Kids aren't what they used to be, older generations say and there is a growing body of research to support that finding.
What those same generations won't say, however, is how they caused the problem that irks them.
As The Citizen's Samantha Wright Allen reported Thursday, 30 per cent of the children heading into Kindergarten at area schools are considered vulnerable. At elementary schools in central Prince George, that number soars to 58 per cent. Those numbers are from a report by the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) based out of UBC, which found the provincial average to be 32 per cent.
Poverty and family income certainly play a key role but there are other, broader social factors at play as well.
The report had five measures for a child's vulnerability: physical health and well-being; social competence; emotional maturity; language and cognitive development; and communication skills and general knowledge.
Perhaps the most disturbing comment about the report was made by UBC professor Martin Guhn, who noted that while the literacy and numeracy of kids across B.C. is improving, their social and emotional health has gotten worse.
"It's not a local phenomenon," Guhn said. "The question again is are we looking carefully at what we've changed in the social environment conditions over the past generation, how that's affecting our children.... That's the question we have to collectively ask ourselves: is that the direction we want to go in?"
In other words, today's kids are better than previous generations at the three Rs but they don't feel very good about it.
In this respect, they are mirrors of their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, their teachers, their coaches and the adults in their lives. An article in Rolling Stone magazine called Why We're Living In The Age of Fear noted that "this is the safest time in human history" before asking "so why are we all so afraid?"
As the articles explains, sociologists and psychologists are quick to point out the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is the red-alert rapid response to a clear, immediate and present threat while anxiety is the yellow-alert ongoing reaction to an unclear and uncertain future threat. Fear and anxiety are both good, short-term stresses, valuable for survival in prehistoric times. In the modern era, however, true fear has all but disappeared out of the lives of many people but anxiety has more than filled that space. Without the occasional jolts of true fear to remind us what we should we really scared of, now we just worry all the time about potential threats, both real and imagined.
That never-ending anxiety is toxic on both a personal and social level.
As individuals, our brains and our bodies don't do well with constant unease and uncertainty. It's physically exhausting and the endless fretting erodes trust, empathy, curiosity, tolerance and patience, replacing them with anger, cynicism and hate.
On a social level, sociologists quoted in the Rolling Stone article talk about group polarization, where like-minded people take more extreme positions after talking to one another. With the connectivity provided through social media, group polarization spreads like wildfire, unchecked.
The contradictory messages from parents and teachers are deeply confusing to B.C. children, hence their own uncertainty portrayed in the HELP report. On one hand, local kids enjoy a degree of safety and support to self-identify as LGBTQ as early as elementary school that their parents certainly did not have. On the other hand, threats of killer clowns on the way can now frighten students, alarm parents and paralyze school officials. Previous generations - both the adults and the kids - would have laughed at such a ludicrous idea and carried on as usual.
The kids are being told that they're safe, they're special and there is nothing they can't accomplish without trying hard and in the very next instance, they are shielded from failure, told that the system is rigged against them and the bogeyman is real and might be under their bed.
The kids deserve better. As long as the well-meaning adults in their lives continue to validate internal and external anxieties, however, a generation of smart, anxious young people is sure to follow.
