Josh is 16. He doesn’t smoke or do drugs and he’s never been blind drunk. At school, he’s popular and hard-working with out being geeky2). At home, he spends too much time on MSN and his Play-Station3), but he practises his saxophone when prompted, tells funny jokes and has a delightfully engaging relationship with his parents. Sounds like the perfect teenager? Think again.
Josh is part of a new social phenomenon — the tethered4) generation.
These are the children who, in the most childcentric time in our history, get on with their parents perhaps too well. Their mothers and fathers are attuned5) and all-providing. Instructed by numerous manuals, they have striven to raise confident and well-adjusted offspring. The dialogue between parents and teens is more open than it has ever been.
Predictable clashes remain — untidy bedrooms, unwashed dishes, homework — but many parents are proud to declare that their teen is also their friend. With that friendship, however, comes an emerging fear: have we produced a generation that will not be able to fend for itself6)?
“My son is quite shockingly attached to me,” says Josh’s mother Caroline, a 42-year-old lawyer. “What worries me is how he is going to make the leap from his comfortable life with us to independence.”
Louise, 48, a communications consultant and mother of three, feels similarly uneasy about her son Luke. “In a way, I would find it easier to deal with a child who was wilfully disobedient. It would give me something to grab on to. What I have is a child who doesn’t appear to understand the realities of life. I can’t seem to impress upon him the importance of knuckling down7) if he is going to make it in the work-force. His teachers say that desire for achievement has to come from him — meanwhile I feel guilty because I’ve generated his laid-back8) approach by being too soft.”
To understand the tethered generation — and their well-intentioned but fretful9) parents — you first have to understand the shifting social patterns of the past four decades. Those now raising teenagers are, in the main, part of Generation X, the section of the population born between 1965 and 1976. Their own parents and grandparents had lived through the deprivation of war — “you don’t know how lucky you are”was a mantra10) of their upbringing. And yet, in many ways, Generation Xers were not so lucky. During their childhood, divorce became easier and therefore more widespread, their emancipated mothers began experimenting with the “have-it-all11)” theory, creating the term “latchkey kids12)”, and meanwhile, the economy went into major recession, with mass unemployment and a three-day week13) during the 1970s. To succeed, Generation Xers have had to be resilient14) and adaptable self-starters. The tethered generation are part of Generation Y. Born between 1977 and 1999, their backdrop has been economic boom and a rising stock market. Their families may struggle at times to pay the bills, but still they have no concept of a world without mobile phones and remote-control televisions. No home is complete without a PC — and preferably a laptop for their personal use, too. This has made them technically literate, but also impatient.
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大学英语---