Climbing the Stairs - To What?

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Drew Lichtenberger, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Pretend all you have ever known is how to climb stairs. From a young age you were trained to scramble up stairs really quickly with great agility; you are most familiar with interior staircases found in any skyscraper which you are able ascend with masterful ability.

Yet one day, the world changes and you find yourself dropped in middle of an expansive field. Your gaze is naturally set toward your feet looking for that next familiar step up, but all your eyes meet is a foreign landscape of endless grass in all directions. Mountains are miles off in one direction, an ocean acres away in another—a choice of 360° in which to move forward and not a clue as what to do.

In essence, this is how we prepare our young.

My analogy is a gross exaggeration, but unsettling realities ring true. From a very young age, American children are being trained and conditioned with a certain set of skills and mentalities designed to give them an edge. The emphasis placed on performance and rankings in academics, athletics, and extracurricular accomplishments is overwhelming, and arguably detrimental to the healthy development of a child…and a society. Typically good intentions of wanting the best for offspring largely motivate this unbalanced drive to manufacture the best resume for eventual college matriculation and attraction of other coveted resources.

“[Our parents] sought to create little hyperachievers encouraged to explore our interests and talents, so long as that could be spun for maximum effect on a college application,” writes Noreen Malone, a Millennial Generation journalist for New York Magazine. Of course, this does not apply to every family, but this is an example of a rather pervasive stair-climbing mentality.

What has been imparted to the Millennial Generation with this approach?

The head psychologist of a counseling center at a prestigious private college told me, “They [students] keep using these same strategies to figure out how they can distinguish themselves.” He described such strategies as taking on heavier academic loads with double majors or multiple minors. “Others join a lot of organizations on top of their academics because they believe this will make them look good to land the best job or get into the right grad school.”

Students will continue to operate how they have been trained.

“Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured,” writes David Brooks in a May 2011 New York Times Op-ed, “College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills.”

it’s like being conditioned mentally and physically to climb stairs and all of a sudden being plopped into a strange new field of unfamiliar terrain and obstacles. This is essentially how we prepare our young, yet parents and employers are wondering why this problem of extended adolescence? Many emerging adults feel stuck, anxious, or frustrated and not exactly sure why. Ambitious yet anxious.

We are training a generation with overdeveloped muscles and skills in some areas while other muscles remain grossly underdeveloped or atrophied.

In fact, research exists to support this notion. At any given point in the teens or twenties those making the transition to adulthood felt that in in some ways they were adults and in other areas they were not. Similarly, in some ways they were very mature and by other measures were very immature (Arnett, 1997, 2001, Nelson & Barry, 2005).

Confronting such realities is difficult for everyone. If you’re a parent you have to ask, “have I done this to my children?” If you’re a young adult it can be hard to take an honest look at yourself and question, “do I need to grow up in some areas?”

The human body informs us when something is wrong. For instance, if you’re incessantly climbing stairs you may develop a shin splint. How conveniently does nature stop us and say, “Maybe you should take a rest, sit and think about what you’re doing first.”

Similarly, perhaps the stress, anxiety, depression, and apathy many experience is nature’s way of saying, “something is amiss!” There seem to be more young people than ever on prescribed psychiatric medications for depression, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders. Is this a societal shin splint?

I think it is time to really stop and think about what we are doing.

Could there be a correlation between the way the Millennial Generation has been raised and this extended adolescence phenomenon? I believe so.

Arguably, it takes somewhere between 20 to 30 years to really see the results of how a child has been raised. Thus, conceivably, it takes at least the same amount of time or longer to see how one generation collectively brought up another. The major point I raised in this article is the possible over-emphasis on productivity and results at the expense of other human developmental needs. However, there are other huge concepts that we hear discussion on such as teaching hyper-individualism and false self-esteem. Tailoring child-rearing philosophies and designing curriculum around these ideas over the last 30 years have conceivably brought about the self-centeredness, entitlement, and narcissism that I hear many people complain about.

The psychologist I mentioned previously said, ”there is more fragility and less resiliency,” referring to the generation being ill-equipped to handle setback and failure. He believes this is a result of how we’ve coddled a generation: “everyone is so worried about hurting everyone’s feelings,” referencing how self-esteem is ‘protected’ by giving everyone a trophy in little league. This put us into a conversation on how I have experienced this in the working world watching twenty-some year-old young adults (male and female) start crying when they were called out on work-habits or tardiness. I have had almost the identical conversation with two people, a counselor at a prestigious private elementary school who cited, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, and developmental psychologist and researcher, Jean Twenge, PhD, who wrote The Narcissism Epidemic. Jean has gotten considerable criticism for drawing the connection between yesterday’s self-esteem movement and today’s entitlement attitude. Why?

These are hard questions to face for both the young and old alike, but for different reasons. However, honest confrontation always takes courage.

Even the best of intentions can lead to disastrous results. After the college psychologist made the statement about little league parents being afraid to hurt their children’s feelings, I asked, “don’t you think that is doing the children a disservice and actually hurting them in the long run?” He agreed and we spoke of those ‘atrophied muscles’ and how many twenty-somethings cannot emotionally handle setback and failure.

In the mission to climb stairs higher and faster and the fixation to mentor our juniors to do the same, are we ignoring the shin splints? (stress, anxiety, depression, frustration). What happens when you fall back a couple steps? (being able to handle rejection and failure). And how about when the terrain changes? (being prepared with one set of skills, yet needing another).

Why were we climbing these stairs? What is the mission? Where are we going?

No one stops to think.