Parenting in the Age of Awfulness (wsj.com)
Earlier this month I finished teaching three more classes, and even after ten years of teaching I still have a hard time dealing with the emotional rollercoaster ride of those last classes. The classes tend to be celebratory on their surface — especially when I can tell students that they’ll never have to worry about taking another English class for the rest of their lives — but all the time I’m sitting there and smiling, a lot of conflicting thoughts are running through my head. I’m always grateful when students thank me for teaching them, and I usually get a lot of that on the last day of class, but at the same time I have to think about the mistakes I made during the term — like every teacher, I’m not perfect — and how to avoid making those mistakes again when I get new groups of students to teach after the coming break. It’s not like I’ll be able to call my students five years later and say, “Hey, I know a lot more about teaching now, let’s all get together for another four months so I can help you even more.” I only get that one shot, and even if I do a good job of teaching my students, I can always do better.
One of the refrains I hear on those last days, more often than I’d like, is younger students telling me that I’m the first grown-ups in their lives who ever really listened to what they had to say. Given how my students are nearly always at least eighteen years old, it’s hard not to be depressed when I hear that, even as I’m being complimented. Part of that is just by design — even if I wanted to slough off my teacher responsibilities, they still haven’t invented a Scantron-like machine to grade English papers — but part of that is also the fact that one of the main reasons I got into teaching was because I had so many horrible teachers when I was younger, and I have firsthand experience of the damage that bad teachers can do to students. In an age where even good teachers can be perceived as bad teachers because they’re being forced (by businesses and politicians with no clue as to how people learn) to teach in bad ways, we need more good teachers, and I always try to be the teacher for my students that I wish I’d had when I was younger.
My parents were both Vietnam War-era hippies, so I think a certain amount of that rubbing off on my teaching style, to say nothing of my personality, is unavoidable. Sometimes I even play off of that comically, just to reassure my students that I won’t make them hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” at some point, but it’s also true that I do care about my students and I want to help them beyond just the bare basics of what my English classes are supposed to teach. Those students are the reason I get to do a job I love, and it’s their money that gets deposited into my bank account every two weeks, so helping my students out when I can feels like one of the least things I can do for them.
Although some of the stereotypes of hippies ring more than a little true, one of the ones that’s always bothered me is what I’ll call the “special snowflake” syndrome, the idea that valuing the worth of everyone, and giving people positive messages, is somehow this weird or even unnatural activity. At best, opposition to believing in the worth of everyone is based on a faulty (perhaps deliberately so) definition of the word “special,” the idea that if everyone is special then no one is special. This assumes that “special” can only mean one thing, and that it isn’t possible for people to have different qualities of being special. This is the equivalent of saying that someone can’t be called “big” because even though they have a lot of extra weight around their midsection, they’re not tall. It’s overly reductive, and from my experience dealing with people who argue that “not everyone can be special,” I get the impression that they deliberately misunderstand this concept just so they can feel better about themselves by continuing to denigrate people that way.
As I’ve talked with my students over the years about their upbringings, though, and as I’ve gone back and looked at the bad interactions with authority figures I had when I was younger, I’ve come to believe that people who are against the “special snowflake” idea more often than not use it as a weapon, to deliberately hurt people. Not only are they trying to bring down the people who try to empower others, who try to make other people feel like they have value, but they want to tell everyone who’s ever been told by someone that they’re special that they, to borrow a phrase, aren’t worth shit. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a nuclear bomb, not just blowing up the people trying to empower others, but all the people they’ve ever empowered as well.
I’ve examined the possible causes underlying this kind of attack, beyond its sheer capacity to hurt many people with relatively few words. A lot of it seems to be the same reasons behind other kind of bullying, feeling the need to bring others down in order to bring yourself up and so on. The closer I look, though, the more evidence I seem to uncover that many (admittedly not all) of the people who use this tactic do so because they believe that “the market” is the sole determiner of a person’s worth, that any qualities that can’t be quantified in terms of money or power are inherently false, and anyone who believes otherwise is not just wrong, and not just a valid target for public ridicule, but a subversive element endangering “the system” (in other words, them) as well.
Looking at my own life in particular, I had to endure a lot of that kind of bullying and abuse, and I continue to get attacked with it to this day. It’s hard to fault little children who bully because so many of them genuinely don’t know better, and as a (nominal) adult who expresses her opinion in a public forum, I accept that I’m going to be the target of other adults who choose to express their disagreements with me in not-so-nice ways. When a grown-up goes out of their way to deliberately devalue a child, though — and I had a lot of grown-ups like that in my life when I was growing up — that is beyond unconscionable, and the more I hear of my students’ experiences growing up, the more I realize that I am far from alone in dealing with that kind of trouble.
