Washington - Recently, I was eating in a fast-food restaurant while looking over old school baseball team photos I'd found.
At one point, three tween-age girls and a mom sat next to me. The girls started making fun of a teacher from their school. The mother chimed in, “Yeah, she could really stand to lose a few pounds. And what's up with that hair, right?” she said, panning the other side of the table for response. The girls squealed. “I know, right?” one of them said. The mother smiled.
“Hey!” the mother said. “Who wants a pumpkin spice latte?”
Hands shot up. “Can we get extra shots in it?” one girl asked.
The mother nodded. “Uh-huhh!”
Lord knows this wasn't a gold-medal moment in parenthood. Shouldn't it be a parent's role to teach children not to be sheep?
Cool-parent cred seems to be the rage in this age, when we're paralysed with the fear of appearing old in front of our children. But there's a problem with the cool-parent actions that no one seems to talk about. As someone who teaches at a large, diverse public university, I see the collateral damage that occurs when kids are schooled in cool. Semester in, semester out, I see that we do our children an epic disservice by modelling behaviour that hurts them - sometimes with tragic consequences - in the long run.
Many of my students begin their riffs on classmates' comments, even if they disagree with them, with the refrain, “First, I agree completely with what you just said...” It's gotten to the point where I have to ask students to put their heads down whenever I take an in-class poll because, like the middle-schoolers I once taught, too many of them are quick to side with the majority.
But that's far from the worst of it. Every semester I pore over personal essays, reflections and doctor's notes from students recovering from eating disorders and debilitating depression and anxiety. Of course these illnesses have roots in chemical imbalances, but many of these imbalances are triggered by excessive stress and duress, sometimes from peer pressure.
Apparently, those aren't the only factors. A 2013 study, “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults,” found that the more college-age students used Facebook, the more they experienced declines in moment-to-moment happiness and overall life satisfaction. Other studies have found links between excessive Facebook use and spikes in anxiety and depression.
“Cool” today means something radically different from what it meant for a long time. Before the late 1960s, being cool or hip was a singular protest - a vacant stare here, a mute nod there - by disaffected Americans. Since then, cool has morphed from a political statement to a self-serving, at times desperate, need to fit in with a culture of conformity. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Internet, where our kids spend most of their time.
A big part of cool today means curating a Photoshop-perfect image in social media, staying constantly looped into whatever pop culture news has gone viral and blithely dropping snarky tweets and texts, as if this were the way we talk all of the time. In other words, you're cool if you're relevant.
This means that our children, even some of us, are forever gauging what we should be thinking and posting based on what will reel in the most “likes.”
Before I left that fast-food restaurant, I looked at the photos of the coaches of my baseballe youth. There they were: Mr Schutz and Mr Compar, middle-aged guys with buzz cuts, wearing baseball caps, white undershirts and trousers (as they called them) practically hugging their chests. The word “cool” never would have been batted their way. They encouraged and supported the wincingly awkward and nerdy kids - the ones many parents today smirk at along with their children - with even more zeal than they did the standouts.
I grabbed the bill of my backward-facing baseball cap and turned it to face forward. The tweens stopped tossing bits of bagel across the table, looked at each other and giggled. I channelled my old coaches as I pointed and said, “You're going to clean that up, right?”
Washington Post
Andrew Reiner teaches writing and cultural studies at Towson University. A version of this piece first appeared on the On Parenting blog.