Posted on 09/28/2024 7:33:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
An older boss was correcting a younger female employee. “There is no P in ‘hamster’,” said the boss. But “that’s how I spell it,” the 20-something objected. The boss suggested they consult a dictionary. The employee called her mother, put her on speakerphone and tearfully insisted that she tell her boss not to be so mean.
It is an arresting vignette. The tearful employee appears to have imbibed the notion of “my truth”, a popular phrase intended to rationalise the speaker’s beliefs and shield them from criticism based on facts. You may say that 1+1=2, but “my truth” is that it makes three. Post-modernists deem this way of thinking sophisticated. Keith Hayward calls it childish. He is right.
But Mr Hayward, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen, goes much further. In “Infantilised”, he contends that young people today are less mature than previous generations, and that Western culture is to blame. He offers plenty of examples of “kidulting” to reinforce his case. Some people like to recreate their childhood pleasures by dressing up as “My Little Pony” and buying tickets to places where they can jump into ball pits and do pillow-fights. Some carry on pursuing teenage kicks in nightclubs well into early middle age.
Over many years as a lecturer, Mr Hayward grew concerned that his 18-year-old students “resembled less mature teenagers on the cusp of adulthood and more fearful schoolchildren adrift in an alien world of adult autonomy”. One arrived in class dressed in a onesie, noting that it was cold and he liked to feel comfortable. Was he not “concerned about the infantilising overtones of such a garment?” asked Mr Hayward. “No, I want to be treated like a kid,” came the reply. “Adulting is hard.”
Here the author produces his most solid evidence, though it will be familiar to many readers. In rich countries there has been a dramatic fall in the share of people who, by the age of 30, have attained the traditional markers of adulthood: leaving home, becoming financially independent, getting married, having a child. In Britain, the median age for a first (heterosexual) marriage, at 33 for men and 31 for women, is a decade higher than it was in the early 1960s.
In 2016 a Pew study found that for the first time in 130 years, American 18-34-year-olds were more likely to be living with their parents than with a partner in a separate abode.
Pop culture, Mr Hayward believes, is infantilising people. Modern cinema celebrates immaturity. From the unreconstructed man-children of “School of Rock” and “Ted” (which stars a beer-drinking teddy bear) to the endless “Batman” and “Spider-Man” remakes, “a visit to the movies these days feels more like a trip to a toy shop”. Reality tv shows “normalise infantilism” by making “40- and 50-year old celebrities dress up as toy cars, children’s bears and dinosaurs”. Many advertisements are an “assault on mature adulthood”. The Milky Bar Kid has been portrayed by actors of all ages. Evian water’s “live young” campaign featured adults in T-shirts that showed baby torsos beneath their necks.
The education system deserves some blame, too. Students are shielded from potentially upsetting ideas: the University of Aberdeen in Scotland put a trigger warning on “Peter Pan”, saying that students might find the “odd perspectives on gender” in the book “emotionally challenging”. Schoolchildren are told things that are manifestly untrue, such as “You can be anything you want to be.”
History, sociology and philosophy are compressed into a “childhood morality tale” of the “privileged” and the “oppressed”. Schools and universities used to teach “the uncontroversial idea that [students] will need to adjust their behaviour and adapt to the world if they are to function effectively within it”. No more.
Finally, Mr Hayward chides the liberal commentariat. On the one hand, they celebrated Greta Thunberg, a former schoolgirl activist, as an “all-knowing sage”, despite her possessing “no scientific expertise” and saying “nothing original whatsoever about climate issues”. This, he claims, is evidence of “a role reversal in which young people are increasingly assigned the intellectual gravitas and cultural authority to educate adults”.
On the other hand, when Shamima Begum, a British schoolgirl roughly the same age as Ms Thunberg, went off to join the mass-murdering, mass-raping Islamic State, the same liberal pundits decried the British government’s decision not to allow her back into Britain to face justice, presenting her “as a duped child…far too young and naive to know her own mind, and therefore not responsible for her subsequent actions”. “When society acts in such a hypocritical fashion, adultfiying on the one hand and infantilising on the other, it is playing a dangerous and duplicitous game,” thunders Mr Hayward.
