who we end up with

North Americans spend eighteen to twenty-four years raising children. But what if, when we’re done, that’s often what we end up with? You know...children. Adult children to be sure, but adults who are painfully under-prepared for the real world.

    Most of us nurturers feel predictably unhappy that things aren’t working out the way we hoped. We’ve come to believe that navigating the real world requires skilled, mature adults. And, God help us, we look around and that’s not who we’re raising.

    And so we’re sad, a lot of us. We hate to see kids get off on the wrong foot. They are after all our children, one way or another.

    The question is: What are we doing about it?

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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Maybe the Kids are Alright

Most kids seem to be doing fine. They’re not in jail nor do they seem likely to go there. They get to school or work most days.

They don’t carry concealed weapons, traffic in drugs, or consort with Russian spies. They seem to be turning out OK. 

    Perhaps it’s benign neglect: Despite ourselves, we managed to not screw them up. Maybe its Providence, which was very popular with the founding fathers and mothers and I see no reason we can’t invoke it now. 

    And maybe, somehow, we didn’t do such a bad job on the whole. Maybe the kids are alright.

    Except that some of them don’t seem alright, at all…some days it seems like most aren’t doing so well.

    Generation X, Y, Z, and whatever’s next, are clichés constructed on something observable. That observable something includes sometimes disturbing levels of aimlessness, sadness, anger, fear, occasional violence, and hopelessness. Many of our children reach adulthood with a serious life skills deficit. They enter their adult years emotionally impotent, unable to cope with pressure, socially awkward, scholastically under-prepared, spiritually undernourished. This produces considerable second-guessing among those who think of themselves as somehow responsible for the outcome.

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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Learning to Collaborate

    The collaborator—who is also an explorer by the way—begins with questions designed to find out what the child knows. One of the great things about collaborating is it’s valuable in both positive experiences and negative—learning—experiences. Kids can learn to repeat positive experiences and avoid negative ones. The collaboration is virtually the same.

    There are three Big Questions for collaborators:

What? Why? How?

What do you think happened? This is not a technique, it’s an honest inquiry, so don’t get hung up on the wording. What do you think happened? or Tell me about it. or What stands out for you from that experience? are all fine variations on the theme. Whatever words you use you’re inviting your child (or student, or employee) to put a name on her experience. The subject might be a disagreement or a book, a film or a lecture or a close call on the highway. Doesn’t matter. What matters is hearing what the kid thinks she experienced.

Why do you think it happened? Once he’s identified what seems to have happened, your youngster is ready to assign meaning to the experience. The essential question is Why, out of all the possible outcomes, do you think this one occurred? Why do you think you identified more closely with that character in the book than with the others? Why do you think you ran out of money too quickly? The answer tells the collaborator and the child something neither may have known before the question was posed. Why do you think you misunderstood your sister? invites a consideration of why he heard something other than what she said. Why do you think you overestimated the amount of gas in the tank? calls for an assessment of decision-making skills and wishful thinking...all valuable processes. 

How do you think you could repeat this success (or avoid this failure)? This is the money question. If a child can answer this question, the learning cycle is complete because now she can take purposeful action to repeat success or avoid failure. She may or may not be emotionally prepared to take the action. But whether she does or doesn’t the collaborator will have a chance to repeat the same process next time, celebrating success or commiserating with failure. In either case, if the kid can answer the What? Why? and How? questions she’s a step closer to intelligent independence.

    Unlike fixing, the beauty of collaborating is you don’t have to do it forever. Eventually, you can help your child see what you’ve been doing (and how and why you do it). Then, in most situations, she can take over the process herself.

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Every Little Thing

Speaking of maladaptive responses to children and adolescents in distress, let’s think for a moment about Danger Signs listicles like this one:

10 Things Every Parent Should Watch Out For

1. New, different, friends

2. Changes in eating or sleeping patterns

3. Fatigue

4. Weight gain or loss

5. Lower achievement in school

6. Disinterest in favorite activities

7. Changes in dress style

8. Changes in musical taste

9. Avoiding eye contact

10. Spending large amounts of time alone behind closed doors[1]

Sorry, but with the exception of radical weight gains or losses, and precipitous drops in school achievement, these changes are so common in adolescence as to be normal. Can such factors signal possible trouble? If they all show up in a cluster, cloaked in mystery…perhaps. But they might just as well hint at the discovery of skating or basketball or country music.

    Look, I’m as concerned about the country music problem as the next guy, but I’m sure gonna try to no panic if my kid comes home wearing Luke Bryan gear. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation. Like, “The dog ate my Arcade Fire shirt!” If it’s obscene, we’ll talk, but I’ll be danged if I’m gonna start a world war over a stupid T-shirt, no matter how stupid I think the shirt is.

    Of course I’m sad when parents miss clear signs of trouble. I know parents who wish to God they’d paid attention to clouds gathering before the storm. I also know parents who drove their children into the cold by seeking to control every little thing.

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[1] Seriously, if this listicle shows up as if it were a real thing, I’m pretty sure my head will explode.

they turn all adult on us

All this about Generations X, Y, and Z is, of course, a cliché no more accurate than “The Me Decade” back in the day.

