Week 8 - The Search for Identity, Meaning and Self

      Though this week had a bit of a confusing schedule and our materials got a little mixed up, it was intriguing to think about the price of affluence. The consequences of having everything seldom crosses my mind because I am more often surrounded by the difficulties and issues brought on by poverty. I am still skeptical of the equal comparison between the issues placed on children coming out of both situations, especially when it is suggested that the wealthy one's may have more, because they are not exposed to the crime, violence, racial stigmas, health problems and loss that many children coming out of poverty have had to live with their entire lives.
      Despite this clarification, I can sympathize and understand the difficulties that wealthy children may face in adulthood when they realize that their lack of resiliency and self-awareness may come back to bite them. In my group discussion today we answered the questions from our reading "The Price of Privilege", which inquired why offspring of wealthy parents were coming in with such intense feelings of confusion and emptiness. We came up with two reasons, the first was that their lives were always so micromanaged as children that they were not given confidence in their own abilities to independently lead a fulfilling life. The second and possibly more contributing factor is that their lives were softened and made so easy that they were not given sufficient experience in feeling pain, sorrow, disappointment, and desperation. Though uncomfortable, these are important emotions to experience during adolescence when you have financial and emotional support from family. If parents never allow their children to make 'safe' mistakes, maybe even some dangerous one's, or fail at something that doesn't have life consequences, as adults they are bound to flounder at the first difficulty they face.
      Naturally I thought of my own experiences in adolescence while conversing on the subject and have come to understand why my mother encouraged advised but independent decision making and 'safe' mistakes. I have come to understand a lot of the actions I once questioned of my parents, a sort of redefinition of our relationships that we also discussed in class today. Coming to terms with the fact that your parents are individuals living lives separate than the one they've built with their children, having lived it before we were born and after and further understanding why they did certain things you couldn't believe is an important part of becoming an adult before becoming a parent yourself.
     What I find interesting when comparing impoverished and wealthy populations is the behavior and ways in which the youth choose to act out and why. Youth coming from poverty tend to be more outwardly rebellious and aggressive while wealthy patients hold their suffering internally and arguably more destructively. One population is controlled and is held with high expectations while the other has the expectation to act out. And the more self-destructive is more socially acceptable. It's all very backward.

In class today we discussed a topic that I have not been able to stop thinking about, something that has given me an insight into the faults of our culture like I've never had before: the problem with too many options. The ability to create our own destiny and path is one of our biggest sources of pride in the United States and has naturally been something I've always admired. I can't say I ever thought about the pressure and stress having so many options and so little cultural direction can put on all of us, but especially adolescents. Being currently in the stage of my life where I am being challenged to create the most "unique, creative and rewarding" path I can conjure, I can attest to the pressure I feel.

This realization has given me a new found respect for cultures who give their youth only a few options of what to do with their life and demonstrate the entire process by living it. We have a strong cultural belief that it is selfish and conservative for cultures and families to continue in their 'family business' and to expect their offspring to continue in the same professions as their parents, but when a young adult doesn't have to create a future life from millions of piece, how much extra time does he or she have to preoccupy themselves with pleasure and relaxation?

You gave an excellent example in class today emphasizing the ridiculous array of options we have to choose between on an everyday basis. Using the example of Crest toothpaste, you perfectly highlighted the trivial choices we are nurtured to make every day between where to by the toothpaste for the cheapest price that only cause unnecessary stress in the name of a competitive economy. The most recent example I have of purchasing insecurity was while trying to purchase a knife last week. i believed that if I just kept looking, just spent a little more time, that I would find something better and for cheaper. It was exhausting. I finally just chose one, accepting the fact that there was surely something better out there, but that it wasn't worth the search.

We also talked about the stress caused by the numerous activities we are demanded to focus on as teenagers if we hope to have any chance in the competitive college application process. To think of the stress I and my peers had and still have over whether or not we were doing enough extra curricular activities to reach our goals,  I question the morality of it but know there is little I can do to protest if I am going to reach the goals I have set for myself in this society.

Compared to Italy, where teens are expected to study their entire five years of high school in order to pass a test that will determine if and where they will continue into higher education, our expectations jut seem confusing. Before today's class I thought societies like Japan's and Italy's where students had only one high stakes test to decide their futures was immoral and only weighed in favor of certain types of learners gave many a huge disadvantage and that that was the worst kind of schooling system. But now I challenge our practice of giving everyone an equal opportunity to prove themselves through creating their own path to success, not because it isn't ideal and more 'fair' but because it may cause more harm than we're led to believe.

With a country that builds its strength by striving for the 'ideal' and the 'perfect life', we are raised to believe that happiness will come with achieving these expectations. This would be all fine and dandy if we were given the appropriate tools and support to guide us to this goal instead of just throwing us in at the age of 16 and telling us it's time to "figure it out!" or "you have the world at your feet!". Does no one realize how much pressure that puts on our youth? Expecting them to decide what to do and how to get there in a world of possibilities puts stress on them that we don't adequately acknowledge in our society. The indecisive -- always looking for something better and cheaper -- attitude we are taught by having so many options is what feeds our consumerist, discontent and unhappy culture. What are we to do when the fundamental building block of what is supposed to make America so perfect is what's causing us to become one of the most depressed and lonely countries in the world?

