The Golden Era of Delinquents
How we became a culture that botches children’s emotional development
Most personality development occurs during childhood, stabilizing in later adolescence and “formalizing” in very young adulthood. Our personalities tend to remain quite stable over time, which is perhaps advantageous for the goodhearted and disappointing for the inborn assholes. We may consider, then, a good sense of humor an essential aspect of our character. For the person who gives to charity, like Netflix’s Reed Hastings, who gave 20% of his net worth away (tax notwithstanding), altruism may be pivotal in their understanding of self. In today’s culture, particularly among the Gen-Z citizenry, a person’s greatest defects tend to be those revered as most interesting.
A self-diagnosed autistic adult with Reddit-inspired social anxiety, for example, may consider their chronic need for reassurance as critical to their being. With this in mind and in spirit, there become minimal incentive to improve upon what most would consider a negative attribute. To essentialize something means to treat it as crucial, as if the functioning of a whole cannot continue if not for a single, basic portion. On a biological level, the human body cannot function without a working heart. On an emotional level, a new mother may come to find being “Mom” is the portion of her character she cherishes and resonates with most. And for today’s self-diagnosed online influencer, their carefully curated online identity will simply combust should their audience fail to accommodate it. Even if it rapidly changes, even if it contradicts its alter ego.
As The Coddling of the American Mind puts it, today’s younger generations appear to be operating off of the following premises:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that is, adversity does not build resilience but garners emotional fragility
2. Always trust your feelings; that is, the emotions you experience, regardless of how disproportionate or inappropriate, are tantamount to logical fact
3. Life is a battle between good and evil people; that is, anything you dislike is “right wing rhetoric”, liberals are apparently the saints fighting the good fight against isms, and we all must choose between being for or against someone or something
In therapy aimed at children, we’ve seen similar, self-serving ideology. The child who throws a vicious tantrum because he’s given a PB & J with the crust on couldn’t possibly just be an annoying kindergartener with questionable rationalization skills. No, no! He’s a morally injured kid acting out of his repressed trauma. Essentializing inappropriate, maladaptive, and even dangerous behavior, as if it’s the most pivotal aspect of the child’s existence, is crooked. While I’m certainly not making the argument that children cannot be traumatized, as children across the globe face immense difficulty grown adults could not fathom, the manner in which they “process” difficulty is quite different from the mainstream narrative. The mainstream narrative claims that any instance of negative behavior, resulting from the experiencing of a negative emotion, is too much for children to tolerate. Normal and expected reactions to earth-shattering realities, like ice cream eventually running out and Six Flags eventually closing for the night, are now recast as “trauma responses” instead of “a kid being an annoying kid”. For those not well-versed in the basics of human behavior science, it is essentially common sense. I’ll explain anyway.
When we reward shitty behavior, shitty behavior continues. This is common sense, as I mentioned. A kid who receives a snappy high five every time they raise their hand in class is likely to continue raising their hand. Conversely, when we avoid something continuously, we become even more fearful of that “something”. It’s the reason why individuals with phobias of needles seem to pass out at any slightest sight of a needle---they’ve conditioned it as highly aversive, and something they cannot tolerate. Again, none of this should come as particularly surprising. For children still budding in their ability to rationalize emotions like fear, adults are crucial in terms of teaching appropriate responding. The power of the neutral, calm, and collected adult is evident in situations where a kid falls and quickly glances to their parents before screaming bloody murder. Should the parent (most typically the mother) lurch into tiger mother mode in a neurotic ensemble, squawking on about, “OH MY GOD, YOU COULD HAVE BROKEN YOUR NECK!”, the child will probably proceed to wail. For the git-r-done parents like mine, who respond with a monotone “you’ll be fine”, the child quickly learns not to ascribe such hysterics to a bump or a scrape.
