A theory dating back more than 100 years suggested that there is an optimal amount of stress for good performance, based on a study that had nothing to do with humans.
Researchers ran mice through a maze, using electric shocks to punish wrong choices. On harder tasks, moderate shocks produced the fastest learning, while stronger shocks made it worse. Over the years, this got reinterpreted into claims about punishment, reward, motivation and stress in humans.
But the original study was about how animals learn to avoid fear and pain, not about optimal learning at all. Once a mouse learns to avoid a shock, escape itself triggers dopamine release; in other words, the escape – not the discovery – is the reward.
I think this is in part due to scarcity and the declining middle class. Opportunities for people to have a fairly comfortable life are fewer and harder to achieve then they were in the past. As there are less resources the criteria to dole them out gets stricter as a way to determine who gets more of the shrinking allotment.
Education is one of the few levers left people can effect that will improve life. It’s easy to see the effects ripple backwards.
My fifth grader has academic anxiety about grades and how it will affect college and job prospects. To me that’s crazy; at this point it’s about the fundamentals of life. How could you know what job you want at 11? Much less what extracurricular activities will universities look for when you apply to college.
They see their parenrs struggling and see what is possibly in store for them, and their parents may also not believe like previous generations that their kid is destined to be better off than them.
Not surprising if the parents accomplished what the generation before them thought was the key to success of getting educated and choosing the right career path. So they’ve already “succeeded” and hit the ceiling and see it wasn’t all they envisioned it to be and the job opportunities and salaries in relation to cost of living getting worse.
And the kids pick up on that.
Your fifth grader understands that when you say ‘everything will be okay’ that what you are really doing is lying to yourself because you are scared, which I understand but what else is your kid supposed to do except be background anxious about coming expulsions from their way of life that their parents clearly are dangerously ignorant of?
Your child’s response is totally rational
That’s a real stretch to come up with what you wrote from my response. You are leading with what you already thought and wanted to say as opposed to responding.