In This Issue
Parenting Millennials - "Back To School? Why Bother?"
What can parents and grandparents do to help their Millennials stay engaged and enrolled in school? Why do some Millennials thrive and love school and others can't get out soon enough?
Why do educators and parents treat them as if they are and what is the potential impact?
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by Kathryn Booth, MBA and parent to 6 Millennials ages 22 to 12
What can parents and grandparents do to help their Millennials stay engaged and enrolled in school?
Despite vast changes in the pace and availability of technology and information that has created a global economy and transformed expectations in business as consumers and sellers, education has largely remained the same. There are a few schools that have been able to break out of the traditional pattern of simultaneous instruction of warehoused students, but the majorities of publicly educated students are stuck in the 1940’s during school and escape to the 21st Century after.
Dropout rates and the downward spiraling of performance in math and science alarm anyone who has an interest in the near future. It is an economic fact that just like the base of our economy shifted from primarily agrarian to industrial, it has just as irretrievably shifted from an industrial and manufacturing based economy to a combination of service and information industries.
The prospects of jobs paying wages that will support a family with even two full time workers have almost disappeared as outsourcing and overseas manufacturing have eliminated entry level, non-skilled jobs with potential for wages above $20 per hour with benefits. Job creation in the last decade has shifted to part-time work with no benefits and very little possibility for advancement or anything but incremental increase in wages.
This gulf between two tracks – struggling in a non-skilled part-time service economy or doing the intense, expensive and life consuming work needed to be educated and promoted into a high wage earning professional or information technology career is visible to Millennials. They’ve seen parents and grandparents who worked their way up to a comfortable standard of living be downsized out of careers they started with hopes of lifetime employment and retirement benefits.
In the minds of Millennials, they must “sell out” to keep a corporate job, they see people earning upper middle class incomes often sacrificing relationships and experiences years on end to keep their jobs working 50 to 60 hours a week. The alternative for the skill sets learned in school – “show up, listen, comply and do as you are told” - is to be treated as pretty much disposable employees in low skill service jobs with no benefits and part time hours.
If we care for our Millennials, we need to take steps to inject the possibility of something more and accept that they have an alternate set of choices that seem insanely risky to previous generations, but to Millennials who cut their teeth on constant change is not intimidating at all.
Education Choices and Challenges for Millennials
Millennials are keenly aware and expect that up to date, detailed information about pretty much everything is a few clicks away. Telling them to memorize information seems pointless, forcing them to use technology and textbooks that are outdated and inaccurate even more so. Doing what it takes to have your Millennial in a forward thinking public school or private school enhances the possibility of them remaining engaged.
For some Millennials, creating customized education, especially in higher grades, using home school materials and college classes, travel and research projects allows them to learn at a pace that fulfills them and opens up internship and career possibilities or time for service activities. Challenges, modular learning and experiences keep them engaged and moving forward.
Relationships are important to Millennials and are a key reason many attend school at all. Alliances with other parents and encouraging Millennials to create and customize supplemental travel, service, social and learning alternatives can help.
One of our associates, who has an exceptionally bright and artistically talented Millennial daughter, allowed her to work with a counselor on things she wanted to learn about and places she wanted to go as she entered high school. They formulated a plan that allowed her to complete the mandatory school requirements as quickly as possible using correspondence and online classes, and positioned her in a part time job to earn money for travel and activities.
Instead of leaving high school with a yearbook and diploma, she traveled throughout Europe and Latin America, gained enough job experience to be employable pretty much anywhere she wants and got entry into a prestigious design school where she is studying photography.
Millennials are globally aware and creating service and learning opportunities for them, in the local community and in other countries even, may be a crucial tactic in keeping them on board to complete school and go on to higher education. Our parenting section in process now will have information about some organizations that offer service/learning travel opportunities.
Second nature to Millennials is “gaming the system” and instead of framing school attendance as something unavoidable and non-choice – parents can show them ways to win school as a game, leveling up by achieving goals on grades and project performance. They can game teachers and administrators by helping them create learning opportunities for everyone, instead of being subversive and looking for hacks and cheats to the system.
Cheating and plagiarism is a big issue in high schools and colleges. Unless we re-align and explain the context of, consequences for and our perception of cheating, this is often a big conflict for Millennials, educators and parents. From their perspective, why bother at all learning the material when the information changes so frequently and is available in their expectations instantaneously via an Internet connection?
Real learning is the process and analysis of information, interpretation and relevant communication of it. If projects and classes were framed in this contextual format, Millennials could see it as a challenge and look for ways to simplify it and optimize it. Instead, our schools and teachers “teach to the test” which is interpreted by Millennials as forcing them to memorize and regurgitate useless information, a huge waste of their time and energy.
Whether your school is communicating this and looking for ways to create technology and experience portals that engage Millennials, it is up to you to take time as a parent or grandparent to give them this perspective. At a minimum it can alleviate frustration. Going beyond that to invest in supplemental learning and technology that enhances and expands what the school provides is well worth it if it prevents despair, boredom and hostility.
The very things that irritate, intimidate and mystify educators, employers and parents about Millennials are their strongest assets as they move into the future we’ve set in motion for them. Having confidence that they will find true success and fulfillment and accepting and celebrating their Millennialization is our highest course of action when it’s time for back to school.
