university

In my previous post, I suggested that perhaps college is no longer the best way to prepare our children for life and career, but while hypersexualized youth is a big problem, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to our young people’s cavalier attitude towards sex, there are a host of other problems that signify a real need for parents to sit up and pay attention, and find ways to reverse this trend.

Instead of college being the final springboard that will propel them to adulthood, our universities are becoming giant centers for babysitting whiny crybabies. Of course, psychological problems are not to be taken lightly or dismissed, and many are wounded, need medical care, and all the compassion that we as a community should provide. But it’s also clear that many things are now taken to extremes. As one Internet meme cheekily points out, “And one day for no particular reason we became offended by everything.”

There has to be a way to distinguish what will truly affect someone’s health and daily functioning, and what is simply part of life not being fair. A mature adult won’t see the latter as a stumbling block, but simply something to ignore or work through. Besides this, we also need to ask whether things are being censored to protect people from real harm, or to inhibit serious thought.

We know that the liberal arts are essential to education, and that the job of teachers is to liberate minds, not capture them. The combination of censorship plus indoctrination does not help students, and if all they’re doing is graduating from high school group-think to college group-think, then the whole purpose of education is defeated.

The Christian student who thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman truly believes that. The Jewish student who thinks Israel is a great country really believes that. And to my mind, stopping people from expressing things they truly believe is outrageous, an unspeakable offence against democracy, especially at a university, where ideas are meant to flow and crash and battle it out. – From Brendan O’Neill, Political Correctness is Killing Freedom of Speech

Even comedy on campus has taken a hit. The ability to relate, to laugh at oneself, to find humor in the absurd, to face the realities of life and not give in to despair — these are signs of maturity. Exposing young people to adult situations and problems, especially sex-related ones, coupled with the failure to teach them appropriate coping skills, is doing them more harm than good.

Overparenting or helicopter parenting seems to be a huge factor, but juxtapose that with the hypersexualization problem and the facts don’t quite add up. These kids are overparented AND YET hypersexualized?

My theory is that our current crop of college kids have been overparented in certain areas, and underparented in others, especially with regards to sex education. The Tax Foundation tells us that America has become a nation of dual-income working couples — the figures have hovered around 70% since the late ’80s. Since parents spend much of their days working, there is little time left for helping children navigate those tricky sexuality issues, so essential to their identity and well-being, especially around the pre-teen and teen years. Emotional connections in the home are necessary for those types of conversations to happen, and therefore not as easily achievable for parents with toxic work schedules. Instead, the overparenting is directed toward the measurable: schoolwork, grades, college plans.

Add to all that the perfectionism, materialism and commodification that afflict our society these days, the general view of education as product-not-process, and we end up with infantilized, risk-averse escapists who can’t handle what the world throws at them. While other factors — peers, the economy, personality, media exposure — play a role, our life/work decisions and how we parent our kids are areas we can work on to effect changes.

While homeschooling itself isn’t a solution for everyone, I’ve seen a few things that have worked in our family as well as others’:

Homeschoolers are often accused of micromanaging our children’s lives, and I’ll agree that it’s a reasonable view from someone on the outside looking in. But my observation is that if we homeschoolers do tend to micromanage anything, it’s not so much WHAT happens to our children as it is HOW they respond. Our conversations on parenting usually involve detailed advice on how to handle and correct attitudes and behavior: rudeness, impatience, and irritability, to name a few. Focusing on these things allows us to build character, and it is character that young people need so much of these days, and that will get them through life’s difficulties and challenges.

While we cannot protect our children from the pain or suffering that life inevitably brings, we can teach them, and model for them, that feeling overwhelmed, disappointed, sad, lonely, anxious, don’t have to be debilitating or permanent conditions. Our children need to develop autonomy not only materially, but emotionally as well. Planning and preparing well for college and life demands that we give this even more attention than we do courses or tuition.

More next time, including college cost, vocation, intellectual freedom, and college alternatives to consider.