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Today's Times :

Parental failings ‘spawned an infantilised generation’ - Times (paywalled - text of article in spoiler)

A failure by parents and schools to enforce boundaries has spawned a generation of “infantilised” millennials and fuelled identity politics, according to a new book by a sociology professor. An unwillingness to chastise children or use moral-based judgments has left young people “disorientated” as they have been deprived of a natural process of navigating or chaffing against rules set by adults, Frank Furedi argues.

Greg Hurst, Social Affairs Editor
Monday July 13 2020, 12.01am, The Times

A failure by parents and schools to enforce boundaries has spawned a generation of “infantilised” millennials and fuelled identity politics, according to a new book by a sociology professor.

An unwillingness to chastise children or use moral-based judgments has left young people “disorientated” as they have been deprived of a natural process of navigating or chaffing against rules set by adults, Frank Furedi argues.

The emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University said the dismantling of boundaries has occurred over three or four generations and weakened the process of socialisation by which parents transit values to their children.

“Children develop by reacting against those lines, the boundaries that are set, and that is a very creative process to gain self sufficiency and intellectual independence,” he said.

“If what’s happening now is they are kicking against open doors, which is really what is going on, then the whole developmental process becomes compromised and you do end up with a situation where the transition from childhood to adolescence takes much, much longer than ever before and the transition from adolescence to adulthood also takes much longer.”

The result, Professor Furedi said, is that millennials in their twenties behave as they did in their mid-teens. His book, Why Borders Matter, says another of the boundaries to have been blurred is that between children and adults; he described seeing a man in a T-shirt with the slogan “I’m done with adulting”.

“Mothers take their 18-year-olds shopping and it’s their daughter that tells them what to wear, not the other way around. Fathers wear the same T shirt [as their sons], listen to the same music — [there is] almost this conscious effort not to be a father to your child or a mother but to be their best friend, which is not what children need.

“They can make their best friend with their peers. They need somebody that can look up to, somebody that can inspire them. There is this estrangement from adulthood.”

He said that, similarly, the debate on transgender rights had challenged the binary distinction between men and women, just as in politics the boundary between public and private lives has become blurred.

Professor Furedi argued that the dismantling of moral boundaries has created a paradox. Young people who have grown up without them abhor others who make moral judgments.

But the millennial generation has, he says, created borders of its own, notably the concept of “safe spaces” from which they ban people whose views clash with their own, and has embraced an inherently judgmental identity politics.

He said: “The thing about identity politics is that every expression they use is actually a contradiction. They talk about diversity — that’s one of the key values of identity politics — but identity politics is totally hostile to a diversity of viewpoints. So if you argue a different narrative to what they are arguing that is seen as racist, as offensive, as hate.”
 
Today's Times :

Parental failings ‘spawned an infantilised generation’ - Times (paywalled - text of article in spoiler)



Greg Hurst, Social Affairs Editor
Monday July 13 2020, 12.01am, The Times

A failure by parents and schools to enforce boundaries has spawned a generation of “infantilised” millennials and fuelled identity politics, according to a new book by a sociology professor.

An unwillingness to chastise children or use moral-based judgments has left young people “disorientated” as they have been deprived of a natural process of navigating or chaffing against rules set by adults, Frank Furedi argues.

The emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University said the dismantling of boundaries has occurred over three or four generations and weakened the process of socialisation by which parents transit values to their children.

“Children develop by reacting against those lines, the boundaries that are set, and that is a very creative process to gain self sufficiency and intellectual independence,” he said.

“If what’s happening now is they are kicking against open doors, which is really what is going on, then the whole developmental process becomes compromised and you do end up with a situation where the transition from childhood to adolescence takes much, much longer than ever before and the transition from adolescence to adulthood also takes much longer.”

The result, Professor Furedi said, is that millennials in their twenties behave as they did in their mid-teens. His book, Why Borders Matter, says another of the boundaries to have been blurred is that between children and adults; he described seeing a man in a T-shirt with the slogan “I’m done with adulting”.

“Mothers take their 18-year-olds shopping and it’s their daughter that tells them what to wear, not the other way around. Fathers wear the same T shirt [as their sons], listen to the same music — [there is] almost this conscious effort not to be a father to your child or a mother but to be their best friend, which is not what children need.

“They can make their best friend with their peers. They need somebody that can look up to, somebody that can inspire them. There is this estrangement from adulthood.”

He said that, similarly, the debate on transgender rights had challenged the binary distinction between men and women, just as in politics the boundary between public and private lives has become blurred.

Professor Furedi argued that the dismantling of moral boundaries has created a paradox. Young people who have grown up without them abhor others who make moral judgments.

But the millennial generation has, he says, created borders of its own, notably the concept of “safe spaces” from which they ban people whose views clash with their own, and has embraced an inherently judgmental identity politics.