Are Millennials Broken and Defective?
by Scott Degraffenreid, Social Network Architect
Why do educators and parents treat them as if they are and what is the potential impact?
Being told and treated as if you're broken when nothing seems wrong to you is very much at the core of most Millennials experience.
Millennials obviously have a different set of issues. They are told to turn off their iPods/TVs, get off the phone and study. Focus! Pay attention! Follow the rules!! Usually prefaced with the phrase “Why can’t you…?” And their usually unvocalized answer that no one seems to get is “Because I don’t function the way you do, if I do it that way I’m bored out of my mind and restless.”
One of the reasons I’ve focused on creating and sharing information that helps employers, educators and parents understand Millennials is that I understand exactly how painful it is to be treated like you need to be fixed and corrected all the time. Some years ago as part of an elaborate job application process I was diagnosed as having borderline Asperger’s syndrome. Asperger’s is at the high end of what are now referred to as autism spectrum disorders (ASD). When I was younger barely anyone had heard of autism and Asperger’s was yet to be identified. I was always considered just a weird and kind of creepy kid and, as I got older, more or less an insensitive but intelligent jerk.
Like many Asperger’s sufferers (Aspys) I am of above average intelligence. Over time I have learned to emulate normalcy. I've basically forced myself to memorize appropriate social behaviors. With no small effort I've learned to recognize and respond correctly to the emotions and expressions of others. Even today however, what Neuro Typicals (NT’s) …aka “normal people”… do virtually unconsciously, requires deliberate focused effort on my part. For NT’s things like empathy and compassion are as effortless as reading this sentence. For me it's more like reading Greek upside down in a mirror.
Before I acquired the ability to blend in or pass for normal in most interactions my life was incredibly stressful. The question ‘what is wrong with you?’ sounds innocuous enough but after you've heard it several thousand times it starts to sound more like what I imagine a newspaper being rolled up sounds like to a dog that knows he’s about to be hit. Nearly every adult I ever encountered in my childhood and adolescence seemed to want to fix me. “You're so smart, if you'd only….” “Why can't you get this? It's so simple!” “How many times have I told you to…?” I’d estimate I was pelted with at least a dozen conversations in these veins every day for close to 20 years.
Fortunately for me my maternal grandmother was primarily responsible for raising my brother and I until I was almost eight years old. It was pretty obvious from the start that I wasn’t a normal child. I almost never cried, seldom laughed and hardly spoke a word until I was three, when I abruptly began speaking in complete sentences one day. All that time and from then on “Ma” always said ‘he’s fine; he’s just different.’ More importantly that's what she always told me ‘you're fine, you're just different.’ It's a simple enough thing to say but I could tell she really believed it and she operated as if it were true. If I said or did something inappropriate she never once took the ‘what's wrong with you?’ tack. She might stop and say ‘do you see what just happened there?’ or ‘this is why they got upset’. She never started from ‘you've screwed up again.’ and she always finished with ‘don't worry, you're fine.’
Those may seem like pretty small things, but unconditional love and acceptance from even one person when the rest of the world thinks you're inexcusably damaged goods can be the difference in feeling like you're at the bottom of a black pit versus in a safe, comfortable room softly lit by just one candle. As I learned to adapt over the years there were more people who recognized that different isn't automatically defective. Still, I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if it weren't for my grandmother’s unwavering and automatic belief in me.
There have always been people with the types of issues that Millennials are confronting today. They didn't exist in any large numbers as Millennials do, but people who seem to operate on different wavelengths have been and will always be around. How the world handles their differences and how they cope with being different is the distance between feeling like an outcast and knowing that you are outstanding in some way.
When parents, educators and employers go through our material on “Understanding Millennials” and see how computer work, video games and high speed, image rich entertainment stimulus has created a generation that thinks in menu-systems, is compulsive about problem solving and attenuates layers of patterns, observations and choices – they can begin to see that it isn’t a matter of too much going on at once – their Millennials do better when they can operate at a higher level of challenge.
Just as much as this interaction with technology has created brain patterns that process faster and better – the cultural shifts and exposure through 24/7 access to every terrible thing happening throughout the world has shifted Millennials to be focused on relationships – with family and friends being a high priority. Teachers, parents and employers who are irritated by how they respond and what appears to them to be scattered thinking and boredom often miss making a connection with them on a relationship level which widens the feeling of disconnection.
A lot of Millennials don't feel they have anyone other than their peers who aren't trying to fix them. Of course many Millennials are bright enough to act “fixed”, to emulate what we seem to want, but often despite this, they really do feel broken. It's worse than trying to pitch or catch with your off hand. For them being like us is like trying to juggle with your hands tied behind your back. Millennials really do want and need our approval. The problem is most of us seem unwilling or incapable of approving of them just as they are. Setting it up with them having to “fake” normal behavior to be accepted can create a huge breach in their relationship with their parents that only grows wider in time.
If you can gain insight into how they are thinking and responding and you can help them learn to interact positively and respectfully with “normal” people in older generations – without the underlying tone that they are rude or broken – that’s great. But on a primary level, be a parent for the child you have, not the child you think you should have. Remember that the very things that seem out of step and too fast-paced and scattered are the ways that they may be perfectly adapted to a world that is just beginning to exist.
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