Socialization: Media, Peers, and Culture

I find the varying relationships between children and their parents both interesting and frustrating. I have been recently thinking that despite all variations of child behavior, we all turn out relatively similar in attitudes and manners as adults, a thought that has changed because of this week's reading. This week has brought more examples to my attention about corresponding behavior from childhood and into adulthood and made me realize that perhaps the differences are still there but less apparent and more internalized.

Different parenting philosophies inevitably have strong influence on who a person will become. The most easily defined categories that parents fall into - authoritarian, lax/permissive, and authoritative - all differ tremendously in the adults they produce. Authoritarian parents make non-negotiable rules, have high expectations of their children, but can still be very affectionate. Lax/permissive parents have low expectations of their children, who end up making the rules and possibly set their own boundaries as adolescents because their parents fail to do so. These parents are warm and communicative and want to be their children's "friends". Authoritative parenting is currently the most accepted and applauded style because it is appropriately strict, promotes open communication, allows for the child to make decisions and be independent while providing appropriate support and assistance. There are many more categories but for the sake of simplicity and the fact that the others mostly fall within this spectrum, I will leave them out. As noted in class, most parents don't fit into one sole category but likely fulfill each category several times a day, depending on the situation.

I find our tendency to build entitled children interesting, both how we do it and what becomes of them later in their lives. I never thought about the consequences of praising children constantly and telling them they're good at everything. Giving a trophy to every child on the soccer team may be appreciated in the moment, but will only cause them grief when they're older. We are raising children to assume this praise and appreciation will come with everything they do, who become lost without it. Children who never fail or hurt themselves will only have a harder time when they do so as adults because they won't have experience in picking themselves back up. Even more interesting is the fact that these parents are truly trying to do best by their children. We don't realize that so much effort can have a negative affect because we've always been told the opposite. Universally, parents want their children to be happy. Parents will do what they think will best bring life-long happiness to their children and in this case it is ensuring them that they are unique, special and quite possibly the best at every activity known. Parents are so adamantly trying their best to make their kids' lives full of stimulation and comfort, that they are ill-preparing them for the "real world". Life contains discomfort, often a lot of it, and we need to be able to make good decisions to independently avoid it and get ourselves out of it. Since their lives were always so full of fun and ease, as adults they are constantly expecting life to return to how it once was and when it doesn't, they feel lost and sad. Here comes in our cultural habit of always wanting to be happier than we are. Even if we are happy, there is always something that would make us more happy. This is the mentality held by most Americans and is what contributes to our heavy rates of depression and the non-fulfillment at the end of our lives, because there is always more to have.  We believe that we must always do more to become happy, never reflect and acknowledge all things good in our lives and realize how happy we already are.

Middle Childhood: Schools and Issues of Diversity, Building Resiliency

While remembering this week's material I kept returning to the article half our class read, "Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill". This article explains through interviews how common it is for students who feel pressured to succeed choose to take prescribed ADD and ADHD medications in order to exceed expectations of parents, teachers and colleges. Rates are higher at competitive private high schools and even more in higher grades, which have college applications and SATs looming over their promising futures.  Taking these pills gives the student the ability to hyper-focus on studying or tests so that they do better than they naturally would. Not only is this a dangerous habit; teenagers don't understand the severity of these pills that aren't any less addictive or harmful than other pharmaceuticals, but it is a habit that is only digging them deeper into a stressful and overstimulating future.
While continuing to supersede the individual's stress and intellectual limitations in high school and college, the body and mind are not practicing the skills necessary to handle the high amounts of stress associated with the profession one is working toward while medicated. Why would someone choose a path they cannot excel in naturally or without extra help? Isn't this why we choose careers that we are passionate about and are good at? We want a job we can do well. Assume a student stops taking these medications once she reaches her freshman year of college at an Ivy-League college, a school to which she was accepted to because of her excellent high school grades and SAT score. Once she is in a setting that has the same or even higher expectations of her, there is no way she could succeed without having established adequate ways to cope with that amount of stress. She would be doomed to fail, or at least perform poorly.
Even more importantly however are the motivations of these students, which are fascinating but discouraging. To imagine a population of our youth that medicates themselves to accomplish the ideal American Dream only makes me question our ideals even more than usual.
I personally didn't go to a very challenging high school so I can't say I was tempted then, but there have been times in college when I have felt like I could never fulfill the expectations held for me. I don't believe that self-set expectations are necessarily a bad thing, but they can become dangerous when they are pressured by parents and schools.
How common is Aderall used in college and how much more in Ivy-League schools? I wonder what could be done to combat the motivations these student have? It would't be enough to only ban the prescription of these medications, because the reasons they are used will still be there. Students will always find other escape routes to make their paths easier if they aren't provided adequate skills to reach their goals.