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The Child-Adults of the 21st Century
For the past few generations, children never developed emotional maturity. So we have emotional children everywhere.
Some twenty years ago, I read a post from an ex-Berkley professor who shared his experience at the University of Cape Town shortly after apartheid was lost to South Africa.
He mentioned that in his first semester, he couldn’t understand why none of the students liked him. So he kept trying harder and harder. At the end of the semester, quite devastated that he had had such an awkward and unhappy first semester teaching, he gave out a questionnaire, essentially trying to find out what he had done wrong.
It came back that he had been the best professor they had ever had, and they thought very highly of him.
At this point, the professor started asking himself why he had misread the situation so badly. He realized it was cultural and did some reading — previous research going back to the 50s and 60s.
It turned out that Americans were accustomed to a great deal of nurturing. They constantly tell each other how great they are, what a good job they did, how fabulous their performance was, how fantastic they looked, etc.
