May 13, 2013

Children of helicopter parenting grow up gullible and naive

You can't help but be struck by how credulous young people are today. No single instances come to mind for me to showcase as examples, but taking so much of what they read at face value, and not questioning the reliability of sources.

In particular, within the naturalistic / mundane / profane / materialistic realm of things -- I'm not talking about belief in things that we can't investigate so easily, such as Santa Claus or the nature or existence of God. And also not narratives that are part of oral tale-telling -- they don't do that anymore either. Factoids, party line talking points, things like that are what I have in mind. Not necessarily ideological either; I'm amazed by what kinds of shit you can make up to little kids today and they'll believe it right away (not that I have, but I hear stories about my nephew, or about people's kids who grew up in the '90s).

Like buying into Citizen Kane and Sgt. Pepper's as among the greatest movies and albums just because some authority figure told them so, when both are mediocre though not unlikable. Zipping over to Wikipedia and being 90% certain that they've heard the final word on whatever they're looking up. They read something on Slate or the HuffPo, and no mass media outlet would lie or distort the picture, would they? How ironic for a generation that considers themselves to be sophisticated skeptics.

So, that interacts with their glib, superficial, spastic tendencies as well, but there's another part that is credulity, gullibility, and naivete.

I think this stems from being cut off from non-family members when they were growing up in the '90s and 2000s. Hamilton's Rule says you should believe your close kin a lot more than genetic strangers, because they have far less to gain by lying to you. Your loss is partly their loss, too, after all.

Only by being raised by peers and unrelated adults -- by the broader community -- does a growing child learn, often the hard way (the only way), to take things that others say with a grain of salt. Does anyone who was a kid in the '60s, '70s, or '80s remember how often you used to flat-out deny whatever your friends were claiming. Oh yeah right! Nuh-uhhh, nuh-uhhh! Psssh, please!

You weren't so confrontational toward unrelated adults who told you things, but you still learned that from all kinds of different opinions that you were exposed to, there was apparently some honest disagreement, so don't just swallow what any particular one of them tried to feed you. And on the other hand, if they all seemed to say the same thing, that was robust independent confirmation -- for example, that "life isn't always fair." (Damn right. Something Millennials never learned...)

My guess is that since the '90s the only steady, reliable source of this stimulation to growth has come from sibling rivalry. Again, even that is pretty weak, given Hamilton's Rule. No substitute for interacting with a broad range of others, and learning from those experiences. Male and female, young and old, poor and rich, outcast and popular. We actually learned quite a bit about what makes people tick back in the good old days.

These dynamics probably also explain the similar traits of the Silent Generation when they were young in the mid-century, the previous heyday of helicopter parenting and social isolation. I'm not sure whether they also had the glib, superficial, bratty thing going on too -- I'd have to check into it to see what people said about young people back then. My vague impression is that while they were credulous and naive, they weren't so glib and dismissive. That may be more related to trends in economic inequality, which would create more individual vs. individual antagonism, all else being equal.

That's one major thing to keep in mind that I don't think I've stressed before -- that because economic cycles and social-cultural cycles are distinct, you don't always see the exact same picture across all rising-crime or falling-crime periods, even though the trend in the crime rate is the stronger force. I'd say the Millennial era is actually closer to the Gilded Age -- falling crime and violence after the American Gothic / Civil War period, but also plagued by widening inequality, Robber Barons, rampant immigration, and so on. People did seem a lot more snarky and show-off-y back then, compared to the mid-20th century.

And of the two dominant revival styles today, I'd say overall the neo-Victorian one is stronger than the neo-Fifties one. Especially with how dark, drab, and covered-up everyone is today, across all demographic groups. Anyway, I'm getting into another post here, but I may come back to this topic soon.

10 comments:

  1. Does anyone who was a kid in the '60s, '70s, or '80s remember how often you used to flat-out deny whatever your friends were claiming. Oh yeah right! Nuh-uhhh, nuh-uhhh! Psssh, please!

    Your Millenial commentators seem more likely to tell you you're full of shit than your more credulous older ones though...

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  2. The immigration rate was low in the middle of the century, but high in our current period. No doubt that had an effect somewhat generational personalities.

    -Curtis

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  3. "Your Millenial commentators seem more likely to tell you you're full of shit than your more credulous older ones though"

    No, that's just their glib dismissal about things they're totally ignorant of. It's not an attitude of disbelief, like "nuh-uhh" or "c'mon, I don't think it's that way." It's like, "I know more about this matter than you, and you're wrong" -- when they prove to know jackshit.

    Nothing wrong with being ignorant in some matter, but Millennials are way worse than other generations about acting confident when they're ignorant. Professional bullshit artists.

    Also, Millennials rarely act that way in person. Students today basically never challenge anything the teacher says, for example. They'll just redirect their disagreement to their phone, where they post some snarky status update on Facebook while in class. Passive-aggressive.

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  4. It's not an attitude of disbelief, like "nuh-uhh" or "c'mon, I don't think it's that way." It's like, "I know more about this matter than you, and you're wrong" -- when they prove to know jackshit.

    I suppose it's not a simple "nuh-uhh" because they try to give evidence or an alternative. Not sure why, perhaps this is a internet thing.

    I probably trust Greg Cochran more here - he seems to think people have just gotten crazier and less knowledgeable about everything across the post war twen cen to present, and he demonstrably tends to know a thing or two about knowing a thing or two.

    Also, Millennials rarely act that way in person. Students today basically never challenge anything the teacher says, for example. They'll just redirect their disagreement to their phone, where they post some snarky status update on Facebook while in class. Passive-aggressive.

    Not being confrontational in person but preferring to go off and write an essay about why something is wrong and then publish it does seem to go with a more introverted approach.

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  5. "Nothing wrong with being ignorant in some matter, but Millennials are way worse than other generations about acting confident when they're ignorant. Professional bullshit artists."

    Maybe this is from being "over-parented". They get their opinions from their parents, and not from their own experience. So they don't understand the rationale behind those opinions, but believe strongly in them nonetheless.

    -Curtis

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  6. "It's like, "I know more about this matter than you, and you're wrong" -- when they prove to know jackshit."

    This might be an effect of being raised with the Internet. Millenials think they are an expert on something because they read about it online. You kind of mention this already.

    -Curtis

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  7. only somewhat related but it seems that teen Marijuana and Cocaine use and approval is no longer correlated to perceived risk; throughout the 80s and 90s the three would rise and fall together. now changes in risk seem unconnected.


    http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-overview2012.pdf

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  8. 20 year-old twinks with no receding hairline rigidly stick to short hair, so gay short hair has little to do with aging and hairlines.

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  9. "Your Millenial commentators seem more likely to tell you you're full of shit than your more credulous older ones though..."

    That's because the millenials have no idea what they're talking about.

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  10. Agnostic, I saw your reply to the first comment after I typed my first. I think you're spot-on regarding the attitude of the millenials. They're much more likely to be passive-aggressive behind-the-scenes instead of in broad daylight.

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