TREND WATCH: What’s Happening? From the classroom to the playground, today’s children face a growing tide of rules governing what they wear, how they behave, and where they go. While rule makers say that they are doing society a service, critics say that an emphasis on rules is creating a generation of repressed, stunted youth.
Our Take: Millennials and Homelanders have been closely monitored from an early age—and many are thriving within the rule-heavy culture created for them by older generations. Overall, their willingness to play by the rules is refreshing at a time when politics and culture in the hands of older generations seem more chaotic—and “unruly”—than ever.
Prom season is an annual rite of passage for high schoolers nationwide. But now, more teens run the risk of being barred from the big dance if their outfits don’t pass muster with school officials. That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which recently offered a glimpse into ever-stricter prom guidelines that are becoming more common at schools around the country.
The number of prom-related rules alone is dizzying to behold. When it comes to clothing, schools are setting limits for nearly everything imaginable: hemlines, necklines, cleavage, hairstyles, and accessories. The rulebook for promwear at Boylan Catholic High School in Illinois stretches to 21 pages. Guests must fall within certain age limits or submit forms that attest to their good reputation. Texas’s Sanger school district even requires a criminal background check.
It’s also becoming standard for administrators to keep an eye on the clock. Prom attendees at Glenbard East High School in Illinois, for example, have to arrive by 8 PM and can’t leave before 10 PM. “We are concerned and looking out for our students from a safety standpoint,” the vice principal told the Journal.
RULES AT SCHOOL…AND AT HOME
Whether inside of the classroom or outside of it, today’s kids face a laundry list of rules and guidelines that they must heed.
Dress at school: Make sure you’re up to code. The ramped-up prom guidelines mirror stricter rules governing appearance at school more generally. Over the past decade, dress codes have become standard fare at most high schools. Department of Education data indicate that more than half (59%) of public schools now enforce a "strict dress code”—up from 47% a decade ago.
Further, one in five public schools required uniforms in 2014, up from 12% in 2000. In certain cities, the share of schools mandating uniforms is much higher: As of 2013, nearly all public school students in New Orleans (95%), Cleveland (85%), and Chicago (80%) wear uniforms.
In the classroom: Behave yourselves. More behavioral standards are being put in place in schools as well. By all accounts, zero-tolerance policies toward truancy and tardiness are spreading. Rigid discipline is the norm at charter-school networks like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which mostly serves low-income urban students. At Carver Collegiate Academy in New Orleans, for example, students are forbidden from slouching, using slang, leaning against walls, wearing the wrong colors, or failing to say thank you.
KIPP was among the first charter-school networks to emphasize strict discipline, doing so in the 1990s. After it became clear that test scores and educational outcomes were higher at KIPP, a consortium of charter-school networks adopted KIPP’s brand of zero-tolerance rules—which marked the beginning of what educator Max Bean calls the “No-Excuses Charter School Movement.”
Even curricula reflect an increased emphasis on rules and structure. Preschoolers and kindergartners are being introduced to mathematical concepts and encouraged to think logically. More classrooms are integrating programming into lessons: In a 2014 Gallup/Google poll, a whopping 90% of parents said they want their children to learn more computer science at school.
Meanwhile, the social-emotional learning (SEL) movement continues gaining in popularity (see: “Children, Behave Yourselves”), formalizing the instruction of skills like self-control and empathy. Beneath the touchy-feely veneer, the core competency taught by SEL is the ability to resist an impulse for the sake of someone else’s priority—that is, the ability to follow a rule. This year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (also known as “the nation’s report card”) included SEL-related questions for the first time.
On the playground: No touching. Perhaps the most notorious example of rules gone wild are “no touching” policies. Michigan, California, New Jersey, and New Hampshire are just some of the states where schools have banned students from hugging or playing hands-on games like tag or touch football. In 2013, one Long Island middle school banned nearly all balls during recess and began requiring adult supervision for cartwheels and games of tag.
Whether on the blacktop or in the classroom, life at school today is increasingly governed by lengthy “education matrices” that tell children how to behave in every situation.
At home: Play it safe. Even outside of school, kids and teens are faced with more restrictions than ever. Similar no-touching rules are springing up at camps and sports leagues, with officials defending them as a matter of propriety and safety—and as a protective measure to avoid lawsuits.
Plenty of activities that today’s parents did routinely as kids are now verboten, like staying out after dark, walking to places alone, or staying home by themselves—a shorter leash reinforced by new curfew laws and shopping mall bans. Youth sports are also getting a makeover (see: “Why America Wants Safer Sports”) as organizations like USA Football and U.S. Soccer add rules to prevent concussions and other injuries.
Even punishment is getting more regimented. In a shift from 1988, research indicates that parents of young children, at all income levels, increasingly favor dispassionate rule-based discipline (e.g., timeouts) rather than emotionally charged physical discipline (e.g., spanking).
