A Generation of Trumps?

An Excerpt from the Transcript from Episode 14: “A Generation of Trumps and Dreams to Remember” (originally aired August 10, 2016)
http://www.buzzsprout.com/60461/409694-a-generation-of-trumps-and-dreams-to-remember.mp3

Well hello, guys! And welcome back to Doctor Ackrite’s Get It Together Podcast. I’m Doc and you must know that, or you wouldn’t be here. 

Welcome, welcome, welcome, guys! I’m so glad you’re here. We have so much to talk about today. Listen, first of all, for the very first time, since you began listening to me, I’m gonna break an implicit promise that I have with you. I apologize in advance, but it’s just completely unavoidable. This is just the era in which we live. Up till now, there’s a certain five-letter name that I have not mentioned a single time on my show. Those of you who know me personally know that I am politically aware, and, like the rest of the nation, a little bit addicted to politics and I take in everything that I can that is discussing the current presidential election for 2016. But I had made an implicit promise to you, my beloved friends, listeners, that I would never, ever, use this as a platform for bashing one Mr. Donald J. Trump. Today, I’m afraid I have to step out of that promise. 

You see, guys, the very fact that I am breaking a promise is a sign of how our world has broken down. How civility has been put on the back burner. How everybody is kind of “me me me me me me me me me.” Not in a good way. Not in the singing “me me me me me me me.” But “me me me me me.” What can I do for myself? How can I make my world better, even if I have to compromise everyone else’s world in the meantime? I don’t care if I have to screw the community as long as, at the end, I get to sleep on a featherbed. 

That is both a symptom and the disease itself. Just like Mr. Trump and his political rise is both a symptom and the disease itself. I’m not sure, and, really, no one is sure, whether Mr. Trump is the chicken or the egg in this scenario. Boy, I’m really mixing my metaphors today. No one can say with absolute certainty whether this guy has risen to power because of the problems in the world and the degradation of civility as we know it, or whether he is the cause of that degradation of civility, Or at least a contributing factor. 

You know, for example, before Trump, I don’t think very many politicians who wanted to have a political future would go on national or international television and say things on a hot mic, that of course they’ve been saying for generations when the mic is turned off. Mr. Trump has. And by allowing himself that luxury, he has encouraged, I believe, others to no give a care about things like civility and manners and decency and decorum. And now I think it’s affecting our children. 

I have noticed with the younger generation—I’m also going to use the trendy term “millennials”—I’ve noticed, with those who are younger than I that notions such as politeness and civility and decency and order and decorum are, in their apparent estimation, quaint signs of what yesteryear was. They have no place in 2016. We don’t have to be good and decent to each other. We don’t even have to be connected to each other. 

For goodness’ sake! If I have a relationship with someone from that generation, I don’t pick up the phone and call him or her. I send a series of short messages and emoticons. We don’t meet face-to-face very often at all. Maybe I follow you on Facebook, or figure out what’s going on in your life through Instagram. That’s the way that we’re connected. Even intimate relationships these days, guys, have become perfunctory. We only get together when sexual congress is desired. Needed. Necessary. We don’t get together to go pick apples. We don’t get together to have a joint experience that has nothing to do with sex. And even when we’re together for sexual congress, as I understand it, it is entirely perfunctory. It is “I know exactly what I need to do to make the nerve endings in my body respond in an extremely positive way. And you know what you need to do to make yours respond. We need each other for the purpose of eliciting those responses, but we don’t have to like each other. We don’t have to love each other. Guys, we don’t even have to know each other, and we certainly don’t have to have any sort of a connection. Other than… you know… insert your obvious dirty joke here. 

I think that’s sad. Now what does that have to do with Trump? What does that have to do with a loss of civility? I think the loss of civility is a loss of connection. To each other. To our communities. I think more than him being the cause, the rise of Trump is a symptom. It is a disease, to be sure. But I don’t think it’s a disease that caused itself. I think that it is a disease that has grown out of a lot of other simultaneous occurrences. I’ll give you guys an example. Now, it is an anecdotal example. I don’t want you coming back to me and saying, “Oh, you picked the one bad thing that happened to you. For goodness’ sake! Grow up!” I’ve already had that conversation with myself, guys. So let me tell my story. It’s my show.

