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| Protesters at Amherst College. (Twitter via Daily Beast) |
On Thursday, November 12, Amherst College in Amherst,
Massachusetts joined the list of institutions that have suffered student
protests. According
to MassLive, the protest “was sparked by the shared experiences of students
who felt discriminated against on campus ..., as well as recent incidents on
campus, like the papering-over of ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters with
anti-abortion messaging that said ‘All Lives Matter.’”
“The turning point and why it got so large is that multiple students of all sorts of background recognized a feeling of feeling marginalized, or feeling invisible or feeling isolated in some important way,” [organizer Mercedes] MacAlpine said. “It really took off just being to come together and talk about those experiences.”
What began as a sympathetic sit-in strike in support of the
protests at Yale and the
University of Missouri took an uglier turn when signs appeared claiming
that freedom of speech was the “real victim” at Mizzou. In a response freighted
with irony, the protesters demanded that Amherst president Biddy Martin issue a
statement saying that Amherst would not tolerate the actions of the students
behind the “All Lives Matter” stickers and the “Free Speech” posters, and that
said students could be punished and re-educated in “racial and cultural
competency”.
Devin Foley, in
a post on Intellectual Takeout, asks what’s the matter with kids these
days. “At the same time some students are flexing their political muscles (with
the help of some professors) at the University of Missouri, Yale, and other
schools demanding
‘safe space’, we’re treated to an increasing number of stories about the lack
of resilience and overall fragility of many college students.”
This juxtaposition of intolerance and delicacy isn’t as
oddly self-contradictory as it appears on the surface. The need for “safe
spaces” is individual, while the strong-arm tactics belong to the group:
“safety in numbers”, as the saying goes. However, it’s clear more is happening
on our campuses than an increase in racial tensions and student political
activism. The safety the protesters seek is far less from physical assault than
it is from fear itself: more and more students are demanding that colleges rescue
them from everything that causes them the least anxiety or unhappiness, from
racism and sexism to bad break-ups and failing grades.
Leftist politics has found its home in the children of
helicopter parents.
Helicopter Parents
According
to Kate Bayless in Parents.com, “helicopter parenting” was first coined in
1969 by Dr.
Haim G. Ginott in Between Parent &
Teenager, who reported teens
saying their parents would “hover over them like helicopters”. Psychologist Dr.
Carolyn Daitsch says helicopter parents “typically take too much responsibility
for their children’s experiences and, specifically, their successes or failures.”
Another psychologist, Dr. Ann Dunnewold, who calls it “overparenting”, explains
further, “It means being involved in a child’s life in a way that is
overcontrolling, overprotecting, and overperfecting, in a way that is in excess
of responsible parenting.”
Helicopter parents hover because they worry too much about
how negative experiences will damage their children’s future happiness; and, in
worrying too much about those experiences, transmit their fears to their
children. Sometimes having felt unloved, neglected, or ignored as children
themselves, they overcompensate by smothering their children with attention and
affirmation. They often harbor an illusion that, to be ideal, a child’s life must be idyllic
— s/he must never know anything but love, support, comfort, success, and
happiness. They sometimes envision a specific outcome — entry into a particular
school (e.g., Harvard or West Point), a career in a particular field (e.g.,
medicine, professional football) — and try to micromanage the child’s life in
such a way that nothing threatens to derail that outcome.
Above all, helicopter
parents never let children take risks, real or notional, large or small,
without adult supervision. If they can’t hover in person, they delegate
others, especially teachers, to hover for them. To develop empathy and
self-reliance, children need “alone time”,
time away from adults and their interference. By contrast, not only do
helicopter parents not allow their children “alone time”, they sometimes choose
their children’s friends and games themselves.
Fragile Snowflakes and Manipulative Narcissists
The results? Decreased confidence and self-esteem.
Undeveloped coping skills. Increased anxiety. Increased sense of entitlement.
Undeveloped life skills. By trying to create and sustain an idyllic childhood,
helicopter parents produce, in Foley’s words, “fragile snowflakes and
manipulative narcissists”.
Rates of anxiety and depression among American college students have soared in the last decade, and many more students than in the past come to campus already on medication for such illnesses [emphasis mine.—ASL]. The number of students with suicidal thoughts has risen as well. Some are dealing with serious issues, such as psychosis, which typically presents itself in young adulthood, just when students are going off to college. Many others, though, are struggling with what campus counselors say are the usual stresses of college life: bad grades, breakups, being on their own for the first time. And they are putting a strain on counseling centers.
Peter Gray, Ph.D., writes
in his Psychology Today blog
“Learning Matters”:
In previous posts ..., I have described the dramatic decline, over the past few decades, in children’s opportunities to play, explore, and pursue their own interests away from adults. Among the consequences … are well-documented increases in anxiety and depression, and decreases in the sense of control of their own lives. We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to learn how to solve their own problems. They have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realize they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention. [Bold font mine.—ASL] So now, here’s what we have: Young people, 18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it.