Maybe so. But the main liberal argument for allowing Ms Begum to return home is that it is against international law to make someone stateless. If it were not, countries could dump all their criminals on foreign shores and refuse to take them back. Mr Hayward does not mention this. There are some nuggets in this book. This reviewer was intrigued to learn that, according to the “fabulously named” Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia, those who regularly signal victimhood are more prone to lying and cheating for selfish ends, a habit people are supposed to grow out of.
But Mr Hayward’s argument has two flaws. One is that it is so grumpy. Why shouldn’t adults dress up as comic-book characters, if they enjoy it? What is wrong with liking the “Wallace and Gromit” animated films? Being grown-up means taking responsibility for your actions; it does not mean only ever seeking fun in highbrow places.
The second, bigger flaw is that Mr Hayward glosses over more compelling explanations for the supposed surge of “infantilism” he decries. Perhaps there is more memorable evidence of adults behaving childishly these days because everyone has a camera and posts amusing clips to social media. The idiotic things that the Boomers and Generation X did in their 20s are nearly all forgotten, thank heaven. The silliest antics of the silliest members of Gen Z tend to go viral.
And perhaps the reason why young people are finding jobs and having children later in life than earlier generations is that they are remaining longer in education. A whopping 40% of Americans aged 25 and over now have college degrees, up from 8% in 1960. This is a huge change, and usually considered a good thing, even if some degrees are costly and pointless. Those who are still studying at 25 are unlikely to be financially independent, and may therefore hesitate to have children. This is not childish; it is wise.
Other writers, such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, have compiled interesting and sometimes troubling research about the young, from their apparently high levels of mental anguish to their threadbare support for free speech. But to dismiss a whole generation as big babies seems like name-calling.
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“The tearful employee appears to have imbibed the notion of “my truth”, a popular phrase intended to rationalise the speaker’s beliefs and shield them from criticism based on facts.”
Sound like the hard-core Zeepers.
Fair question. Maybe we’re too rich.
Lifestyles of the rich are too out there.
Young people are overindulged in every way
The American dream is out of reach. I am surprised any Gen Zer even tries to make it at all. It is all uphill for them. Low wages crushed by inflation, housing thru the roof and legal immigrants (H-1B) taking the good jobs every day.
None of these articles point out that “family” is not what used to be the first and only husband, and the real father, as head of the family and home.
How do those families do in all the various measures, and also we need to start seeing the measure of effect of mother only families, which is very common today and seems to produce killers and angry, racist, and violent children who largely fill our prisons and are uneducable.
Well, thank goodness we don't allow *that* to happen!
Yeah, like the state of New Hampster.
What he describes may be the current culture of the West, but it is not Western culture. Get back to real Western culture and notice the difference.
I made a statement on this forum 20 or so years ago that affluence would be our downfall. Very few agreed.
they should be glad for their current “rough life”. just a few hundred years ago virtually everything in life was uphill. for many there WERE no wage. at all. starvation was the real threat and if you didn’t know how to forage or grow your own, starvation was a real possibility. housing? if you couldn’t build your own house or live with others who did, you were homeless. and then there were those who took everything you had away because you couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back. back then it was outlaws and today it’s government. the “American dream” came out of survivalism. seems we are back to it again. good luck folks. you are going to need it.
“Dressing up like My Little Pony”
At this very moment I am at a cabin in Maine with a group of my fellow Bronies hanging out and having nerd fun. Among them are a tax accountant, a cranberry farmer and super genius researcher/entrepreneur.
Never happened. Especially in a large North American country. /s
My step DIL loves the term your mythology.
But they still demand their adulting stickers.
Of course, the “whole generation” is not being condemned, but an alarming trend is being noted.
More snarky Rothschilds corporate, anonymous writing that concludes exactly the opposite of all evidence cited.
“Hard times make strong men...”
The Fourth Turning.
Or, on the family level:
“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”
You are right. Look at almost any "problem" society faces and you will find it to be a first world problem. Massive obesity is an example.
No mention of home life. Many of these young people grew up without what was once taken for granted as being a normal childhood.
How many of them come from an intact family? How many of them were packed off to daycare, where strangers housed them? How many of them were raised properly by their own mothers at home? How many have had the benefit of a father’s guidance and discipline?
Proper childcare is important work and not something that should be farmed out to strangers. It requires parents to teach their children proper behavior, manners, how to cope, etc.
There are entire industries that would shrink to near zero if they couldn't produce and market to adult children but instead had to face a market of "sane, sober, moral, and prudent" people.
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