Generations Blog

This past evening, my 14-year-old daughter ate an ice cream pop and left the stick and wrapper on the kitchen counter. I called upstairs and said “Erin, please put your ice cream stick in the trash.” After a bit of a huff, I heard her come back down into the kitchen. A short time later, I returned to the kitchen and discovered that, yes, she had put the ice cream stick in the trash but, no, she had not put the ice cream wrapper the stick was resting on in the trash as well. When I asked her to return the kitchen again, she once again returned with a huff and threw the wrapper away.

I asked, “Why didn’t you throw the wrapper out with the stick?”

She gave me a blank stare and replied, “Because you only told me to throw the stick away.”

Now some may argue that she was simply playing games, but I looked in her eyes and honestly believe that it simply didn’t occur to her to do so. Erin is a bright and engaging adolescent. Get her into a debate over something and you can see her wheels turning at a hundred miles an hour. But expect her to use her common sense when performing everyday tasks and you’ll be disappointed a good portion of the time.

I’m not picking Erin alone. I observe this behavior in her many friends. Other parents ask me about it. Teachers discuss ad nauseum and managers complain about it constantly. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget postulated that children make a transition from what he called “concrete thinking” to a process of “formal thinking” somewhere between ages 11 and 15. (Go to http://www.funderstanding.com/piaget.cfm for additional insights.) While it might be argued that Erin and her friends are still in that transition, we are seeing lots of evidence that those close to twice her age remain in that transition as well. In most circumstances, they can argue critical issues on topics important to them. But assume that they will scan the environment and use their “common sense” as a part of daily decision making and you’ll be sorely disappointed in a lot of cases.

Do I have a “concrete” solution for this? No. In today’s world, there are many possible causes. These include the plethora of menu-driven options available that condition dependence and society’s emphasis on convenience, as in “someone else should be picking up that stick and wrapper.”  Then there’s the fact that young adults are taking longer to master life skills due to the lack of daily adversity and manual tasking faced by most in previous generations. You can probably think of other contributors as well.

The fact remains, however, that the Millennial generation requires more specificity in instruction than perhaps the average parent, teacher and manager has assumed. Will all 80 million need these step-by-step instructions? No. The problem is we don’t know which ones don’t. So get specific until they prove otherwise.