but they may be the most optimistic and capable generation in a century.
We will trash the next generation, populating our elementary and middle schools right now because that is what our culture does. It attacks the vulnerable and eats its young.
But we don’t have to. That need not be who we are.
We can stop this dysfunction by stopping the cycle of shame. Not only because it is good for us and will make us healthy. That sounds too much like dieting or going to the doctor.
Instead, we can stop this dysfunction because it is lazy and stupid and we are the ones creating it. Stop shaming children for not knowing the things we are unwilling to teach them.
So go play games with them. Or pick out a movie on Netflix. Pop some popcorn and bundle up. It sounds like that’s what we’d much rather do anyway. That our children will be healthier and more capable will be a fun byproduct.
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