Generation: Socially Inept

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

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I recommend that everyone click on the link to this article in order to get the entire thing in context, but to sum it up before I begin my rant, educators are attempting to separate children that are drawn to one another in an effort to keep other children from feeling excluded, and to prevent bullying. When children get into arguments, teachers feel as though they need to interfere and force them to set things right. Luckily, I am not the only person that finds all of this incredibly stupid.

We were all children once. Most of us had that one friend that we were drawn to and that we considered our best friend. The childhood best friend is the first meaningful relationship most of us have outside of the family unit, and indeed, some of those friendships remain strong into adulthood. These are the first relationships we have that teach us how to be friends. Whether they thrive forever, fade, or end badly, we all take away some sort of lesson about how we want to be treated, how to treat others, and how to socialize in a healthy manner.

The idea that having a best friend leads to bullying, excluding other children, or that it is somehow unhealthy to have that one special friend is wrong on several levels. As mentioned in the article, how is it healthy to foster several superficial relationships and discourage the deeper ones? How does this even connect to bullying, when the bully is very often that lone child that picks on other lone children? I ask, what is this doing to a generation that is already disconnected from its peers?

I will be showing my age in saying this, but for various reasons not worth getting into at the moment, for some are sound or cannot necessarily be helped, while the rest are paranoid, children no longer have the freedom to go outside and play. Overly involved parents set up play dates with other children, so that outside of school, children only seem to come into contact with the children that their parents choose for them. I recently read an article (sorry, I did not think to save the link), that children were being set up on Skype play dates, eliminating the whole going outside and running around, getting dirty and possibly hurt thing.

Should this trend continue, the generation growing up now is going to be the most shallow generation yet. They will never learn social or problem solving skills on their own, because parents and teachers are preventing them from having the meaningful friendships that teach us how to fight, apologize from the heart, be empathetic, selfless, and otherwise normal, with the experience to understand how people click and interact. Without those lessons, and without the beauty of having that one friend that shares your secrets, you are bound to become an emotional deficient. The article states that this is all being done to force children to build stronger working relationships with all of their peers, but if anything, it is undermining it.

It's bad enough that Facebook has become the modern child's playground, where the lack of face to face contact is making it difficult for kids to relate to one another. I truly feel that this ignorance of facial cues and gestures is the reason for the sudden boom of self diagnosed/parent diagnosed Asperger's cases. To stunt the normal social life of children who interact on a daily basis is completely misguided, and if this becomes the norm, the human race will have lost a part of its very essence and ability to solve problems in a healthy manner, or form other meaningful relationships as they grow into adults.