By Rebecca Do
Teachers can only do so much to make sure their kids succeed. Sure, my brain and I are both satiated in my AP classes, with my wonderful teachers who’ve been working since the beginning of time, but the problem isn’t with these modern-day high school teachers.
It’s a culmination of modern-day parenting techniques, the pandemic and underfunded public schools.
Pandemic parenting has severely damaged the new generation of children. They’re put in front of a screen from dusk to dawn, their little brains unable to handle information if not given in 15-second increments.
The guardians in all this? Clearly not thinking about the adverse effects that their passive style of parenting has on their children.
I first caught wind of this concern on TikTok (ironic, isn’t it?). User @qbthedon, a middle school teacher based in Atlanta, posted a video about his class of seventh graders — who were still performing at a fourth-grade level. This video sparked conversation amongst educators, parents and “unqualified” childless spectators such as myself on pandemic parenting and how it’ll be the be-all and end-all for Generation Alpha.
When I was in elementary school, my peers and I were reading at a ninth-grade level. It may have been because we were all huge nerds, but it was mostly due to the fact that we craved reading — something that we would often get in trouble for when we did it in class. But kids these days aren’t getting in trouble for those sorts of things anymore; instead, their parent-teacher conferences most likely start with “unfortunately, your child is not performing at their grade level.”
I remember thoughtfully scribbling my musings onto my knees in class. I remember my friends and I writing books — folding copy paper into halves, storyboarding, authoring and passing them around the class when they were complete. I craved the thrill of reading a “new” book that was probably a regurgitation of some novel they had read before (though the idea of plagiarism wasn’t fresh in the minds of eight-year-olds yet). Still, we kept busy — our minds put to work and our brains set in motion by the pure joy and excitement we experienced from reading and learning. This was commonplace.
QB does an amazing job of giving us insight into the world of an educator in the modern age. In the aforementioned video, he says “But why don’t y’all know that y’all kids are not performing at their grade level? Why don’t y’all know this?”
Some parents refuse to accept the fact that their kids are developing as they should, and it is so, incredibly damaging.
Of course, there are the outliers: neurodivergent kids, kids who are reading above grade level and the kids who are right where they’re supposed to be. I’m sure there are many psychological nuances of why our attention spans are shorter (social media and accessible entertainment) and why kids these days aren’t learning as well as they used to (exposure to such mediums,) but that would create an article so long that not even I would like to read myself. It would, however, explain how these children are so behind.
I work with children myself; as a high school senior by day and piano teacher by night, I’ve become accustomed to the little ones born in the 2010s. Their bright eyes are captivating every time they pluck the keys, their little brains twisting and turning every time I give them a new piece. However, I have noticed that the younger they get, the harder they are to teach. Even the older children — the ones in their -teens, can’t read music as well as I remember kids doing at my age. Why?
The accountability of these parents is at an all-time low. Beige parents on TikTok, mommy bloggers, vlog families, parents who shove their kids in front of television screens in order to get time to themselves, mommies who care about their kids only at the surface level, and dads who pump out more children from different people than an Apple factory are damaging us; they are damaging our society, our kids, our future generations.
To an extent, kids are only as good as the parents who raise them; the age-old question of nature versus nurture.
To me, it’s all nurture.
The way that kids are being raised nowadays is not helpful, nor does it prepare them for the future, the real world. We should, if anything, enact a state of emergency. WARNING: the future generation is going to have no idea how to run the world. Help!
There is too much pressure from parents on the people who teach their children. Keep in mind that our public schools are underfunded and understaffed, and that definitely does not help the academic dilemma.
We place too much pressure on educators to help these kids learn three, four or even five years’ worth of material, and for what? So they can move on to the next grade?
We don’t need that. We don’t need more eighth graders who don’t understand phonics or more seventh graders who can’t divide — what people need to do, is to start cracking down on how they are teaching children at home.
