Besides speaking in public, naked, in an enclosed space, with snakes, from a scary height, in a high unemployment economy--what do you think the number one fear of the modern American adult is today?
I don’t know this for a fact, but a generation of expensive SAT prep, summer camps, private schools, gap-year consultants and obnoxious helicopter-parenting suggests what we fear most in life is bringing up children. At least, bringing up children that are unhappy or have a poor chance for success.
Take The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969, that argued that self-worth was the key to a child’s success. In the 1980’s California even established a self-esteem task force for its schools. (Oy.) Forty years, 15,000 scholarly articles, and a trophy-for-every-player-in-the-Under-10-Youth-Soccer-League-at-the-end-of-every-season later, we’ve discovered that self-esteem doesn’t improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, or deter alcohol consumption. And now, those kids who got endlessly complimented for being average are entering the workforce.
(We have met the enemy, Pogo said, and he is us.)
We can blame at least some of this intense need for child-rearing advice on Dr. Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician whose 1946 The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became one of the biggest sellers of all time. Face it: your mother had a copy and you were brought up on it. (And it’s probably still in a bookcase in her home, second shelf from the bottom, far left. The part about how to stop brothers from biting their older sisters might be dog-eared. A little. Just guessing.)
As I write this, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers has been on the NYT’s Bestseller list for 40 weeks. That’s a tribute to Gladwell’s great story-telling abilities, as well as his terrific power of synthesis. But, I’m convinced, it’s also a function of Outliers being the new Dr. Spock—a thinly-veiled book about “success” that’s really about your child’s success.
Outliers gives all kinds of advice that’s fun to follow--like start having sex (well, the procreative kind) around April 1st if you want to a hatch a truly successful child.
More on that, and Gladwell’s other advice, in my next post.
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