He said: “The thing about identity politics is that every expression they use is actually a contradiction. They talk about diversity — that’s one of the key values of identity politics — but identity politics is totally hostile to a diversity of viewpoints. So if you argue a different narrative to what they are arguing that is seen as racist, as offensive, as hate.”

This "sudden social decline because of dissolute youth/pampering parents" has been a trope in Western civlisation since at least Greece and Rome. It is well documented in Geoffrey Pearson´s "Hooligan: a history of respectable fears."
 
'Infantilised' is also becoming the RCP (they'll always be the RCP to me) word of the day. Fox used it at least twice last week on Radio 4.
 
Such a load of shit. I bet he doesn't even bother to engage with the extensive studies about positive rather than negative reinforcement. But there's always some reason this generation are 'infantilised' for some reason.

Why does no-one write about the boomer generation being 'infantilised' by being given shitloads of free money in the form of house price growth? Attached to the tit of financialised housing markets forever, believing themselves to be responsible adults who made their own money, no-one daring to pop their delusional bubble.

I'm not saying that's the narrative I would choose, but it would be just as valid as this shit, possibly more so.
 
This "sudden social decline because of dissolute youth/pampering parents" has been a trope in Western civlisation since at least Greece and Rome. It is well documented in Geoffrey Pearson´s "Hooligan: a history of respectable fears."
Long long time since I read it but Is pampering parents well documented in Pearson's book? Lack of parental discipline yes, no respect for elders yes, affluent teenage/young adult lifestyles yes but I'm not sure about pampered parents. If it is then surely 1960s onwards?
 
Such a load of shit. I bet he doesn't even bother to engage with the extensive studies about positive rather than negative reinforcement. But there's always some reason this generation are 'infantilised' for some reason.

Why does no-one write about the boomer generation being 'infantilised' by being given shitloads of free money in the form of house price growth? Attached to the tit of financialised housing markets forever, believing themselves to be responsible adults who made their own money, no-one daring to pop their delusional bubble.

I'm not saying that's the narrative I would choose, but it would be just as valid as this shit, possibly more so.
That led to a generation of entitled sociology professors writing silly books.
 
Long long time since I read it but Is pampering parents well documented in Pearson's book? Lack of parental discipline yes, no respect for elders yes, affluent teenage/young adult lifestyles yes but I'm not sure about pampered parents. If it is then surely 1960s onwards?

I read it 30+ years ago, so my memory may not be pristine. His main argument, l think, was that delinquency is often perceived by the establishment to be other and foreign, and frighteningly recent (usually a span of 20 years).
 
Does Furedi have any kids of his own? Because one thing I've noticed about the kind of people who whinge about "young people today" is that they hardly ever seem to be parents themselves.
 

Well, so much for that hypothesis. Anyways, Millennials aren't being infantilised. We just recognise that being an adult can fucking suck. Hence the "I'm done with adulting".

One of the great things about being a legal adult, is not having to worry about being so grown-up all the time. It's actually a mark of immaturity in my opinion to be so pre-occupied with strait-laced, po-faced notions of "being a grown-up". It's the brattier cousin to the teenage notion that being dark and cynical and miserable = adult.
 
I read it 30+ years ago, so my memory may not be pristine. His main argument, l think, was that delinquency is often perceived by the establishment to be other and foreign, and frighteningly recent (usually a span of 20 years).
Yes, it was a good read about generational moral panics about youth over the centuries
 
Good to see Sp!ked among the network of Conservative media outlets that have been caught out publishing articles by fake journalists:
.

Sp!ked isn't mentioned in the article by name, but on Twitter the author has pointed out a number of articles on Sp!ked by fake journalist Joyce Toledano:

Makes a change from them shilling for the Koch Foundation, the right-wing, anti-public healthcare "charity" that funds them.
 
Today's Times :

Parental failings ‘spawned an infantilised generation’ - Times (paywalled - text of article in spoiler)

“Children develop by reacting against those lines, the boundaries that are set, and that is a very creative process to gain self sufficiency and intellectual independence,” he said.

I don't think this is a particularly controversial point and it’s been made in various different forms for a very long time. Hobbes uses the analogy with water which stagnates if bounded in too tightly and which dissipates if left without any boundaries at all.

He was talking about Law, whereas Furedi is talking in a looser sense about normative culture generally. This is where I think he’s mistaken. The societies of the most developed economies are more regulated and in more diverse ways than at any time in human history.

I think detraditionalization is a better way of understanding the shifts in (non-state) based societal regulation, which is more to do with the depersonalisation of authority than a lack of “rules”.

Also, Furedi completely ignores how disempowered people generally and young people especially are in contemporary society. There's precious little scope for creative self fashioning outside of the limited scope of Neoliberal values. How can an 18-year-old be expected to develop a strong sense of self and autonomy in a dying world where any prospects you might have are linked to abandoning your critical faculties, jettisoning your soul and assimilating yourself into the death machine?

I’d stay a child under those circumstances.
 
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