The case of Joyce Brown is one which perfectly illustrates the dangers in prioritizing appearance and negative traits over personal ethics. Joyce Brown was a schizophrenic woman in the 80’s who was essentially celebrated for her “individual, unique expression”; this wasn’t creative expression so much as it was a cluster of psychiatric symptoms. Jonathan Rosen, journalist and author of The Best Minds, describes the situation as follows: “…though she slept on a sidewalk grate, ran into traffic, covered herself with her own excrement, screamed racial epithets at Black men (though she was Black herself), and tore up dollar bills, set them on fire, and urinated on them, a judge ordered her released, agreeing with her lawyers at the New York branch of the ACLU that her behavior was the result of homelessness, rather than its cause, and writing in his opinion that although burning money “may not satisfy a society increasingly oriented to profit-making and bottom-line pragmatism,” Joyce’s behavior was nevertheless “consistent with the independence and pride she vehemently insists on asserting.” Consistent with independence? The woman was homeless because the clinical, psychiatric symptoms of her schizophrenia became so horrendous that she was unable to manage day to day life. And attempts to see mentally ill or disabled people as romantic emblems of hope is, at best, a cruel delusion.
Joyce Brown’s siblings, as one may guess, did not find her behavior to be particularly bursting with “pride”, as they cared for her for many years and struggled to financially support her and her various treatments. This is eerily similar to the activist doctrine: since we don’t have to deal with it, it doesn’t matter to us. As long as we post on social media that we believe children should be allowed to run the roost, the rest is up to the Nazis and the racists and the ableists to parse out. Activists don’t have to deal with the downstream effects of allowing children to do whatever the hell they want… you know, when they become aggressive adults who cannot be managed and have to be physically or chemically restrained while they’re in group homes or psych wards. Where is the outrage for those populations? Or should we vocally cheer them on while wiping their adult diapers, as they’re just hygienically divergent?
Piaget’s stages of development in children largely encapsulate the childlike behavior in many of today’s therapists. As a quick prelude, logical reasoning refers to the ability to understand and incorporate the basic rules of logical inference in everyday activities. On a basic, clinical level, many behavior analysts working with children have likely targeted “inferencing” as a skill in session by use of a few generic questions: What is he feeling? What might she be thinking? What happens next? Our own life experience, and repeated exposure to others’ experiences, helps us better understand what other people may be thinking and feeling in any given situation. Diverse consumption of viewpoints, cultures, and perspectives helps to soften our inborn, rigid rules, the kind that force us to believe adults can read our minds and adults function as personal servants so long as we cry and pound our fists. In the preoperational stage of development, according to Piaget, children use words and images to represent objects but still fail to reason logically. Perhaps of most importance to this piece is the fact that children during this stage, between 2-6 years old, are egocentric; that is, they operate under the assumption that other people exist specifically for them. They also cannot fathom that others, regardless of gender, age, or color, think differently than they do. For children, this stage of development is moderately annoying. For adults… it’s potentially catastrophic, specifically regarding therapeutic outcomes.
An example of a child in the preoperational stage is talking to an imaginary friend. The equivalent Gen-Z or millennial counterpart would be that of talking to minions online despite never speaking with them in real life. Children during this stage also symbolize objects not in the room using readily available objects; a dowel rod could serve as a pretend sword, or a broom as an imaginary horse. For the brainwashed therapist hellbent on burning down the patriarchy and insisting only deeply traumatized children cry, a symbol like a black square, the blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag, an Instagram story about “letting kids lead”, or a copy-and-pasted set of pronouns could represent a more abstract concept like nobility, bravery, or social justice. For my audience, who I consider largely reasonable and intelligent, we know this is quackery. Much like symbols only represent surface-level understandings of concepts in children, today’s behavior analysts are more concerned with appearing good than actually being good.
