I was chatting with a friend about a newspaper column we both had read. The writer noted statistics showing that American high-school kids score below their peers from other developed countries on math and science skills, and attributed this deficiency to poor policies of the federal government, the Department of Education in particular. I asked my friend, “When your kids were growing up, if one of them brought home lower than normal grades, did you blame the government?” He laughed loudly, “Of course not! And I’m sure you didn’t either. If fact, I remember a time when our son was a junior in high school, and one marking period his grades went down almost 10 points. My wife and I discussed this and it occurred to us that he had been hanging out a lot with a new friend—a friend with a car. ‘We slipped on this one,’ my wife said. We had a sit-down with him and told him we were restricting the amount of time he could spend with this new friend. We were more detailed but you get the idea: If he wanted to spend more time with his buddy, first he had to bring his grades up. We made it clear that two things were responsible for his grade decline: we were not being responsible parents, and he was not being a responsible student.”
In the model of coping developed in this blog, we stress four things: Acceptance, Accountability, Humility, and Empathy. In the case of my friend’s son, accountability is the main culprit. His parents corrected the problem, but too often in our present-day society, young folks are not held accountable. Look at that newspaper column—the federal government is to blame for kids’ poor academic performance relative to those in other countries? Seriously? Could the writer be more enabling and indulgent toward American kids—not to mention their parents? Here we are in 2025, and both parents and their kids need to be held more accountable. How many kids regularly hear their parents badmouth reputable scientists like Tony Fauci, or feed them false information like vaccines cause autism? We are producing a generation of overindulged, psychologically-damaged kids who are unable to think critically, handle stress, resolve conflicts, and overcome hardship. We better wise up—fast—or we’re going to have a society populated by psychological invalids.
Psychology and Stress 