That is why articles like the one above gall me so much. First of all, it incorrectly puts humility in opposition to self-worth. It is more than possible, and I would argue necessary, for people to believe in their own worth and also to be humble about themselves. For all that I may have accomplished in my life, and for all that I may accomplish in the future, when it comes down to it I’m just a carbon-based life form like everyone else. Even as students thank me for respecting them and their voices, even as I get good performance reviews from students and bosses alike, in the end I’m just a hippie artist with questionable fashion sense and a slightly unhealthy obsession with cartoon ponies. A good part of the reason I’ve had success as a teacher is because I make a point of telling my students that I’m not perfect, which for many of them is such a refreshing change of pace from their previous instructors that I instantly gain a lot of credibility with them.
More to the point, though, devaluing young people pretty much shackles them to the life path that the “no one is special except me” people want them to take. Even if the children of the rich and powerful get it in their heads that they have no inherent value, their advantages in life pretty much guarantee that eventually they will be told that they have value and worth when they get out of their expensive schools and universities, get high-paying jobs (or just inherit a crapload of money) and have everything from right-wing media to car commercials tell them that yes, they are special. For those who don’t have those advantages, self-doubt and other mental issues brought on by systematic bullying can present insurmountable obstacles to even basic happiness, let alone feelings of self-worth and success.
Pretty much every generation has been trying to do this in conscious and unconscious ways; the author’s example of kids being preoccupied with their smartphones was kids being preoccupied with their portable music players in the generations before that. All of these are based on the assumption that the people in authority — parents, teachers, or just older people in general — are always right, and younger people are always wrong. Not only is that assumption incorrect, but it devalues young people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
As an example, whenever I have a student in one of my classes who chooses to look at their cell phone during class instead of pay attention to me, the “conventional” response would be for me to assume that the student is being disrespectful at the very least, and most people would think that I’d be in the right to verbally thrash that student for their behavior, that I have a right as the Almighty Instructor to demand full and complete compliance with all of my desires, no matter how egotistical or self-serving or just plain stupid they are. (Yeah, I had a lot of those kinds of teachers growing up.)
I never act or even dare to think that way, though. To me, a student who is paying attention to their smartphone, or talking with another student, or what have you, is a sign that I’m not doing my job as a teacher to engage them. It’s a signal that I need to change tactics to try to give that student the education that they are paying me to give them. Sometimes some students just won’t engage with you, and yes, sometimes students are deliberately disruptive, but you know what? Sometimes students are checking their smartphones all the time because they have a parent or grandparent in the hospital and they’re expecting news that could be really good or really bad. Sometimes they have a friend or relative in the armed forces serving in another country, and they got news of a bombing in that country just before class started. Any teacher who automatically assumes the worst about their students, as far as I’m concerned, has no business teaching, because it’s assholes like them who give the rest of us, and education as a whole, a bad reputation.
The same holds true with your kids. If they want to check their smartphones when they’re at the dinner table instead of talk with you, then maybe you need to be more interesting. If they tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, then maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, there is a lot to be said for teaching young people courtesy and respect, but if you’re not willing to respect your kids, if you insist on clinging onto the idea that you as a parent are always infallible in every interaction you have with your children, then you’re not qualified to teach them about respect, and you’re damn sure not qualified to be hectoring the rest of us about it.
It’s not surprising that the people who are trying to push this kind of parenting are the same people who expect everyone who isn’t like them to be subservient to them. These are the same people who want young people to “shut up” about police officers killing their African-American friends, then turn around and shriek that they’re as persecuted as Jesus was because a cashier said “Happy Holidays” to them. These are the same people who try to carve out “religious exemptions” to anti-bullying ordinances to enshrine their own ability to devalue other people. These are the same people who think that children are their parents’ property, and follow the link because I’m not exaggerating when I say that.
No human being is property. (America fought a war over that 150 years ago, and the pro-slavery side lost. Get over it already.) That’s a very convenient philosophy for these people to have, though, because that kind of thinking makes it even easier to make young people believe that they have no inherent value, that any worth they have will be determined by rich and powerful people when they’re older. It’s a pretty powerful way to enshrine any kind of privilege you can think of, and we’re already experiencing the detrimental effects of that kind of thinking not just on individual people, but society as a whole. It’s hard for people to rise up when they’ve been wronged if they’ve been trained their whole lives to think that they have no right to complain, or even speak, because as far as “the real world” is concerned, they aren’t worth shit.
Instead of sitting down with your children and reinforcing the same arbitrary and deleterious power structures that have messed so many of us up, tell them that you’re not perfect. Tell them that you’re trying to do the best job you can as a parent, but you need their feedback and their help to be the best parent you can be. They might not respect you for that, but they’ll sure respect you a lot more than if you become another silencing force in their lives. We’ve already got too many of those in the world right now, and they’re messing up far more than just our children.