So I went to have dinner. My kids were out of town. They were visiting their mom. Went to have dinner at a restaurant that sells submarine sandwiches, custom-made-to-order. It’s a chain restaurant. And I went there at about 8:30 in the evening. Knowing that the restaurant closes at 9. But I was by myself. All I needed to do was order my food, get my food, eat my food, and clean up after myself. If I can’t do that in 30 minutes, then I don’t know what the world is coming to. And by the way, I don’t know what the world is coming to. We’ve already established that. 

So I get in that fine establishment at about 8:30. I order my food. I pay for my food. I notice that the young lady, who I believe was there by herself—and she was somewhere between 17 and 19 years old, she was quite young—I noticed that she didn’t offer me the option of dining in or taking it to go. But I’ve also noticed that that seems to be common now in fast food establishments. They don’t offer you the option anymore. They just put the thing on your tray. I guess that’s one more thing for them to have to think about. And maybe the management has decided it isn’t worth the trouble. So she packed everything to go. Well, I’m kind of used to that now, so I took it and I went and I sat down. I got up from the table and got my drink, because it was one of the places where you go to the fountain yourself and you fill your drink. When I sat back down, I looked . I noticed there were two other guys sitting at another table. It’s a small restaurant, so they were sitting quite close to me. 

The young lady comes out. By now, it’s 8:40 p.m. The young lady comes out on the floor. She stands five feet away from the two tables where people are sitting, and she says “you guys are going to have to leave.” We looked at each other. We looked at her. And I said, “You mean when we’re finished.” She said, “No. You’re going to have to leave now.” I said, “I don’t understand. You’re not closing right now.” And I looked down at my imaginary watch, because nobody wears a watch anymore. Then I looked down at my cellphone, which is where the real time was. It was 8:41. I said, “I said you’re not closing right now, so why would we have to leave right now?” “Well, I’m closing at 9 o’clock, and I have some place I have to be, and I have to mop and sweep and all of that, and you can’t be here.” So I looked at the other two guys. They had stopped listening to her altogether and gone back to their eating. 

I just said to her, “Well, I understand you have a lot to do, but I’ve paid for my meal, paid for my drink—I ordered the small, by the way, because I knew I could make return trips to the fountain—so I’m going to stay here and finish my meal. I’ll be done before 9 o’clock.” And she stood there with her arms folded, as if waiting for me to leave, and I decided that the best approach was to do what the other guys had done. Resume my meal. She made some vague reference to calling the police, and I decided it was best just not to continue to engage her. Because I could imagine the conversation with the Police Department. That a guy came into our restaurant, paid money for food and actually had the unmitigated gall to sit there and eat it. 

When I was finished with my meal, which I finished at 8:53, I got up to walk out—and this particular restaurant has an entrance in the front, and also has an entrance that opens to the parking lot in the back. That’s down along a hallway. I had parked my car in the back. So I cleared my tray, put my tray where trays go, threw away my trash, and proceeded to walk down the hall. Said “good night” over my shoulder, as I would have any other time. She turned the lights off in the hallway. So I had to navigate a black-dark hallway to get to my car. This is the loss of civility that I’m talking about. Someone has to explain this to me. Go ahead. I’m listening. 

INTERVIEW

Doc: In my pursuit for answers, I decided to come to a friend. A television producer who’s worked on a lot of things that we might recognize. But one in particular I thought was of interest. Amy McCampbell, welcome to the show. So tell us a little bit about your work.

Amy: I’m a television producer. I’ve been doing it about 20 years. I did a lot of reality shows. And you know, tv shows that you’ve seen on cable and network television. A really big thread of my work has been with early child development and educational programming, and we did a project—took almost about 10 years—Mind in the Making, and that was in conjunction with Ellen Galinsky and Families and Work Institute. Basically, we spent about 10 years interviewing and filming the research of the leading child development psychologists who were looking into how children learn, and what is it that helps children learn. And from that, Ellen wrote a book and we created this program called “Mind in the Making.”

