Dear Millennials: Your parents lied to you
toughsledding.wordpress.com
toughsledding.wordpress.com
I sure as hell don't remember being showered with praise or getting athletic trophies just for turning up.
For instance, I played soccer as a kid and was quite terrible at it. Getting a trophy for showing up just made me feel slightly awkward; ultimately, it ended up giving me a healthy contempt for systems that rewarded such mediocrity.
I experienced a lot of that, but in retrospect my parents managed it pretty well by rewarding hard work. If I got a trophy for a bad sports season, they gave me the option to throw it out. I always did. When I was little, I earned an allowance by doing chores and yardwork. When I was in high school, I was expected to work in the yard if I didn't have a weekend job, so I was always working, but only sometimes getting paid. I was given cash rewards for quarterly grades through high school, but a B paid so much less than an A that it was more of an insult.
I came out the other end a little backwards: I dislike getting awards, and I feel uncomfortable if someone tells me I did a good job.
In the end, child development always comes down to parenting. If the child's environment isn't pushing them hard enough, they can do something about it
Interestingly, we're accused of not wanting to pay our dues and and the same time expecting to be rewarded for merely (but more importantly, being judged on) quantity, not quality. Seems like an interesting juxtaposition if you ask me. (I recognise this sort of thinking is pretty indicative of an arrogant 'millenial' ;)
I've also read that the way to handle a generation of gamers is to humor them with clearly defined goals, regular feedback, and involvement in decision making. Again this seems universal rather than an exasperating personality unique to kids. Was there a recent generation that happily served as unthinking, unfeeling, unquestioning drones?
This is all a bit hard for this millennial to swallow. Frankly these analyses feel like another case of analysts telling their clients what they want to hear rather than offering any new insight. [1]
I would assume yes, especially if there is an academic component to the field, and it's based on a social science (ie theories are unprovable). PhD's design the crap out of things, and then pass it on for implementation, during which, half their design assumptions will prove wrong.
The only example I have is esoteric: library science. others? Journalism?
When I grew up as a kid in the 1950s, there was a huge emphasis on making sure that kids, unlike their parents and grandparents who had grown up on farms or had come to America as poor immigrants or had endured the privations of the Great Depression or the horrors of watching millions die and suffer in WWII, would get the very best education and all the modern conveniences.
Even more important, theories about child-rearing changed dramatically in America from about 1950 on. Dr. Benjamin Spock (http://www.answers.com/topic/benjamin-spock) became wildly popular with his ideas promoting "permissive" child-rearing and eschewing discipline. This meant treating kids like little adults, seeking their consent, and never using a switch on them when they misbehaved. Everybody was to cater to "little Johnny." Of course, the kids grew up feeling they were supposed to be catered to, and, voila, you have the hippie generation - the "me" generation, as in "it's all about me."
There is no doubt that the Spock babies marked a turning point in kids having strong entitlement expectations and this has led to such things as heavy emphasis on self-esteem (which the WWII generation would have laughed at), grade inflation ("all A's"), denigration of honors programs or anything else that makes some feel less recognized than others, indiscriminate showering of trophies on kids for mere participation, and the like.
Of course, every generation eventually grows up and matures through life experiences. But the broad change in American culture since the 1950s is unmistakable and has carried through to this day in a form that earlier generations had never known.
One thing that we think we've learned in the last 50 years: praise works better than threats as a motivator. Perhaps that is what these complaining old gruffs are seeing.
Academia is about the only place left where you can still give criticism that makes people cry and keep your job.
Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen (40 years ago).
Most intelligent people will realize that praise granted indiscriminately is not really praise at all. If everyone gets an A, then the A itself becomes average (at least, in an intellectual sense).
While it's possible that people are so deluded as to believe the in the brilliance of a performance demonstrably within such an average (relative to their classmates, teammates, or whatever), I have not seen this within my peers (who are, in fact, millennials).
In other words, individual egos are not expanded in light of receiving an A in something akin to the cliched "basket weaving." At most, people feel good about themselves for manipulating the system to their advantage --- that is, finding the course of "least resistance" in the first place. Such an "easy A" is only useful as an external signal of "I'm smart" to employers or grad schools; it is not typically used as a proxy for the quality of one's inherent intellect.
The English curriculum at public schools deemphasizes writing composition to focus on reading scores, which are tied directly to funding. As a result, many students receive very little instructions on how to organize an argument on paper, and generally aren't exposed to well-written essays until their freshman year of college.
These two factors create a brew of ignorance that makes students oblivious to college writing standards. This is made worse by the fact that larger colleges have their mandatory writing comp classes filled to the brim with all the grading done by over-worked TA's who, due to volume, cannot give detailed feedback on each paper.
You need to be careful about the praising for trying bit, especially as they get older:
"Actually, they were being treated like children but they had been their whole lives and didn't know the difference.
"Treating like an adult: You're fucking up. Here's how to fix it. Now fix it.
"Treating like a child: You're trying really hard! Good job! It's not the result that matters, it's just that you try!
"(That's actually a functional way to deal with children up to a point. In most cases they can't do a real job. But when they get to the point they can, when they're ready to learn to be adults with adult responsibilities, "it's a good try" should never cut it.)"
If it's any consolation, prescriptive grammarians have always been wrong. :)
I hope this guy at least gets paid to to run generational awareness workshops for people to ignore over sandwiches and doesn't run through this tired rigamarole for free.
Last I checked, most young people's parents don't grade their kids' essays. They may edit them, but that doesn't directly result in the kid saying to her professor the next year, "But I always got A's before!" There was a still a teacher supposedly being a gatekeeper between the paper and the grade.
From the comments: "There are two types of Millenials - whiners and fighters."
I dunno, but that sounds like HUMANITY in general, to me.