https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=H4KiYLGcCo8
You introduce the book, Who is I, Jen, and How Do We Know, and then talk about chapter one, In No Hurry, Growing Up Slowly. That’s the prolongation of childhood. And so tell us about that and also about what you make of it. Yeah, so childhood really does last longer now. Kids are not as independent, and when they get to be teenagers, they’re just less likely to do all of these things that adults do and children don’t do. And it’s part of a bigger cultural story. It’s part of what evolutionary psychologists call a slow life strategy. So that means at times and places when people live longer, when health care is better, and when education takes longer to finish, parents tend to make the choice to have fewer children and nurture them more carefully. So that’s a pretty good description of the way that we raise kids now. So you get that kids don’t walk to school by themselves as much, and then when they’re teens, they are more reluctant to get their driver’s license or to go out or to date or have a paid job. And then by young adulthood, it takes longer for people to settle into a career and get married and have children. And then even older adults affects them too, that 50 is the new 40 and people are healthy for longer. So the entire trajectory of life has really slowed down. And for iGen or Generation Z, where that really comes out is that their teen years are very different from their Gen X parents who remember going out, driving around in cars, getting in trouble, drinking alcohol, all of those things, and their kids don’t do that as much. So do you see this as a prolongation of childhood in a positive way because people have longer to live or because the cynic in me, I suppose the Freudian too, thinks of this as a consequence of overprotective parenting and the inappropriate extension of childhood into adolescence. And I’m wondering too, to what degree, you talked about improvements in healthcare and transformations in technology, longer lifespan. To what degree is this also a consequence of the fact that people are older when they have children, that they have fewer children and that they’re wealthier, which all of that would make them in some sense more conservative, but also in some strange sense more careful with their children and maybe even more inappropriately careful. And especially the age of parents that’s increased over the years and the fact that there are fewer siblings, which also seems to me to tie into your work on narcissism because I think siblings tend to knock the narcissism out of each other. And so when you don’t have any, well, you definitely are a specialist, especially if your parents have been waiting for you for a long time. Yeah, so it’s definitely a function of people waiting longer to have kids. And you just said they have more resources and they have fewer children. Because when you think about this strategy, that’s when it happens. It happens when there’s more security and when everything tends to slow down. And when there’s fewer kids, just from an evolutionary perspective, then parents are going to protect them more. Also, you just can’t keep track of them all when there’s a lot of them. So my mother comes from a family like that. There were eight children in her family and a dairy farm in Minnesota. And they couldn’t possibly have run their dairy farm and kept track of every single one of the kids, so they learned how to be independent very early on. But that was in the 1940s and 50s, and that was the standard at the time. Even families with fewer kids, it was normal for the children to go and play and it was be home at dinner or come home when the streetlights come on if you grew up in a more urban setting. But that was the idea of you kind of let kids do what they wanted to. And that’s different now. And it’s not just from the parents. So I think sometimes if you just look at other the parents who are overprotective, you miss some of the bigger cultural story that I mean, this has been codified into law in a lot of places in the state of Illinois. You’re not allowed to leave a child alone until they’re 14 years old, which to a Gen Xer is ridiculous. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere, whether you’re selling succulents or stilettos, start selling with Shopify and join the platform, simplifying commerce for millions of businesses worldwide. 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Or do you see something something that’s permanently affecting people’s capability of maturing? You know, I think it’s some of both. It is part of technology, certainly, that all of these causes are rooted in technology, better health care, education taking longer for a more complex society and more knowledge that pushes toward that slow life strategy. So it’s an adaptation. It’s an adaptation to a particular place in time. So there’s trade-offs. Neither slow life strategy or fast life strategy is all good or all bad. There are some clear advantages. The kids are not growing up as fast. Most parents are thrilled that not as many teens are having sex or drinking alcohol. But there is the downside. The downside is that we have a generation growing to adulthood who doesn’t have as much experience with independence. And it’s difficult often for them to make decisions on their own. So when I travel around to universities, this is what I hear very consistently. I have more and more students who can’t make even simple decisions without texting their parents. And to take the perspective of this young generation too, which I think is important, it makes sense. It’s, you know, this is not necessarily how they asked to be raised. This is the culture that they grew up in. And they arrive at university without those experiences of making those decisions. And it’s really, really hard for them to do that and to make that adjustment. So that’s the big downside. So that’s where I think, you know, as you said, you can be more of a cynic or a critic and say, you know, this is definitely not all good. I do hesitate to use the word maturity though, because is it more mature or less mature to drink alcohol when you’re 17? It’s really neither one. So I think it’s better to focus on that it’s slower development. Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but slower. Yeah, well, there were studies of alcohol use. I remember conducted when I was studying alcohol several decades ago, looking at, let’s say, life outcomes among teenagers as a consequence of their proclivity to break rules. And the findings basically were that, and this is probably what you’d expect, is that the kids who broke no rules were much more likely to be dependent, depressed and anxious. And the kids that broke too many rules were much more likely to be antisocial, right, and criminal. And so there’s a sweet spot in the middle, like there is so often, where a certain amount of experimentation is exactly what you’d hope for. And the question would be, if the proclivity of young people to drink less alcohol, and I mean alcohol is pretty damn toxic, it’s a bad drug, all things considered, is a net good because they’re delaying their experimentation, that’s probably neurologically healthy, at least with regards to the effects of alcohol. But if it means that they’re doing less experimentation in general, then the question is what the long-term consequences are. I mean, if it’s only a delayed maturation, then in some sense, it doesn’t make that much difference. But if it’s a permanent abdication of maturation, then that’s a completely different issue. And you also mentioned cell phones and texting parents. I mean, one of the ways that people learn to make decisions before there were cell phones is that they didn’t really have a choice. Because if you were away from your parents in a car, you were actually away, unless you could get to a payphone, let’s say. But even then, that wasn’t necessarily all that likely, and you’d have to go search one out. And so you were on your own. It wasn’t just that you were acting like it. And now, because you’re connected all the time with this electronic tether, especially, I would say, if your parents are somewhat anxious, then, well, under what circumstances should you make your own decisions? And that was never a choice before. And those sorts of things become problematic when they become a choice. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, that’s the other piece that technology plays. And it is, yeah, even when you’re at university, you can constantly contact your parents in a way that didn’t used to be possible. And the other part of it, too, and this gets to some of the other trends in the book, is that socializing for teens has moved online. And so you think about a lot of those things on that list that adults do and children don’t, where a lot of them involve getting out of the house and hanging out with friends and getting in a car, usually to go be with other people. And that doesn’t happen as much now because the party is on Snapchat or on Instagram. So that’s the other way that technology is playing a role, is there’s so much more interaction online and less face-to-face.