The World is Not a “Safe Space”
Just over six months ago, the New York Times published Judith Shulevitz’s provocative article “In
College and Hiding From Scary Ideas”, which suggested that “safe spaces” and
trigger warnings “infantilize” college students. But the truth is that many
arrive already infantilized by their parents, who often don’t understand that
the things they do to give their kids the “perfect childhood” also retard their
emotional development and (ironically) diminish the happiness the parents are
trying to insure.
The millennials’
demand for “safe spaces” comes not just from fear but also from the conviction
that they’re entitled to a life without fear — fear of being hated, fear of
failing, fear of opposition, fear of uncertainty, fear of making the wrong
decision, fear of having their plans (or their parents’ plans) for their life
disrupted, fear of risk. However, no such entitlement exists. As the Paris bombings so forcefully remind us, the world is not a “safe space” … not
now; not until Christ makes all things new.
Risk is part of life: risk of being hurt, risk of failing,
risk of being rejected, risk of having your aspirations thwarted, risk of
losing everything you have or love. Once the “Special Snowflakes” — Rod
Dreher’s term — leave their campuses, they’ll still have to face the same
fears in a real world that offers no safety nets … a world which won’t give
them automatic love, automatic inclusion, automatic credence, or automatic
success; a world which won’t feel obligated to give a rat’s tuchas about them; a
world which will feel only contempt for their whinging and effing: “Suck it up,
buttercup.”
Lest someone accuse me of confusing two separate issues,
cultural sensitivity versus emotional fragility, I must insist that the issues
are inextricably intertwined. If it’s true that some students are using freedom
of speech as a pretext to be culturally offensive, it’s just as true that others
are using the snowflakes’ fragility as a pretext to shut down criticism of
their opinions. The students’ advocacy is stridently intolerant, despite their
mantra of inclusivity, because they lack the self-assurance and empathy which
make real tolerance possible. They only tolerate what doesn’t threaten their
own comfort, while they’re largely unconscious or dismissive of the discomfort
they cause others; because their Weltschauungen
are entirely self-referential, they see no inconsistency or irony in their rhetoric.
“Helicopter Institutions”
My point isn’t that colleges can’t protect students from everything they fear (although it’s
true), but rather that they shouldn’t be expected to. By the time students arrive at their first dorm room, they should
already possess the internal resources they need to survive and succeed away
from adult supervision — courage, resilience, self-reliance, and
self-discipline. Certainly, colleges should provide reasonable protection
against physical assault, as well as some reasonable mental-health assistance.
They shouldn’t be expected, however, to function as “helicopter institutions”,
as delegates and substitutes for overprotective parents.
Moreover, college is supposed to be a place where
intellectual combat takes place, where little is taken for granted and little
is beyond question, where students develop cognitive muscle by the constant
thrust-and-parry of argument. College is supposed to be a place where Truth is
aggressively sought, not dictated by an Authority Figure or a central committee.
Even in a Catholic institution, which seeks among other things to build
students up in the Faith (in theory, at least), their faith is supposed to be strengthened
not by rote repetition but by questioning and defending. The “delicate snowflakes” are like boxers who want to throw punches but are scared of being
hit.
Aleister
from ProgressivesToday.com calls the Amherst students “totalitarian thugs”,
and complains, “We’ve actually come to a point where students on an American
college campus are protesting free speech. It’s like we’re suddenly in Mao’s
China.” Discounting the hyperbole, the fact remains that the “safe” college
environment the students want — one free from all risk of fear or unhappiness —
is not only unrealistic but unhealthy, and would undermine if not defeat the
purpose of college. Students should go to college to learn how to think, not what to
think.
Moreover, the students’ political convictions, whether ultimately true or false, aren’t
entitled to exemption from question or challenge. Sympathy for their fears
isn’t the issue; their long-term emotional health is. Contra Eric Posner, colleges and
high schools which act as “helicopter institutions”, under pressure from
helicopter parents and their children, don’t “[advance] the autonomy of
students” so much as they enable the fragile snowflakes’ helplessness and the
manipulative narcissists’ pathology. Protect students from physical harassment,
by all means; but don’t try to protect them from “scary ideas”.
Summary
Again, I’m making no argument against the truth-claims of
the protesters’ sociopolitical beliefs; that they are, in many cases, on
emotionally shaky ground doesn’t prove that they’re wrong, whether in whole or
in part. Rather, I submit that “safe spaces” are no substitute for emotional
therapy, that at best they merely kick the can down the road. I submit that
colleges aren’t where emotional maturation should start but where it should
receive its finishing touches.
College and university administrators and trustees,
unfortunately, aren’t noted for their moral courage. Over the last fifty years,
they’ve shown a marked tendency to cave in to student and adult pressure; they
fear lawsuits and declining tuition income more than they do the ruin of the
value of a traditional college education.
Eventually, the market may force a solution, as more
resilient and self-reliant students abandon colleges and universities dominated
by the “Special Snowflakes” for more conservative, less indulgent institutions
or nontraditional venues. Unfortunately, this means that many of the premier
colleges from which our cultural leaders are largely drawn, such as Yale, Amherst,
and Mizzou, will be forced to become “helicopter institutions” — little more
than combination nursemaids and diploma mills for a segment of our youth that
wants the privileges of adulthood without the risks or the responsibilities.
And all of us will suffer for it.
