A
year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services
to join other faculty and administrators, at the university I’m
associated with, for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience
among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls
to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students
are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional
crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent
examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her
roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought
counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus
apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and
set a mousetrap for them.
Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has
become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had
grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the
subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their
offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B,
as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the
world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame
them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in
telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would
distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased
tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason
to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do
with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to
which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is
college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate
students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the
second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown,
or, who knows, maybe even suicide?
Two weeks ago, the head of Counseling (who has now moved up to
another position in the University) sent us all a follow-up email,
announcing a new set of meetings. His email included this sobering
paragraph: “I have done a considerable amount of reading and
research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college
students. Our students are no different from what is being reported
across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health
problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many
young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether
we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their
teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-to-day
basis. The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission
of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal
development of students.”
He also sent us a summary of themes that emerged in the series of meetings, which included the following bullets:
• Less resilient and needy students have shaped the landscape
for faculty in that they are expected to do more handholding, lower
their academic standards, and not challenge students too much.
• There is a sense of helplessness among the faculty. Many
faculty members expressed their frustration with the current situation.
There were few ideas about what we could do as an institution to address
the issue.
• Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need
to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as
catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more
important than learning and autonomous development.
• Faculty, particularly young faculty members, feel pressured to
accede to student wishes lest they get low teacher ratings from their
students. Students email about trivial things and expect prompt replies.
• Failure and struggle need to be normalized. Students are very
uncomfortable in not being right. They want to re-do papers to undo
their earlier mistakes. We have to normalize being wrong and learning
from one’s errors.
• Faculty members, individually and as a group, are conflicted about how much “handholding” they should be doing.
• Growth is achieved by striking the right balance between
support and challenge. We need to reset the balance point. We have
become a “helicopter institution.”
Reinforcing the claim that this is a nationwide problem, the Chronicle of Higher Education, three weeks ago (Aug. 31, 2015), carried an article by Robin Wilson entitled “An Epidemic of Anguish: Overwhelmed by Demand for Mental-Health Care, Colleges Face Conflicts in Choosing How to Respond.” Colleges
and universities have traditionally been centers for higher academic
education, where the expectation is that the students are adults,
capable of taking care of their own everyday life problems.
Increasingly, students and their parents are asking the personnel at
such institutions to be substitute parents. There is also the
ever-present threat and reality of lawsuits. When a suicide occurs, or a
serious mental breakdown occurs, the institution is often held
responsible.
On the basis of her interviews with heads of counseling offices at various colleges and universities, Wilson wrote: “Families
often expect campuses to provide immediate, sophisticated, and
sustained mental-health care. After all, most parents are still
adjusting to the idea that their children no longer come home every
night, and many want colleges to keep an eye on their kids, just as they
did. Students, too, want colleges to give them the help they need, when
they need it. And they need a lot. 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. 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.”
In previous posts (for example, here and here),
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, I have argued, 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. 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.
Dan Jones, past president of the Association for University and
College Counseling Center Directors, seems to agree with this
assessment. In an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education
article, he said: “[Students] haven’t developed skills in how to
soothe themselves, because their parents have solved all their problems
and removed the obstacles. They don’t seem to have as much grit as
previous generations.”
In my next essay in this series I’ll examine the research evidence suggesting that so-called “helicopter parenting”
really is at the core of the problem. But I don’t blame parents, or
certainly not just parents. Parents are in some ways victims of larger
forces in the society—victims of the continuous exhortations from
“experts” about the dangers of letting kids be, victims of the increased
power of the school system and the schooling mentality that says kids
develop best when carefully guided and supervised by adults, and victims
of increased legal and social sanctions for allowing kids into public
spaces without adult accompaniment. We have become, unfortunately, a
“helicopter society.”
If we want to prepare our kids for college—or for anything else in
life!—we have to counter all these social forces. We have to give our
children the freedom, which children have always enjoyed in the past, to
get away from adults so they can practice being adults, that is,
practice taking responsibility for themselves.
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And now, what do you think? Have you witnessed in any way the kinds
of changes in young adults that are described here and that seem to be
plaguing colleges and universities? How have you, as a parent,
negotiated the line between protecting your children and giving them the
freedom they need for psychological growth? Do you have any suggestions
to college counselors and professors about how to deal with these
problems they are struggling with?
From :
Peter Gray
Freedom to Learn
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