I was talking with someone recently who has worked in the Student Life office of a university for the past 20 years. She said, “It’s amazing how students have changed over the past 20 years when it comes to their sense of responsibility. Nothing seems to be their fault; there’s always an excuse. Just in the past few months, a student on work studies was caught on tape stealing money out of the cafeteria register. Her excuse? ‘I was planning on paying it back. I really needed the money for a textbook.’ Another student was drunk and unruly outside a bar, and punched a police officer who was trying to calm him down. His excuse? ‘I was drunk.’ Another student attacked a girl at a party, pushing her into a table. She hit her head and had to be hospitalized with a severe concussion. The attacker’s excuse? ‘She was hitting on my boyfriend.’ It’s unbelievable. And even worse, the parents defended their kids. It used to be me and the parents against the misbehaving student; now it’s the misbehaving student and the parents against me!”
Accountability is a key part of any coping plan. You must be careful, however, and not confuse accountability with self-blame. If you’re like many people, you might automatically assume it means, “taking responsibility for what happened.” Not always. Accountability means, “recognizing that you are responsible for evaluating your role in the event.” In many cases, you must choose not to blame yourself, not to form a pity parade, and not to make it all about you as a sufferer. When coping with stress, accountability means empowering yourself to choose how best to evaluate your stressful experience, and how best to resolve the subsequent emotions you feel.
Look again at the examples above. In all three cases, the students are clearly responsible for their actions. Taking money with the intention of paying it back is still stealing and shows a lack of conscience; being drunk is no excuse for assaulting a police officer, and indicates that one may have a drinking problem; attacking and severely injuring someone simply because she is flirting with your boyfriend shows a lack of impulse control. In each case, if the students appropriately evaluated their behavior, they would have discovered personality and behavioral issues they should address.
Also, in the examples, notice how the parents get in the way and prevent some self-discovery by their kids; they enable and justify their kids’ behavior by defending them. The parents’ actions almost guarantee that each student will not appropriately evaluate their (the student’s) role in the situation. So, what’s with the parents? A good possibility is that they fear looking like they are ineffective and failures as agents of childrearing. They are unable to say that their kid is accountable because it’s an admission that, “I, too, am accountable because I did a lousy job of raising this person to be a responsible adult.” What we have, therefore, is a situation where both parents and child are at fault, but neither is willing to face that fact.
These examples illustrate a fundamental problem facing society today, a problem alluded to by the Student Life Officer: More and more parents today seem to feel that only they are capable of deciding what’s good for their kids. Many of today’s parents are defensive when teachers, police, and other agents in society try to enforce rules of behavior; parents feel that’s an intrusion on parental territory—only parents can rightly determine what’s best for their child. This message is beginning to permeate society: a parent complaint to a school board can get that book banned; parents are deciding certain courses—such as, Algebra—are not needed to get a job, so school boards should remove those courses as diploma requirements; parents are micromanaging the classroom and dictating to teachers what they can teach—Florida has banned classroom instruction from elementary school through college of any topic dealing with DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion); an amendment to a Florida law said that parents should determine if their child should be promoted to 4th grade (the amendment was eventually removed).
The sad result of these actions is that we are producing generations of kids who cannot think for themselves, who fail to acquire a social conscience that includes personal accountability, and who develop low self-esteem that makes them passive, anxiety-ridden, and dependent on others for guidance. In short, too many parents—driven by a need to protect their own fragile egos—are dumbing down their kids intellectually, emotionally, and socially.
Psychology and Stress 