This is a mere horrible rough draft. It will probably become a 10 page essay in which all the flow problems (and glaring evidence problems) will be worked out.
Meals in 5 minutes, toys received upon request, and other sources of instant gratification are seriously destroying the perceptive senses of the latest generation. How can anyone learn a sense of time or work when everything is handed to them instantaneously with not only a lack of harvest, but a sense of entitlement? I have a younger brother of 7 and several young cousins that I spend time with several days of week. This and the fact that I am a mere half-generation above them gives me the credibility to put forth the theory that attention spans are ever-shortening and that it is leading to problems like the general lack of discipline, motivation, and maturity.
The first source of instant gratification starts when babies are born. The latest generation of parents, fearing the title of being a neglectful parent, feed their baby whenever it cries, attend to it whenever it cries, and do everything in their power to keep their baby from crying. I am sure that it was not this way in our hunter-gatherer days when the availability of food and time alone would have prevented this constant attentiveness. So I have to logically conclude that a baby’s brain starts to become trained at an early age that when it is in want, it needs to cry out and its needs will be instantly met. I believe that the child is also taught in this stage to become almost selfish, that their wants take precedent over their parents.
The second source then becomes when these babies grow in to toddlers uttering their first commands, which almost always is “no”. Parents today bend to their children like I can’t imagine they did before, most of the time compromising or downright obeying their own child. This just reinforces the child’s belief that their needs are above that of anyone else’s and their sense of entitlement slowly grows with every instance of weakness from their own parent. Meal time is no longer divided in to three like it used to be, but is divided in to whenever the child wants a “snack”. My cousins and brother have rice crispy treats whenever they want, or potato chips, or popcorn at almost any time of the day. When time comes to eat traditional meals, my young relatives don’t eat all of their meal and are excused from doing so without thinking twice. How could they ever learn to wait for things when basic things like food are provided at their slightest whim? These quick snacks usually are not healthy and it is widely known that childhood obesity is on the rise probably from overeating junk food, which I credit as a direct result of this poor enforcement of mealtime discipline.
There was a study not a long time ago in the journal of Pediatrics that linked watching television with shorter attention spans in children. I would say this also becomes a major source of instant gratification in the early years. Sesame Street and Jay Jay the Jet Plane teach kids to forget about entertaining themselves, and to start to learn to stare at a series of pictures that does their thinking for them. They never learn to sit and fantasize and imagine and exercise their brains for a time when they might not have someone to do their creative tasks for them. This is a key part of the lack of motivation that I mentioned earlier. Why would anyone who was never taught to put time and effort in to anything suddenly pick it up once they reach adulthood? It is not something that just happens in human beings, the ability to dedicate and put time in to yourself is learned through the time reserved for learning, youth.
The preteen years and teenage years are now being dominated by cell phones, allowances, gifts of inappropriate size, and the continuation of the lack of discipline enforcement. How many kids have chores anymore? Not me. Not my cousins or my brother. My father had them in spades, yet the kids doing them today are a minority and their “chores” are usually compensated.
My father didn’t have too many luxuries and I am sure his father had less and so on. How many kids have to buy their own car? I didn’t. My dad did. How do you learn to value expensive objects if you are just given them? How come credit today among the young generation is so horrifically bad and that America’s rate of savings has for the first time in history, dipped in to the negative. We are actually borrowing more money now than we’re saving and I am willing to say this is a direct result of the lack of an attention span. We want things and want them now and don’t have the sufficient skills to wait and save for anything.
I had not yet touched on maturity, but my case is this: studies have shown that kids are living with their parents longer and longer. This is because we don’t even know how to grow up, we don’t even want to! The thorough loss of attention span in our early years forced us to not even think about taking care of ourselves. Everything has been taken care of our whole life and nobody wants to just be cut loose anymore.
While I am not a scientist nor have I done any scientific study, I just know in my gut that my cousins and my brother and even myself are a little bit lost in the world because of our shortened attention spans. We never learned how to take care of ourselves, how to wait patiently for simple things like a new bike or even dinner. You will see even more and more concrete evidence of this lack of discipline, maturity, and motivation in the years to come. It’s because of attention span; I guarantee it.
Read more!