Doc: So here’s what I really want to know, Amy: In 2016, I feel that the young people and the children that I encounter, many of them don’t seem to have any connection, any empathy, any—I don’t know—any compassion for other people in their community. Everything seems to be “how can I make things better for myself?”. Are we raising a generation of Trumps?

Amy: I don’t know if we’re raising a generation of Trumps. I don’t know that I’m ready to say that there’s no connection to community, because there’s a lot of positive moments that you see with young people and I think millennials are very aware of what’s going on in the world as a generation. What I think in general I do see that makes me more nervous is when I see parents sort of neglecting to make those connections with their kids—their younger kids, not the older ones, although everything sort of applies to the older kids as well. You always want to be engaged and connected. But when I see parents who hand—placate a fussy kid by handing them a telephone. “Oh here. Just play with that.” They’re a little antsy, just give them a phone to play with. 

Doc: How old are we talking about?

Amy: You know, I see it with two year olds. I see with four year olds. I see with eight year olds. It’s the youngest ones, like the two year olds, where I really get a little stressed. 

Doc: What should they do instead?

Amy: What is really important is that adults understand that one of the big jobs of childhood is making connections with adults, with the adults in their lives. It is through the adults that surround them, most typically parents, but not always parents, that they learn everything. Kids are able to do this. They need the people. They’re sort of wired to do all of this very early on. They need people around them to help facilitate it. So (T.) Berry Brazelton, the famed pediatrician, does this experiment, and you can find it online probably. A brand new baby is being held. The parent, mother or father, is on one side of the baby’s head. Doctor Brazelton is on the other side of the baby’s head. Well even Dr. Brazelton, if he sits there and stands on one side of the baby and says the baby’s name, or just says generic baby stuff—he’s talking to the baby, saying “hello, baby baby baby, oh you’re so sweet baby baby. You know, or if the kid has a name, you know, “Cara, Cara, Cara.” Both the parent and Dr. Brazelton are on either side of the baby’s head. The baby will always turn, or mostly turns, towards the parents. Meaning they’re already making that connection then. “I listen to this person. I was listening to this person when I was in the womb. I was reaching out. Paying attention to what this person was saying.” When you say “goochie goochie goo” to a baby, are you in one room and the baby’s in another room? 

Doc: Not usually, no.

Amy: What are you usually doing?

Doc: Playing or touching or—

Amy: Exactly. You’re connecting. You’re engaging with that baby. It almost doesn’t matter what you say at that point. If you’re engaged and you’re one-on-one, face-to-face… Let me tell you about an experiment that Ed Tronick, up at Harvard, did. Powerful stuff, right? You put a six-month-old in a baby chair. you have an adult, a parent. You put the mother opposite the baby. For a few minutes, they engage. They do this. They go “goochie goochie goochie goo.” You know. All that goofy stuff that you do as a parent. You tickle, you laugh, your eyes get big. You know. The way that you engage with the baby. The researcher then asks the parent to look away for a moment. Turns back, looks at the baby. Presents a stone face. No emotion. No engagement. No gestures. No nothing. Just stares at the baby. The baby [thinks], “well, this is weird. There’s something wrong here. Let me try to engage. I can’t talk. I can’t do anything. So they do what they normally do to engage a parent. Their eyes get big. They smile. They reach out. They try to bring that parent back to paying attention to them. When that doesn’t work, you see the baby collapse. You see a sense of failure. I could not connect to this adult. Before the child is traumatized, the research asks the parent to look back and then look back again. And re-engage[] and instantly the connection is rebuilt. It’s totally repaired. So it doesn’t matter. That parent can be saying “onomatopoeia,” you know. Whatever it is, that’s not important. The importance is the eye contact. The smiles, the “I’m paying attention to you. I’m here for you and we’re connecting. We’re engaging.” There’s so many examples in child development where this is important. One of the studies that we did, that we featured in Mind in the Making, was by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff. You see the importance of this connection and this engagement, that you lay the groundwork in, hopefully when their very young. And it manifests itself in learning so much stuff. Empathy, and perspective taking, and focus, all this kind of stuff. And really, in language, it’s quite powerful, right? So what happens is up until about 12 months old, parent talks to a child and says, “Do you want the ball?” Right? “Do you want the apple?” “Look at the doggie.” They’re learning these words. They’re great. It’s usually the parent and the child directly engaging. Over those next six months, They start to recognize that the parent can point to a box, and say, “Oh, look at the box.” Not me holding the ball. But it’s “Let’s look over here at a third place.” That starts to become more important. By the time they’re about 18 months, they have a cognitive capability of… the mother and her friend could be talking about a cup of coffee. Now they recognize that that cup of coffee is important to their mother. It’s signaling something because they laid the groundwork when their mother pointed and said “oh, let’s look over here at that box.” The mother was saying, “I’m signaling to you that that box is important, so I want you to pay attention.” You don’t find that box interesting, right? It’s not like a ball or a dog. “I’m telling you that that box is important.” Now, by the time they get to 18 months, they see mom talking to her friend at the table. Kid’s not involved whatsoever. And the kid can start to say, “well, Mom thinks that cup of coffee is important. I need to pay attention to the word ‘coffee’ and add it to my list of things.” That doesn’t happen as fluidly without those early connections. Without taking the time to engage. And again, some of it may be gobbledygook. “Goochie goochie goo.” But that goochie goochie goo is important. It’s more important than, say, what other people tend to do, I think, which is “Let’s do a lot of input.” Right? Flashcards. For example, “let me show flashcards.” Well, if you just did flashcards, and you never did “goochie goochie goo,” kids aren’t going to learn—they going to learn a lot more if that “goochie goochie goo” is combined with, you know, just talking around them. You engage them with the goochie goo and whatever other stuff you’re doing, so that they’re paying attention. They want to learn what Doc is saying. They want to connect. They say, “Oh my gosh! This person is connected with me. I’m going to pay attention to what’s coming out of that person’s mouth. That’s really important.

