Curling and cajoling

28 July 2017

At the recent Roskilde music festival, when the mob of waiting attendees was let onto the grounds, many apparently had to fight hard to get a good location for their tents, and some were rather young. It’s common for high school kids to attend this week-long communal experience. It’s an initiation ritual, and adherents with many years’ experience ensure us that they are happy to help and watch out for the noobs. This year there was an outcry on Roskilde’s Facebook page by parents complaining to the festival management that their children had been pushed aside by older youths and denied the location that their position in line had entitled them to. Immediately came a equally strong reaction condemning the parentsfor trying to micromanage their children’s lives.

In Denmark they’re called “curling parents,” who sweep away the smallest obstacles before their kids – shelter them, cater to them and indulge them; in the US, I think the phrase is “helicopter parents.” This episode resuscitated a recurring debate in the media about just how spoiled Danish kids are and childrearing in general. The short answer is very – perhaps the most pampered and protected on the face of the earth. They enjoy the highest standard of living, an extensive safety net of social benefits, a flexible educational system, generous maternity and paternity leave, subsidized day-care, free college, stipends for studying, and unemployment benefits upon graduation.

The age of affluence

Material prosperity is certainly a large factor. It comes partly because both parents usually work, and that means childcare is outsourced to a greater degree. If the parents experience time pressure, work pressure or peer pressure themselves, it’s often easier to address an immediate need by doing something for a child than training the child to do it herself.

The left wing calls attention to the existence of disadvantaged children whose are socially stigmatized because their parents cannot afford to send them to sports clubs or buy a birthday present for a classmate. This segment has grown lately because of cuts in welfare benefits for immigrants, and the stigmatizing effect is real because of the high average level of prosperity. But the percentage of children in poverty is much lower than the US, partly because joint custody and child support for children of divorce seem to function well generally.

The gentleperson’s C

Danish schoolchildren’s performance on international tests has fallen sharply in the past 20 years to middling among developed countries, despite the most expensive school system in the world. A few years ago there was a TV documentary that followed two ninth-grade classes, one Danish and one Chinese. The latter clearly outperformed the Danes, not only in rote learning but also in the Danes’ purported forte, creativity. One explanation for the decline is the idealistic reforms from more than a generation ago that abolished segmentation by ability in the name of egalitarianism.

The criticism is that teaching was geared toward the lowest common denominator but the poorest students still didn’t perform up to the standard and were never allowed to flunk a grade. Up to 20 percent were carried along through ninth grade as functional illiterates, and some of the better students became bored and disaffected. A rapidly increasing percentage of students attend gymnasium, which is high school on a college-prep track, because they don’t want a vocational trade, and teachers find them unprepared. Afterward, almost all of them now take a gap year or two or three to find out what they want to do with their lives.

The number who attend university is also rising quickly. It’s about 50 percent higher than it was 10 years ago. Although they shy away from STEM programs, their professors also find them unprepared and lazy. Since only a minority live in dormitories, the rise in attendance has contributed to the housing shortage in Copenhagen, and many parents need to buy apartments for them to live in. They’re the oldest in the world, on average, by the time they finish their studies – around 28 – and when some graduates cannot find a job in their field, they unashamedly prefer unemployment benefits to a service job.

Future shock

In their defense, these young people are also said to suffer from elevated stress. They complain about pressure to perform academically and social pressure to be physically perfect and share nude photos. They are of course technologically sophisticated digital natives. They grew up on PlayStation, Xbox and iPad and got their first cell phone at a tender age. They’re always on call. They reply to every text message immediately, even at the dinner table. They check Facebook updates compulsively or whatever is the latest app. An increasing number are diagnosed with hyperactivity and medicated, although not to the same degree as in the US. Others suffer eating disorders and experiment with cutting. Many start drinking after confirmation at age 14. Half the cases of high school dropouts are owing to weed.

Demographically, they are not as lucky as the baby boomers who enjoyed decades of steady growth and property value appreciation after World War II and whom the millennials will now need to support in retirement. They are said to be anxious about the future, the uncertainties of the labor market with jobs being lost to offshoring, robotics and software, and political uncertainties in an age of terrorism and mass migration. But most seem to have little concern about their economic future or the stability of their society, nor are they very curious about revolutionary developments in bioengineering or AI.

Mea culpa

Personally, while I side with the critics of curling in principle, I must confess to belonging to the guilty camp of enablers myself. Of course parents should instill discipline, responsibility and aspiration in their offspring. My failing came not as much from an anxiety to shield my son from ordinary vicissitudes as from impatience, frustration and expedience. By their mid-teens, their indifference, contrariness and complacency can be so ingrained or resolute that if you make a request or give an order three times, they’re still able to forget the obligation or rationalize it away. It’s easy to let your good intentions get worn down and say fuck it, wait until he hits the next level of socialization and has to face reality and its consequences. Most of them seem to turn out all right in the end, but an unnecessarily large share fall by the wayside.