Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

Psychology Today ^ | 9-22-15 | Peter Gray

[GnuThere]

I have some baby boomer friends who raised their 2 girls in a privileged upper middle class setting, which sometimes seems to lead to a sense of entitlement and vacuous priorities, but these girls could not be more polite, considerate of others, and hard working.
They were both rolling their eyes about a childhood friend who got a cushy summer job and promptly was dictating to her boss about when SHE (the kid) would need to miss work for a family vacation. Wow.

[ronnietherocket3]

I would be irritated if a priest publicly announced that he had met with me in private, even if I were planning to tell someone that I had. Likely, the Pope held that it was her decision whether to announce the meeting or not.

Possibly she never dealt with anyone growing up who did not like her or that person was punished quickly.

two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment.

Possibly neither of them have ever had to deal with a mouse before.

Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world.

k-12 schools now have a lot of standardized testing and a lot of funding for the school depends on students doing well on the standardized testing, that likely the students have been raised to believe that the world is coming to an end if they do not do well.

Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things.

Because every time they did they got yelled at. I have heard a number of stories of young children going to their parents with a problem and their parents responding by belittling them.

External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development.

Because they have been raised by a generation of women who want to have a successful career and a family.

Students email about trivial things and expect prompt replies.

Probably because they are used to getting instant replies from people. Due to texting/IM/mommy or daddy is there for you at every moment, millennials lack knowledge that something might not be instant. One way to handle this would be on the first day of class to simply tell them to not expect instant replies to issues or questions.

There is also the ever-present threat and reality of lawsuits.

Who does the work to file a lawsuit (hint: its not millennials)?



Finally, the author of this struck gold with two comments. The first is "they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one." When dealing with millennials, try being clearer and more explicit with what you want them to do. The second is "Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like," With this, when millennials complain about something listen (don't just dismiss it as not a problem or worse try to fix it for them) and when they are finished complaining ask them how they plan to approach the problem. If after a few days you have not heard anything, ask them how it turned out.