All this about Generations X, Y, and Z is, of course, a cliché no more accurate than “The Me Decade” back in the day. Remember The Me Decade? It started as an entertaining, insightful essay on postwar America. The popular press loved it, American preachers jumped on it and, after a few months, The Me Decade was turned into The Me Generation—by which they meant people like me. They meant Baby Boomers. They said we were self-centered and unreliable. They said we were sex-obsessed, drug-addled and undisciplined. All we cared about, they said, was feeling good. Which made our mothers blink back tears and our fathers shake their heads and wonder how it all went so wrong.

    The preachers and the press were partly right about Boomers. And partly wrong. America was, and is, a cultural soup. We stew on a back burner, every generation adding unique flavors to the blend. Generalizations seldom reflect anybody’s reality. Some Boomers went to Vietnam; some to Canada. Most stayed put. Some smoked dope, a few were Jesus Freaks, a lot went to college, most went to work. Boomers did not end civilization—though a few in government took a good crack at it before finally aging out. Mostly, Boomers blended into the soup; just like everyone. 

    I expect the generations following mine will do more or less the same. Most of our children are, or soon will be competent, capable, productive, reasonably fun human beings. Kids have a way of becoming that for the most part. Eventually, almost all of them end up turning all adult on us. Whether we raise them that way or not, they take their place in what old folks like to call the real world. Still, I can’t help noticing that a sizable number of our offspring are not much interested in that real world. “Real to whom?” they wonder.

from Raising Adults by Jim Hancock

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Canary in a Coal Mine

Children are often the first to succumb to toxic cultural conditions. Look around, it’s not hard to see that for some, the song is over before it’s barely begun.

    In this connection, much has been made of adolescent suicide, as should be. Confirmed reporting of data on causes of death lags well behind real time. We know that, in 2014:

425 10-14-year-olds died by suicide

1,837 15-19-year-olds died by suicide

3,253 20-24-year-olds died by suicide

Including 20-24-year-olds is an artifact of the first wave of reporting in which, other than 10-14-year-olds, the numbers are often released in 10-year groupings—15-24-year-olds, 25-34-year-olds, and so on. A lot of us are accustomed to thinking of teen suicide differently than young adult suicide, much as we’re accustomed to think differently about 24-year-olds and 15-year-olds giving birth. But maybe it’s useful to consider the lives of people in the five years after their teens. Most of us don't think typical 24-year-olds have much in common with typical 15-year-olds, but many 24-year-olds are still within reach of help from people they knew and trusted when they were 15 (as well as people they might have trusted at 15, had they known them).

    In any event, in 2014, the rate of suicides spiked from about nine per 100,000 15-19-year-olds to about 14 per 100,000 20-24-year-olds. That spike is typical of recent years. For people endeavoring to raise adults, this is sad news.

    The vulnerability of American children and adolescents is measured in more ways than suicide. For example, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducts longterm Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance that does more or less what it sounds like: The YRBS studies risky behavior in America’s student population. These indicators suggest that, in general, things are not as good as we wish, and not bad as we fear.

    Here’s a sampling from the High School Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance 2015 Results:

    If you’ve been told things are getting worse all the time, the data show that is not true. Much of the conduct measured in the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance is trending less risky compared to the peak between 1991 and 2015. Any-is-too-many, yes…but let’s give credit where credit is due. In many ways, the current crop of high schoolers are doing better than, or about as well as, the generation before them at the same age.

    Having said that, we return to the any-is-too-many theme. Kids in trouble are in as much trouble as kids in trouble ever were. Their families suffer the same sort of distress all distressed families always suffer.

    When teenagers take risks in reaction to real life stress—self-medicating against pain, for instance, or non-suicidal self harm to deflect pain—they are trying to do what people have always tried to do. They are trying to cope.

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Silence in the Kitchen

Kids have an amazing capacity to learn new tricks. They don’t allow themselves to get very cold or hungry or lost more than once without pretty good reasons. 

    One very good reason, of course, is to get under the skin of a parent who is a hijacker.

    When, on frosty mornings, I see kids on their way to school without their jackets, I imagine the sort of conversations that occurred on their way out the door. For example…. 

Interior. Morning. Kitchen. An eleven year old boy runs a piece of bread around the rim of a jelly jar and chews thoughtfully, having decided toast is too much trouble. 

From another room we hear an adult voice: Are you wearing your jacket?

There is silence in the kitchen. The adult speaks louder: Are you WEARING your JACKET!

The boy speaks, his mouth full of bread: Snot Cold!

Adult: What? I said, are you wearing your jacket?

Silence in the kitchen. After a moment the adult hollers: ANSWER ME!

The boy glances up at the clock. Indeed, he is not cold at this moment. He is, however, tired of being yelled at from another room—though he is not about to venture from the relative safety of the kitchen, at least not voluntarily, to find out what the hollering is about. In an instant the boy decides he will placate the one in the other room but, for reasons he hardly understands, he will not satisfy her. His voice rises with the patronizing tone he will use again some fifty years in the future to explain to his mother why she must eat her strained vegetables: Mom, it’s too hot to wear my jacket in here. Don’t worry about it.

With that, the boy dips his finger in the jelly, rubs it on another piece of bread which he folds neatly in half, walks past his jacket and out the door into the cold, clear day of his youth.

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