Friday, January 6, 2023

Today’s 18-year-olds

 From Let Grow:

This accidental crippling of our kids is showing up on campus as fear and depression. To look at whether, in fact, giving kids’ too little independence too late is the real culprit, Korbey interviews Georgetown Psychology Prof. Yulia Chentsova Dutton. The professor and her team devised a clever study:

[They] interviewed students from Turkey, Russia, Canada and the United States, asking them to describe a risky or dangerous experience they had in the last month. Both Turkish and Russian students described witnessing events that involved actual risk: violent fights on public transportation; hazardous driving conditions caused by drunk drivers; women being aggressively followed on the street. 

But American students were far more likely to cite as dangerous things that most adults do every day, like being alone outside or riding alone in an Uber.

The American students’ risk threshold was comparatively “quite low,” according to Chentsova Dutton. Students who reported they gained independence later in childhood — going to the grocery store or riding public transportation alone, for example — viewed their university campus as more dangerous; those same students also had fewer positive emotions when describing risky situations. (Read more.)

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