American Children Losing Motivation And Creativity, Teachers Say
American Children Losing Motivation And Creativity, Teachers Say
American children are less creative and less motivated than past
generations. When teachers compare today’s children with their peers from only
a few years ago, there’s a clear difference, according to Page Park, an Indiana
teacher with 24 years of experience.
“They don’t know how to think for themselves, too. I do have a
few kids that are really good at problem solving, but not as many. They’re not
good at problem solving,” she said.
Park said that since she first started teaching, creativity has
declined. Students today don’t look for solutions to simple problems.
For instance, if a student found he didn’t have a pencil, he
wouldn’t ask for a spare, Park said.
“I’ve taught most of my career.” Park said. “I’m talking high
school students who just don’t think to ask, ‘Hey, can I borrow a pencil?’ And
I have them available where they can just take them.”
When Park looks at her classroom, she sees a disconnected
generation.
“They talk about games a lot. They never talk about going
outside. They talk about staying up late. Their sleep rhythms are awful,” Park
said. “I have one that was telling me last week or the week before that he
doesn’t go to bed until three o’clock in the morning. They might be a little
more rigid in movement.”
Other teachers in different states have seen a similar change. Theresa, a teacher in New York and writer for The Developing Mom, said that her students also seem to lack creativity and motivation.
“I thought, all I have to do is just show up every day and do my
very best, and I can inspire these kids. I can change your life. Every teacher
thinks that,” she said. “But what I started to see was the students, they were
not inspired, no matter what I or my fellow teachers did.”
In the three schools where Theresa taught, she found this same
problem.
Theresa, a Nigerian immigrant, said that the children she grew
up with had far greater creativity and motivation than the children she now
teaches. In her experience, American children give up when challenged.
“Why is it that these kids show up and they are completely
disinterested in education? It baffled me,” she said.
About half of the students at Theresa’s current school are
homeless, but they lack the drive to escape poverty that Nigerian children had,
she said.
Theresa knows the challenges of poverty. As a child in Nigeria,
she and her siblings often had only one daily meal, but they and other children
were desperate to get educated and succeed.
“To see people waste their opportunity, it makes me want to
cry,” Theresa said. “Any child in Nigeria, would give an arm and a leg to come
to this place. And you guys have everything, and you throw it away.”
Jessica Bonner, a speech pathologist for elementary schoolers in
Birmingham, Alabama, also said she sees a difference between children today and
children in the past. They don’t usually talk about what they like to do
together. Instead, they seem centered on absorbing online videos other people
make.
“I feel like with them pretty much being influenced by what
they’re seeing. They’re definitely contributes heavily to them not being as
creative because you’re being influenced by someone else,” Bonner said.
Recently, she asked a group of children in one of her classes to
choose an educational topic for a music video they would create. Instead of
debating or making a choice, they looked at her blankly, then started talking
with each other about unrelated subjects.
“I honestly believe that elementary school students are so
accustomed to having to follow a set curriculum throughout the day with
little to no input from them that they unconsciously shelve their ideas,”
Bonner said.
In the stories these teachers tell, creativity and the drive for
success seem closely connected. Creativity arises from an intense desire for
some result. When children feel apathetic, they don’t create.
Trading Dreams for Screens
Experts have several theories on why American children are less
creative. But the first and most popular theory is that constant life online
damages a child’s ability to think and self-motivate.
Teachers that contacted The Epoch Times agreed that too much
time online is part of the problem, and the statistics back them up.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics suggest
that in 2010, something changed mental health for teens.
From 1999 to 2010, only a few years had teen self-harm rates
above 300 injuries per 100,000 people or suicide rates above 10 per 100,000
people. But after 2010, suicide and self-harm rates for young people 18-24 have
never dropped below these numbers, and have generally trended upward.
According to Pew Research Center, one of the biggest changes in
society during the same time period was a rise in iPhone ownership. Other
surveys suggest that young people spend extremely
high amounts of time online.
While correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, in the
experience of both teachers and psychologists, excessive time online and mental
problems tend to go together.
Psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax said that American children spend much more time online compared to children from other countries.
“In this country, for example, it’s very common for kids to go
to bed with their phones, or for boys to have video game consoles in the
bedrooms,” Sax said. “It’s actually unusual in continental Europe.”
As children have started living online, child mental illness has
increased dramatically, Sax said. Somehow, excessive time online seems linked
to disengagement, lack of motivation, and a wide variety of other symptoms.
“Over the last three years, American kids have gone off the deep
end and are now many, many times more likely to be anxious, depressed,
disengaged, unmotivated, and not paying attention compared to kids in Europe,
Australia, or New Zealand,” he said.
Growing Up Smart
According to teachers, children today tend to spend their whole
lives tied to their smartphones.
Even the friendships of today’s children don’t resemble those of
children a decade ago did, Park said. They revolve around what happens online.
