Pivoting Round Y2K

By: Carol Maxym Ph.D.

One of my first thoughts this morning upon really going back to work after the long holiday break was that we are equidistant in time from 2000 as we were in 1986.  I am quite certain I didn’t think about that on January 5, 1986.  Reagan was President, no one had a computer or cell phone.  No one had imagined the Internet, Blogs, e-mail…. Kids abused drugs but not really prescription drugs.  Kids weren’t really being diagnosed with all sorts of diseases, disorders, and disabilities.  Hardly anyone took psychotropic medications.  Life was slower, different, more thoughtful—or am I just becoming old and nostalgic?  “Back in the good old days…”  We had less communication but perhaps better communication. We dressed with more care, eating habits had not deteriorated as much as they have now.   People wrote letters to each other, and letters were more thoughtful than e-mails.

But I do sound like an aging complainer….or do I?  I worry about that often because there is so much in the growing-up world that frightens me, disturbs me.  Sometimes I think the main value of residential treatment for kids is taking them out of their modern, highly-stimulated world.  What do you think?  Am I being simplistic?  Are we, as individuals, parents, Americans better off now than in 1986?

Well, obviously there is no one and certain answer (or maybe there is—that’s even scarier…).  More importantly, there is no going back.   So what can we learn?  How to move forward?

I think the main point is that more is not better.  More is simply more which doesn’t make it better. I think that pivoting around that millennial moment (remember Y2K? and all the horror that was to ensue that didn’t happen?) provides a window to observe where we are and where we want to be.  I’m not suggesting that we engage in Soviet-style five-year plans, but I am wondering about thinking more about how we want the world to be for our children.

And yes, I know the politicians accuse each other of stealing our children’s future (usually referring either to the National Debt or to Climate Change), but I don’t mean that.  I mean do we wish to provide our children with so electronic a world that they are using iPads before they can talk?  What about constant music everywhere providing emotional indications of how to feel just in case you don’t know yourself?  What about diagnosis of purported disorders?  Do we prefer a world of medication or a world of understanding the wealth of human emotions? 

I think the 28 years around the fulcrum 2000 have been years where we became more quickly reactive but not more helpfully reactive, or proactive.  Public figures apologize ad infinitum, So that the whole concept of apology no longer has any meaning (and I do remember beginning to notice that in the ‘80s).  Accountability is a word and one we don’t really even expect to have meaning.  There are so many words like that.  Depression is another one.

We have the opportunity to become more thoughtful, more deliberate, more reflective as we re-think the growing up world we present to our children.  Or not.