Thursday, June 27, 2019

What Happens After Graduation



High school graduation is a weird thing. It’s like society drives young people up to this jungle and then just opens the car door and says, “Good luck in there!” Or, if the expression is “It takes a village to raise a child,” high school graduation is the first step out of the village and into the wild. Yes, graduation is kind of crazy when you think of it as the arbitrary spring date we choose to kick our children out of the village. Maybe it shouldn’t be that harsh,

I really worry about what happens to my students in the years that follow graduation. For their whole lives, they’ve enjoyed the safety, comfort, and security of their childhood which has often been headlined but their school experience and the guidance they’ve received from their guardians and teachers. So much of that falls away on graduation day though. Sure, good parents are going to stick around but are probably taking at least a little step back and certainly the routine of grade school is gone.

That means there is a lot left for a young person to figure out on their own and I believe the years that follow graduation are every bit as crucial in a young person’s transition to effective adulthood as their teen years. So, I think it’s really important for the “village” to stay vigilant and keep a careful watch over the people they’ve supported at this time. Actually, they probably need to be more vigilant now. Gone are the support networks offered by schools and the web of support they might have received from friends is likely smaller too. In spite of this, they’re facing some of the biggest decisions of their lives involving career and relationships when they need support the most. There’s a lot of significant things going on and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

Providing support to this demographic is complicated. These people need a balance between letting them be the adults that they and this continued support. Playing the role of the overbearing, I-still-know-what’s-best-parent likely isn’t going to work. Young people in this situation need to fall down sometimes, they need to be a little hungry, they need to discover what they like and don’t like about being an adult because those opinions will drive them down the path they choose. The supporters of young adults need to accept that mistakes will be made. They can’t and shouldn’t prevent the inevitable lessons that will be taught by those mistakes. However, supporters can be ready to extend a hand to pick up their young people, to bring them in from the jungle with the storm grows too fierce, and be willing to offer advice, when solicited, which the right amount of touch. In other words, your job as a parent isn’t done at graduation. Except when it is.

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Traditional Skills for The Next Generation



              As another group of young people are heading off into the workforce, there are a few traditional skills I’m afraid they’ve never acquired. These are skills that might seem archaic to young people who are quite adept at navigating a digital world. However, the types of tasks that are to follow are ones that are extraordinarily commonplace to the parents of these graduates and are likely to be needed long into the future.
              Unfortunately, I have come to understand young people’s attitudes towards these skills the hard way. So, for example, I once had an extended debate with a student as to whether there was ever a scenario in which one needed to supply their own phone number in a voicemail wherein they requested a return call. To this student, cell phones or caller ID were so ubiquitous that anyone who retrieved the voicemail would be able to see the numbers of the people who called the phone. Apparently, this student assumed that anyone who might work at doctor’s office or any company would naturally use their personal cell phone for all communications related to their work and
that the main number of these businesses was simply that of an employee who worked there. In my work, the majority of my calls are from parents who do almost always identify themselves in their message and leave me with their preferred method to return contact. However, I would estimate that more than 90% of the occasional voicemails I receive from students do neither of these things. They are usually something simply along the lines of “Hi, I have a question for you. Please give me a call back.”
             A parent once shared with me an anecdote that she had tasked her son with addressing a number of envelopes for an event she was having. The teenager in turned placed the stamp in the dead center of the envelopes and wrote the return and recipient addresses in incorrect places as well. At first, the parent thought this was the act of a careless young man until she realized he really didn’t know any better. I’ve also seen students who seem unaware of how to write a check or how to properly use a phone that is not cell phone (or what “dial 9 to get out” means). They prefer to text and don’t do a good job of monitoring their email and their business etiquette can be somewhat lacking in
situations like interviews or formal meals. In other words, there are some skills young graduates will be expected to know in the adult world, because adults use these skills, but the schools are not doing much to teach these skills and young people are too connected to the alternative digital versions of these skills to have ever needed to acquire them.
            If schools are teaching these things, it’s probably a quick lesson on one day, perhaps in elementary or middle school. If that lesson covers a skill the student doesn’t use again for a long time, it’s easy to forget. So, I think the onus of really teaching these types of    things ultimately falls on parents. Consider teaching your child how to do some things that are second nature to you that might not be to them. You never know when

they are going to need it.