Dear Parents Quit Comparing Generations

I read an excellent article by Rhonda Stephens on Huffington Post that brings up some great points about what this generation’s children lack in regards to development. For the most part, I think she nails the areas of growth our kids are being robbed of, such as problem-solving skills, independence, mental toughness, and delayed gratification. However, like many articles out there critiquing our generation of parents and calling us to action, Rhonda’s observations, like many others, makes what I believe is the mistake of comparing the older generation to the current generation in an attempt to highlight what we are missing. In most of these articles, what the author neglects to highlight is the cultural and societal backdrop that make up the environment that these parenting styles were developed in the first place. We place too much blame on the parents without accounting for societal impositions as well as the economic environment we are navigating.

Societal & Economic Impositions

After spending countless hours in marriage and family therapy with my clients and trying to intervene in a meaningful way to help support collapsing families, something dawned on me. I began to explore the structure of people’s lives. The weekly schedules, two parents having to work to support a household, jobs that take place in the age of the internet where there is no “off the clock,” and nothing is closed on Sundays and after five o’ o’clock on weekdays.

When I was growing up, some people were home during the day. Kids went out to play unsupervised, or so we thought. Neighbors, retirees working in the garden, we knew “Who are the people in your neighborhood.” Evenings after school, even with sports, seemed to last longer. There was time to play outside, eat dinner, do homework, watch some tv with the family, and shower. We weren’t cramming in homework until we reached junior high to prepare for high school. In places like the Chicago Public School System, they give you homework in elementary school to prepare for the junior high years. The societal impositions that we are navigating are not conducive to family relationships in the least.

I would add that the screen time issue many parents face is caused directly by the lack of time families have together in a stress-free and non-task focused space. Children are filling a void with screen time. When parents try to take it away and make the screen the issue, they miss the critical element of what the screen was providing. It was filling a relational void, that’s what all addictions are anyways. You have to be able to replace the void with human relationships because the need is the need. I’m not advocating for more screen time, but any intervention we apply needs to account for the underlying need, not just address the manifested surface level problem.

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What Are We Up Against?

I remember when my son was nine years old, and we had just moved to Chicago. We live in a great family neighborhood that is built around a high performing school. We had moved there in July and quickly attempted the “Go outside and play!” intervention. I was excited that we were living in a neighborhood that resembled mine growing up. On the first day that I gave him the command to go outside, he came back a few minutes later, telling us that no one was out playing.

We quickly sent him outside with a timer and told him he needed to ride his bike until he found someone to play with. I assumed they would be out there, and he was just too eager to get back to the video game. To no avail, he returned dejected by several failed attempts. I began to survey the neighborhood in disbelief only to find out that he was not lying. On a hot July day there were just no kids out playing.

As we became acclimated to the neighborhood and met more parents, we were quickly introduced to the “play date.” It was then that I realized we were living in the “play date” generation. Playdates, I believe, are fear-driven and completely parent-manipulated/refereed attempts to orchestrate our children’s social time. They prevent the children’s organic ability to free play, socialize, and learn. They were a means to developing the independence that Rhonda said was missing.

As dumb as I believe play dates are, I was unable to avoid the necessity. These “play dates” were a necessary adaptation to more significant societal system issues. I could apply my childhood to my parenting, and my kid could ride his bike alone, or I could get on board with the social adaptation that was taking place in this world. Something is going on, but it’s not merely lousy parenting.

Or take, for instance, a recent Facebook post where a parent asked, “At what age do you let your child walk to and from school alone?” Now I understand that there are neighborhoods out there were threats to life exist, and volunteers stand in the streets to ensure that kids pass through safely. However, my community might be the most storybook walkable neighborhood in the world. The school is no more than a 10-minute walk for anyone, and families pour out of the house every morning filling the streets. Because of the school-neighborhood bond, everyone knows everyone. I was alarmed that in this pristine setting, people were proclaiming that they would not let their child walk to school alone or with friends until they were 13 years old or 7th grade! It wasn’t just one weird parent either; it was multiple parents who chimed in.

