"The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt. A Review

It has become commonplace to attack helicopter parenting as producing an endless array of social and individual woes. Young children, coddled and scheduled all day, fail to learn to play on their own and do not develop the basic cognitive skills to master self-control and deal with difficulties. When they age, as college age students, they are too anxious, depressed, and afraid of basic life decisions because of their overinvolved parents. These helicopter parents are even to blame, in an article in The Atlantic, for individuals taking offense too easily and taking emotion, instead of reason, as sufficient grounds for lawsuits against teachers and professors (Lukianoff & Haidt). This chapter addresses the construction of the idea of the deleterious effects of helicopter parenting and the popular advice on how to better parent. Myths of a bygone past when parenting was easier, natural, and less involved draw an obscure veil over inevitable and avoidable ambivalence in parenting. One finds that the solution to helicopter parenting is a rigorous disciplinary project on the part of the parents—what I call “meta-helicopter parenting.” Falling largely to mothers, one is encouraged to think one’s child is a project entirely dependent upon proper choices. Such ideas foster the neoliberal turn which makes addressing structural problems collectively elusive.

The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency, 2020

This chapter addresses the construction of the idea of the deleterious effects of helicopter parenting and the popular advice on how to better parent. Myths of a bygone past when parenting was easier, natural, and less involved draw an obscure veil over inevitable and avoidable ambivalence in parenting. One finds that the solution to helicopter parenting is a rigorous disciplinary project on the part of the parents—what I call “meta-helicopter parenting.” Falling largely to mothers, one is encouraged to think one’s child is a project entirely dependent upon proper choices. Such ideas foster the neoliberal turn which makes addressing structural problems collectively elusive.

Research in Higher Education Journal, 2017

Perhaps universities have gone too far in their attempts to provide the best learning experience for our students? We have heard of helicopter parents who hover over their sons and daughters, removing all obstacles their student might face and solve problems for them. Have colleges and universities adopted this same kind of behavior in their attempt to be “student oriented,” provide better customer service, and reduce student attrition rates? This paper examines the pervasiveness of “helicoptering” and the detrimental effects when parents and universities seek to control students instead of allowing them to learn responsibility.

2018

In this essay, I respond to an argument raised by some of the sources in Professor Chris Roederer’s Editor-in-Chief Lecture, namely that a major reason speech is under assault on college campuses is that college students have been coddled by parents, teachers, and now by university administrators. I refer to this as the anti-coddling narrative. In what follows, I argue that the anti-coddling narrative is problematic for two reasons: (1) it does not accurately depict the challenges facing this generation of college students, and indeed ignores other groups that demand coddling; and (2) it will not convince college students to adopt free speech values. Instead, we should replace the anti-coddling narrative with a perspective that treats campus protests for safe spaces and trigger warnings as speech acts just as worthy of protection as the speech acts they oppose. I. The Anti-Coddling Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 R II. Is The Coddling Label Acc...

Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 2012

Is there a point where parental effort can be too much? While the link between parenting effort and the wellbeing of children has been firmly established, contemporary discussion has proposed that extreme levels of parental protection of and responsiveness to children could be counterproductive. Research has not yet addressed this phenomenon to ascertain if overparenting is a genuinely different type of parenting approach. The purpose of the present study was to gain insight into the parenting actions considered by parenting professionals (psychologists and school guidance counsellors) to be overparenting. One hundred and twenty-eight professionals responded to an online survey about their observations of overparenting, with eighty-six respondents providing lists of the types of actions they believed were behavioural examples of the term. The survey data revealed that certain types of actions were considered to be indicative of overparenting, and that particular beliefs and outcomes may be involved in this parenting approach. Implications for parenting advice and education programs, and further research are discussed.

Zea Books, 2016

You did a wonderful job here! The analysis of the housing market collapse was terrific and the conclusion about hand held devices should be read by every parent.... You should send this to Michael Moore for his next movie."-Dr. Michael Soupios, Senior Professor, Political Science Long Island University, Post Campus "Patrick is concerned with the intellectual future of the media industry. His two recent books ask questions and suggest answers to some of the most pressing issues under discussion today. They are penetrating reads and should be required of anyone interested in the world of mass communication.

2018

What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosity of song events; that musical behavior varies more within societies than across societies on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography, analyzed through four representations (machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, expert transcriptions), revealed that identifiable acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral function worldwide, and that these features fall along two dimensions, melodic and rhythmic complex...

Barroco. Enigmas y misterios. XI Encuentro internacional sobre Barroco, 2024

En la sacristía del antiguo templo jesuita de San Francisco Javier de Tepotzotlán, ubicado en el actual estado de México, existen diez lienzos de enormes dimensiones (2.62 X 2.72 en promedio), firmados por Miguel Cabrera, que hasta ahora no habían sido estudiados con detenimiento. Creemos que esa falta de estudios respondía a que seis de los lienzos son tan similares, pues muestran a Jesús sentado a la mesa con sus discípulos, que descontrolaban incluso a los espectadores más entrenados en asuntos iconográficos. Mas gracias a que hoy en día conocemos las estampas grabadas por los Klauber que dieron origen a la serie de Tepotzotlán, pudimos compararlas y entender en su justa dimensión los lienzos de Cabrera.

Education for a Better World , 2019

Critical thinking is the mental process of actively understanding, analysing, evaluating or synthesizing an issue or information before making a judgement or making a decision or drawing a conclusion or holding onto a belief or engaging in a particular course of action. Put another way, critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. Thinking refers to conscious mental processes; and rationality refers to reasons or foundations or bases for declaring certain positions or issues to be either true or false; or to be valid or invalid. When a person is thinking critically, she does not simply follow emotion or feeling, she deliberately follows conscious thought patterns, and she seeks evidence before drawing a conclusion. Critical thinking requires knowledge of the structure of arguments and of the sources of ideas or knowledge that sits in our heads.