When we fixate on appearance alone, we succumb to our teenage-minded insecurities: what others think of us versus what we think of us. In much of Jonathan Haidt’s work, which focuses heavily on teenage girls, one correlation is quite clear: the advent of social media has resulted in teen girls’ mental health plummeting. I’d be interested, though, how older generations are affected by such mainstream use and consumption of social media. For likely the first time, practitioners of all industries are taking to platforms like Twitter or Instagram to share their expertise. Because it’s so readily accessible and costs nothing, it can be a wonderful means by which to obtain information. As was shared recently in an article about autism information on TikTok, though, more than half of the information shared on such platforms was fabricated, an overgeneralization, or completely inaccurate. So we have a population who can only comprehend themselves and their surroundings by use of symbols, and a platform riddled with cryptic, politically influenced symbols. What could go wrong?
Today’s kids are grandfathered into an aggressive mediocrity. They’re informed that their most maladjusted tendencies are just slight deviances from the norm of experience, and that most every conversation should be centered around this deviance. Should these children continue to be accommodated in the same manner as Joyce Brown, it’s plausible they may end up in similar situations: unable to manage their day-to-day lives, as they’ve been coddled; incapable of sustaining any form of employment, as they’re wickedly entitled; and remarkably lonely, as few want to befriend a person who believes their life is above that of everyone else’s. It’s interesting, too, that training children to essentially fear their surroundings and scorn everything they dislike is a theory propagated by clinicians screeching at their colleagues to be “compassionate”. What exactly is compassionate about conditioning youngsters into victimhood? What is particularly altruistic about informing children they’re incapable of success unless they’re heavily supported, assisted, and babied?
While it’s unlikely participation trophies alone contribute to a victimhood mindset, there are traces of real life in elementary athletics: we live in a world largely based on merit. Imagine the individual who has been told, until age 18, that others recognizing their autism as a superpower is the only avenue by which to attain happiness in life. Should people regularly side-eye the hand-flapping autistic adult, as it’s human nature to glance at behavior we’d consider odd, the individual may be inclined to believe they should feel sad--- after all, if people are not throwing a block party for “autism awareness”, they are akin to eugenicists. Remember the shallow representations of symbols and objects discussed earlier, and The Coddling’s third premise (i.e., “life is a battle between good people and evil people”)? People instructed to hyperfocus on their feelings and external validation will spend much of their time categorizing people into those who affirm their identity… and those who hate them. How will this person develop meaningful relationships if they feel chronically deprived of validation? How will this person work in any sort of setting for employers, employees, and customers that don’t consider autism worthy of celebration? And in what way will this person be an empowering voice to families and others with similar disabilities, who clutch to any trace of hope that their life will become of something other than challenging behavior and therapy sessions?
I wrote a piece very similar to this one over a year ago, titled “Prepare Your Children For the Road, Not the Road For Your Children”, and I outlined nearly identical issues. My thoughts surrounding this issue remain largely unchanged: we cannot teach children that others exist for them. We cannot encourage narcissism and repackage it as “self-love”. And we cannot appreciate their most maladaptive traits as if they’re adorable personality quirks. People will not always accept us, and yes, it is sometimes shitty when they don’t. But we’re also human beings who cannot control what another person is willing to live with or tolerate. Our best bet is to accept ourselves, with our strengths and our deficits, and be open to letting go of the idealism of childhood.
Maybe we’re not all that special. And, as Dr. Seuss says, “adults are just obsolete children, and the hell with them.”
I guess as a parent, one who has legitimate diagnoses, and has two kids with diagnoses, I'm falling in between some of those examples. I'm definitely a helicopter parent because I've had to be. My moderately autistic 10 year old is still developmentally close to 6 in most regards. However, my kids get told no every damn day. 🤷♀️ I guess they will be traumatized because I fricking go off. Then, because as I'm constantly told by developmental peds, pediatrician, and psychiatry, there is no real "manual" for a child like mine, I have to give my 10 year old ice cream and have his dad help talk to him about an upcoming surgery. Are we trying to prevent a meltdown? Yes. Because he already has medical anxiety from having a gtube and procedures. Am I trying not to raise little conceited assholes? Also yes. (Someone undoubtedly has a problem with me using the word assholes in correlation to my kids with disabilities. Well tough luck. I'm generalizing, and adhd/autistic kids can be assholes too)