Doc: When you mentioned the flashcards and the Baby Einstein and the Mozart, it occurs to me that an entire generation of parents was so concerned about raising baby geniuses that it forgot to raise good people. Connected people. Compassionate people. 

Amy: Yeah. Again, this goes to, you know, what I’ve said. I think it’s all about… I think the generat—and, you know, not without making sweeping generalizations—

Doc: That’s what we do on this show.

Amy: Well, you know, I can’t. It is a sense of the more you put in the more you get out. And I think that they’re putting in the wrong stuff. Right. Or that the emphasis is on the wrong stuff. I had a friend who, I remember, she had a brand new baby and we were driving in the car. She was going to put on Prince. You know, rock out to Prince. And then she said, “I never can play this because my husband always wants to listen to classical music when the baby’s in the car because he thinks it’s going to stimulate something. And… super-well educated person, lawyer, you know, you name it. And I said, “Yeah, you know what? You’re singing with the music. You’re engaging. Maybe you turn around and you dance with the baby. That’s just as valid as whatever positive things come from classical music. There’s nothing wrong with classical music either. I think there is this emphasis on smart. And smart comes from, again, input. But it comes from engagement. It comes from understanding other people. It comes from focus and self-control. That was essential thesis of the project, The Mind in the Making. These are skills that you work on and they’re not soft skills. They’re important. And understand that the way you talk around a kid… It’s not that you have to use fancy words. It’s just that you’re talking. The simple act of talking. You don’t even have to be talking to that baby. I worked on another project about math. And this was with preschoolers. Even the simple act of naming numbers in conversation. You’re cooking dinner. The baby’s in the high chair nearby and you say “oh”. You know the way parents often narrate what they do? That’s a great way of connecting with the kids and doing what you’re doing. And also feeding them a little better. “Oh look, Johnny. I’m getting out three eggs. I’m going to crack the three eggs. How many forks do I need to get? One, two, three, four.” Just that simple counting actively counting out loud and letting kids who hear that start off at an advantage in their math understanding. Simple, stupid, little things like that. It’s not about “Johnny, can you count three.” Like trying to get Johnny to do something that maybe he can’t do. It’s just infusing them with experience and coupling that with engagement. 

Doc: Amy McCampbell, thank you so much for being on our show. 

Amy: You’re very welcome.

Doc: We appreciate everything. And maybe we’ll make the world a better place after all. 

Amy: Perhaps. Now turn off your phone.