Louis Cozolino, in his book, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains, discusses adaptations in the process of evolution. He states:

“While evolution is a process of adaptation, each adaptation leads to new challenges for which new adaptations need to arise. As most of us have experienced, things that seemed like a good idea initially can have unforeseen consequences and prove to be problematic down the road.”

People’s behavior, in this case, parenting style, is always an attempt to solve some internal problem or maintain a state of familiarity. The question and focus should be directed at the problem, not the behavior itself. To suggest that I parent in the ways that earlier generations parented is reckless. It promotes guilt and shame that somehow I am not living up to some greatness achieved in a previous generation.

So what is the problem?

The problem lies in the heart of social-emotional developmental needs. This area of our brain is where we experience the satisfaction and peace of life regardless of how much money we make or where we live. The social-emotional developmental needs of children does not change with the times. Children’s developmental needs remain consistent at a biological level for all humans and all generations.

Just because the world wants to operate a certain way, does not mean my children’s development needs will change accordingly. Instead, the world’s system will require adaptations in my parenting to meet those underlying developmental needs. Failure to do so leads to emotional and physical distress that continues into adulthood. Thus we have the playdate, after school programs, and other adaptations designed to meet a developmental need. It does not appear to be working, and we are at the precipice of needing new adjustments if we are going to survive. New adaptations are necessary because, after all, my goal is to raise healthy adults, not just have “Good kids.”

We are a species that is meant to live in and develop in community. Renowned child development and trauma expert Bruce Perry shows us that we do not have to go that far back in time to see this “tribe” dissolve and be fairly non-existent. Family size in 1850 was six people, and today is fewer than three on average. We are less trusting of our neighbors and have fewer intimate connections than at any time in history. Children raised early last century were provided a 4:1 adult to child ratio of caregivers, which included aunts, uncles, grandparents, and older siblings. Today the ratio is reversed, and the neuro-relational needs of our children are suffering (See Book Born For Love). We are spread out from our family support; we work longs hours; children spend too many hours in school and daycare all because of the system we are adapting to for survival. Yes, it’s economics, yes, its greed, and mostly yes, it’s fear-driven.

Let’s Not Accept the Defeat of Disconnection

So what is the antidote for this fear? The answer has never changed throughout history. The answer is community! Relational bonds have long been the source of contentment and peace in our lives. We are distressed when we are disconnected, and we are disconnected when we seek material things that we think we need at the expense of relational development. As parents, it is our job to go out of our way to create bonds with other parents and develop tribes of people we can count on to help raise our children, support our marriages, and be there for us as we should be there for them. In this type of community, we have survival, we have contentment, and in this type of society, we develop healthy children.

So please stop comparing generations. We know we are screwing up, but we do not stop. We are coping and need to start recognizing what we are dealing with, so we can begin to thrive. Recognize that you are feeling sorry for your children and helpless at the same time. Recognize feeling sorry for them while simultaneously being caught up on your own hamster wheel of anxiety-driven living is what’s behind your parenting style. If we can raise our awareness of how we are just “going along” with the current of a destructive culture and start to prioritize relationships above all else, we might have a chance.

Prioritize Relationships & Stop Dwelling on the Good Ole Days

What we can not afford to do is make excuses and say, “Well that’s just how it is.” We can all put down our cell phones more, draw boundaries around work as best as we can, put limits on the kid’s screen time, and ensure that there is some quality time every day in relationally being together. Also, let’s not complicate things. Put down your parenting intervention books, stop looking for a diagnosis to describe what’s wrong with your child, and lastly, put down your guard and start developing relationships.

Plug into a church or with families from your child’s school to create the social support you need. Set out to establish relationships that truly target our innate need for connection, and then possibly by being engaged in an inclusive and supportive community, you can be part of the culture change we so desperately need. If we focus on these underlying needs, we will help eliminate the problem, and our children and grandchildren can get some of those things that Rhonda spells out for us. It’s imperative that we do these things intentionally.

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Previously published on Medium.com.

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