Advice to Parents of Generation Me
Review of Caffrey’s: Drive: 9 Ways to Motivate Your Kids to Achieve
Sep 11, 2008
Once parents read Janine Walker Caffrey's book, it will affect the way they think about parenting their kids forever. Seeing one’s own kids only as individuals rather than as part of their generation is to miss the significance of things going on in one’s very own home.
Excellent Parents Will Have Their Eyes Opened Wide
Caffrey advises parents that some of the things they do that they think are helping their kids may not be beneficial in the long run. For example, this generation constantly has access to their parents via cell phone. Parents may think kids are being responsible when they text message their parent from school to ask for advice on a decision about school or friends. But technology has allowed so much communication that teenagers are rarely in a position to make their own decisions. This has resulted in a generation of teens who are fearful of acting on their own behalf and are chronically waiting around for someone to tell them what to do.
In addition to pointing out the harmful effects of seemingly positive behaviors, the book will help parents recognize areas where they may have caved into societal pressures against their own better judgment. It will reinvigorate them to act on their wiser instincts in areas where they may have reluctantly compromised.
Caffrey Offers Advice Counteracting the Negative Traits of Generation Me
Central to Caffrey’s concern is that Generation Me (those born between 1981 and 1996 and later,) unlike prior generations, lacks one of the basic life skills: drive. Caffrey's parenting advice is organized around the concept of counteracting this trend.
Drive is the desire to pursue one's dreams and the energy that makes a person do so. According to Caffrey, members of Generation Me are so lacking in drive that they are not becoming productive, independent adults.
In her observation and research, Caffrey has noticed:
- more and more young adults refusing to move out of their parents’ homes;
- young adults lacking a desire to do much, with no clear purpose in life and no interest in developing one;
- teens and young adults being unable to commit to short-term relationships or even dates, let alone marriage and family life, with an increasing number of out-of-wedlock births;
- teens lacking the desire for a driver’s license and putting this off much longer than any other generation;
- children feeling chronically bored and needing to be entertained and helped constantly.
Caffrey's Parenting Advice is Highly Credible
According to Caffrey, this group has grown up at the center of their parents’ focus in a society of abundance, total comfort and 24/7 fear-mongering news media. They are over-scheduled, constantly entertained and supervised, and hovered over by anxious parents who believe they will be abducted any minute - despite the fact that, according to Caffrey's research, they have grown up in a safer-than-ever society where the rate of child abductions by strangers is down to around 115 per year in the US.
Caffrey makes a strong and credible case for how circumstances of the times have shaped the development of this generation and have ultimately robbed them of their desire to think and act on their own. The credibility of her advice to parents is enhanced by the fact that in response to this problem, she founded her own school, specifically geared towards restoring drive and helping students take initiative in every area of life.
Positive Parenting Tips
This book gives new meaning to the term "positive parenting." Caffrey offers concrete advice on how to deal with kids and young adults who have never developed drive. For those with younger children, Caffrey advises parents on iinstilling and cultivating this most essential and basic of life skills. Her advice is sound and does not involve goal charts or "techniques". Rather, she gives clear-headed, common sense specifics that are easy to grasp, once the significance of instilling drive is understood.
Caffrey offers hope for children and young adults regardless of how apathetic they may have become. The parents' response is critical in motivating children.
Caffrey Offers Parents an Insider's View of Their Children's Generation
Caffrey has an understanding of how kids have changed over the years, unique to those who have been in the field of education for generations, and she gives the reader this insider's view. A parent of Generation Me children herself, she is quite credible. However, there may be way too much advice crammed into this book, and at times it is repetitive and seems like a mere laundry list of her own personal parenting preferences.
Also, many of the parenting tips are so solid that if parents aren’t already doing these things – and clearly many, if not most, parents of this generation are not – then just telling them to do so does not seem helpful. Sometimes things like inappropriate guilt or other personal issues prevent parents from doing what is clearly in their children's best interests.
Case examples of parents who have tried to implement some of these strategies and the difficulties they faced – practically and emotionally – would be more helpful for parents having difficulty. If the book falls short at all it is in that Caffrey fails to reach into the minds of parents to help them uncover what is at the root of their well-intentioned mistakes.
In spite of its minor drawbacks, this book is more than recommended reading: it is essential reading for every parent of a Generation Me kid.
The book is Drive: 9 Ways to Motivate Your Kids to Achieve, Advice from Middle School to College and Beyond, by Janine Walker Caffrey, EdD, First Da Capo Press edition 2008, ISBN 978-0-7382-1160-2.
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