For them, it seems like the internet is ‘the real world.’
“It’s all about what he or she did on TikTok,” Park said.
Park, who also teaches yoga, said that children seem separated
from their bodies because of their extensive online life.
“If they get frustrated with something, they don’t know how to
deal with that within their body. They don’t know how to shut their nervous
system down and come back into a rest and digest state,” she said. “So they
live in this constant state of panic and anxiety.”
Fixation on technology leaves children isolated from nature too,
Park said.
This separation from nature makes them less creative, Park said.
“They don’t go with their toes in the grass,” she said. “There’s
a huge disconnect between kids and nature, a huge disconnect between what’s
going on with them physically.”
When children live online, they tend to consume the content of
others without developing their own thoughts, said Bonner.
“They’re pretty much being influenced by what they’re seeing,” she said. “That definitely contributes heavily to them not being as creative, because they’re being influenced by someone else.”
According to Dr. Patrick Capriola, the founder of education website Strategies for Parents, kids
learn creativity in early childhood. To do these activities well, they have to
practice without distractions.
When children spend more time looking at screens, they don’t
take advantage of this crucial time, he said. Instead of experiencing life,
processing it, then engaging with it, they risk being overwhelmed by stimuli.
“The more time children spend in front of a screen, the less
time they have to be with their imagination, focus on their thoughts, and
experiment with them in creative ways, because the content behind the
screen often does it for them,” Capriola said. “This exposure has the
potential to degrade their ability to develop these skills because the
child has less time to conceptualize ideas on their own.”
Too Easy
Theresa said she believes that American children aren’t creative
because others solve their problems for them.
With access to the internet and parents who quickly intervene
instead of letting kids struggle a little, children approach life as if someone
else will always solve their problems, she said.
“Every little problem that they have is immediately solved for
them. And if it can’t be solved by their parents, they just find a resource
online.”
When children don’t have challenges to overcome, they don’t know
what to do when they face a difficult concept in school, Theresa said.
Teachers at her school struggle to find a solution to this
problem, she said. In her teachers’ lounge, how to help kids who won’t face
challenges is a common discussion. But there aren’t any good answers.
“We complain about the issue, and then we just accept it. Like,
this is just how America is. This is how the kids are,” she said. “You just
have to move on.”
Psychologists call this sort of dependence on others ‘learned
helplessness.’ When parents help their children too
much, children conclude that they don’t have agency.
The problems caused by learned helplessness resemble the
problems caused by too much time online. They include depression,
underachievement, and anxiety.
Issues at School
Another reason why kids don’t create may be the nature of school
today. According to Dr. Sax, many things about the American education system
leave it struggling to capture the interest of children.
Unlike schools in Europe that focus on teaching kids to enjoy
school, then teaching them academic skills, American schools often teach kids
skills before children are old enough to learn them, Sax wrote in his book
“Boys Adrift.”
Because boys develop more slowly than girls, this trend harms
them more, he said.
Boys who are too young to succeed at school feel like they’re
stupid, Sax said. They start to hate school because it forces them to fail.
After about 20 years of trying to persuade school leaders to
change how they teach, Sax has found that for the most part they are unwilling
to listen.
“When you approach a principal or school administrator with that
kind of concern, you are a nuisance, and you will accomplish nothing. They may
or may not say something nice, but it doesn’t really matter,” he said.
Park said that in her experience, schools do a poor job with
children that aren’t academically gifted. Although everyone should have some
competence with reading and math, not everyone needs to be great at it.
A child could be a creative artist, creative carpenter, or creative builder, but a school that focuses on teaching academic subjects often will let that child down, she said.
“I feel like those kids who maybe would have been creative in
some of those other areas, maybe they would be an amazingly creative welder.
They would be able to create a beautiful thing, given the opportunity,” Park
said.
But because they struggle in more academic subjects, they aren’t
able to go into this program.
College isn’t for everyone, said Page, and there are many other
good ways to earn a living.
Times Are Changing
It may be that children are more perceptive of what the future will hold than adults are, said Robert Powers, a college counselor.
Although excessive online activity seems tied to mental
problems, the online life is here to stay, Powers said. Life in the future will
likely be even more online.
Children won’t be creative, relationally connected, and
ambitious in the same way they once were, he said. But we’ll use the same words
to describe what they do in new settings.
This generation will become E-sport athletes and online friends,
he said.
“The child who was once glued to his screen was really
ahead of his time, trying to balance two worlds that really ought to have
been combined all along,” said Powers.
A digital or “blended” world is the future, Powers said.
“And I do think that also means that the kids are
all right,” he added.
But to many teachers who knew children before they lived online,
creativity, determination, and friendships today seem less than what they could
be.
Park said that she has always loved technology. But she has seen
that too much time online cuts her students off from the beauty of nature and
from human relationships.
“It’s not as good as it could be,” she said.
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