According to a study presented in HealthyDay News, “today’s American high school students are far likelier than those in the 1970s to believe they’ll make outstanding spouses, parents and workers.” The research findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science claim that “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far.” The study’s co-author, Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, states:
“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence.”
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The study found that today’s teens are “much more likely to claim they are “A” students with high IQs — even though other research shows that today’s students do less homework than their counterparts did in the 1970s.”
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Twenge believes that “decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world. High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,”
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HealthyDay News reported that co-researcher W. Keith Campbell, of the University of Georgia, used data from another study, Monitoring the Future study, to further their research.
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The co-authors compared the answers teens provided in 1975 and 2006 to 13 questions centered on students’ “self-views.” These questions asked students to share their opinions on such things as “how smart they thought they were”, or “how likely they were to be successful as adults.”
Twenge claims, “When we look at the responses of the students in the ’70s, they are certainly confident that they are going to perform well, but their responses are more modest, a little more realistic” than teens in 2006,
The HealthyDay News reported the following examples:
· In 1975, less than 37 percent of teens thought they’d be “very good” spouses, compared to more than 56 percent of those surveyed in 2006.
· Likewise, the number of students who thought they’d become “very good” parents rose from less than 36 percent in 1975 to more than 54 percent in 2006.
· Almost two-thirds of teens in 2006 thought they’d be exemplary workers, compared to about half of those polled in 1975.
· Twice as many students in 2006 than in 1976 said they earned an “A” average in high school — 15.6 percent vs. 7.7 percent, the report found.
As a parent herself, Twenge shared a personal observation. As a mother of a 2-year-old daughter, “I see the parenting of kids around her age, and I haven’t seen this changing. Look around — about a fourth of the clothing available to her says ‘Little Princess’ on it.”
