Some (un-comprehensive) answers to the excessive angst among young people:
– Pull back on organized, adult-led activities, and allow kids to organise their own play, setting their own rules.
– Parents offer too many compliments to their children. One should praise children for effort and sticking at it – constant praise for everything breeds egotism and gives them inflated ideas of their abilities.
– Try to get schools to open in the afternoons with monitors, but no organized activities.
– Advocate for a shorter school year and lots of downtime for dreaming.
– Ban homework for young kids. Too much homework does more harm than good.
– Encourage them to read actual books, and have a ban on computers during certain hours.
– Children can’t be good at every subject. Let them fail a bit.
– For older children, schools should ban cellphone use during lessons, and should assure teenagers that it’s quite alright not to have a presence on Facebook.
– Schools should severely crack down on all bullying.
– Parents should stop the drift towards ad hoc, lone eating in the evenings and insist on family meals where parents talk to their children, and vice versa.
– Being by yourself playing video games is unhealthy, and arguably lonely and addictive. And there should be a serious crack-down on sales of alcohol to teens (yes, it’s been an issue for far too long).
I haven’t had teenage children for many years, and I’m not sure I was all that good at it at the time, anyway. A bewildering experience. All the same, I can’t help wondering whether two parents working outside the home hasn’t something to do with all this. Exhaustion, absence, guilt and over-compensation.
Meanwhile, my 15 year-old grandson tells me that the emphasis at school is on “jobs”. What are you going to do when you leave full-time education? Money, money money. Oh, dear! So early. How dismal, but maybe not surprising since so many areas of employment will soon be disappearing.
I completely agree with all of this, except for perhaps the sale of alcohol to teenagers. On the Continent, they sell alcohol to teenagers all the time. The result is a culture of moderate and responsible drinking. Our crackdown on underage alcohol consumption has made the issue taboo amongst teenagers in which alcohol was not a prominent part of their childhood, promoting them to drink irresponsibly when they first can, with often horrifying results. We should emulate Germany and Austria, where the drinking age is 16 but teenagers are far better at handling themselves.