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
While rules of conduct are nothing new, today’s culture is unique in both the sheer volume of rules and their specificity—lending ammunition to critics who claim the rigmarole is suffocating kids.
Older generations are divided on the impact of these rules. The ones crafting them—the Boomer and Xer school administrators, sports league officials, and concerned parents—cite the myriad “kids these days” stories of teen sexting scandals, preschool meltdowns, and restaurants banning unruly children as evidence that more rules are necessary. Three-quarters of parents agree, in fact, that kids today are less polite than when they were growing up.
Yet there isn’t much evidence that youth behavior has worsened; rather, the growing outrage might stem more from declining adult tolerance. Xers and Boomers have become convinced that certain behaviors need to be fixed—a shift in reaction to their own laxer coming-of-age experiences.
On the other side of the argument, many adults (including those behind the “free-range kids” movement) protest that excessive rules strangle kids’ development and leave them overly fragile.
But what do the kids think? If Millennials and Homelanders mind all of these rules, they aren’t exactly showing it.
Younger generations are used to playing by the rules—and are even setting them up for themselves. On platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, kids establish complex rules for themselves about how often to post, how many and what kinds of pictures are acceptable, and how to handle awkward situations—even while most adults remain clueless about “netiquette.” Codes of conduct are how today’s kids are accustomed to negotiating relationships and play a huge role in how they judge others and themselves.
When they break the rules, today’s kids they do so subversively, not confrontationally: using disappearing messages (of the sort pioneered by Snapchat), anonymous social sites (so-called “Finstagram,” as in fake Instagram), or peer-only sites. This way, they get more freedom while still maintaining a good reputation and avoiding bad marks on their “permanent record.”
The difference in mindset between today’s kids and older generations is easiest to see when open resistance to the rules does occur. Often, late-wave Millennials don’t exactly break the rules but instead urge humane reform.
Students have objected to dress codes, for example, on the grounds that they’re sexist, promote body shaming, or are unfair to those who are gender-nonconforming—and their solution is to call for inclusivity. At Boylan Catholic High School, some students are planning to host an “alternative prom” the same night. At Buchanan High School in California, students switched gender norms for a day to protest their traditional dress code. “Hopefully, the board will see that we aren’t blindly rebelling, but simply advocating for our rights,” one participant earnestly told CNN.
WHERE ARE WE HEADING?
Products and services that cater to a society governed by rules are already gaining traction—and should continue to be a hit among parents, teachers, and Homelanders for years to come.
It should come as no surprise that America’s hottest toy today, the fidget spinner, was designed to soothe anxiety with little disruption to others. Add these to all the Ritalin tablets, “play planning” sessions, and mindfulness exercises (see: "Meditating on Mindfulness") intended to increase focus. Also popular are games that allow kids to exercise their creative imagination within a complex structure of interlocking rules. Examples: Minecraft or the upcoming Lego Boost, which allows users to “program” the blocks—or, more broadly, the growing “Maker Movement.” (See: “Millennial Makers.”)
The classroom is not immune to these types of product innovations. We’re already seeing more teachers use workbooks that help their Homelander kids learn school rules in an interactive, fun way. In the future, with the help of prep materials and software, teachers could spend entire units helping children navigate an increasingly complex web of school rules. Parents who once slept through homeroom class can now take satisfaction that their kids are using the time to learn better behavior.
The newfound emphasis on rules and self-regulation does have one demonstrable negative health effect, according to critics. With diagnoses of childhood ADHD skyrocketing, some argue that schools and parents are too quick to jump to medication. The disorder may actually be caused, or at least exacerbated, by overly structured classrooms and too much time spent indoors with few tactile activities—which leaves high-energy kids (largely boys) squirming. (See: “No Touching! (Except If It’s an iPad).”) In Esquire, one psychologist lamented: “We are pathologizing boyhood.”
But experts disagree on whether the solution is to add more rules (teaching SEL-style impulse control) or remove them (allowing for freer play). Recent research has linked regular outdoor play to milder ADHD symptoms, but if recent trends are any indication, educators will never end up allowing truly “free” play for Homelanders.
Overall, today’s young people do offer a refreshing contrast at a time when Americans of leadership age (Boomers and Gen Xers)—those promoting all these rules—don’t seem very inclined to follow rules themselves. The last generation of youth that experienced this kind of super-regulation was the one that raised their parents: the Silent Generation. As children during the Great Depression, the Silent eventually earned a "Shirley Temple" reputation as well-behaved, rule-abiding kids even though their Lost Generation parents were anything but. It’s likely that Homelanders will follow their example and continue going along with the rules that raised them—while keeping their messier impulses suppressed below the surface.
