#Resiliency
To me, it’s run its course. Like the aftermath on college campuses to support students in internalizing a sense of grit after Angela Duckworth’s research was published. Full disclosure: I showed her video to my class of students when I worked in higher education. I absolutely drank the Kool-Aid, and I still believe in every young person having grit. It translates to having passion and perseverance. Everyone needs that. And then just like grit, “resiliency” became the next buzzword on campus. We needed every incoming student to be resilient.
If you haven’t read The Coddling of the America Mind, I highly encourage you. It does a fantastic job of discussing how good intentions are setting up Generation Z for failure. These young people haven’t had to experience resiliency like generations before them. And because of it, now we’re trying load them up with resources so they can be resilient. It’s a hard thing to sit back and watch.
Let’s not call it resiliency for a minute. Let’s just reference it as “bouncing back.” Let’s call it students being human and falling and then picking themselves back up. Sometimes struggling to get back to where they were, and other times being able to jump back immediately. Setbacks are normal, especially for college-aged individuals. I talk about this a lot in my other writings. Especially for the students who were high achievers in high school and didn’t head the warnings around the changing in college academics and expectations. Those are the students who struggled with their own distortions around the reality of their situations. Some of those students were able to bounce back, others ended up dropping out.
There’s a correlation between those who were able to separate their failures with what they did versus associating the failure with who they were. This is why we have such a high population of young adults with anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation. They grew up being praised for what they did (read: academics, achievements, and community honors), and were never taught to separate that from who they were as a person. It was too entangled. These are the current college students today.
If you’re a Millenial though, maybe you’ll understand my reference when I talk about wooden push puppets. Anyone born after 1995 probably wouldn’t even know what the hell I’m talking about. If you grew up knowing push puppets though, you will get my reference. We found pleasure and entertainment in pushing these toys and would watch them collapse, knowing they would immediately re-right themselves with the simple release of a finger. Every time they would collapse, they would fall in different positions. I vividly remember giggling at these when I was younger. The transference to the notion of resiliency in modern age is frightening.
Here’s my plea: can we move away from this topic? Can we instead just assume that every young person who is human will experience ups and downs and we need to load them up with ways in which to respond to these challenges? We don’t have to go along with the fad of referencing students as resilient or not. We don’t have to go along with the fad of referencing a student as having grit or not. Let’s show current student a wooden push puppet and let them make sense of the correlation between that item and their life. Let’s give them the space to sort it out on their own. If they need help processing next steps, we can be there to guide them. We’re not telling them what to do, nor telling them it will be okay. The wooden push puppet has already done that for us.
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