ABSTRACT
In October 2011, Noreen Malone, Assistant Editor of New York magazine, wrote a detailed article considering the effect of a shrinking economy on American twenty-somethings. Firstly, Malone comments on the effect of the praise culture on self-esteem, writing,
… our parents tried to see how much self-confidence they could pack into us, like so many overstuffed microfiber love seats, and accordingly we were awarded clip-art Certificates of Participation just for showing up. Self-esteem among young people in America has been rising since the seventies, but it’s now so dramatically high that social scientists are considering whether they need to find a different measurement system – we’ve broken the scale. Since we are not in fact all perfect, this means that the endless praise we got growing up, win or lose, must have really sunk in.
(Malone 2011) But the article then goes on to describe the feelings of these young adults who are unable to access the successful careers that they were expecting. One person commented, ‘The worst thing is that I’ve always gotten self-worth from performance, especially good grades. But now that I can’t get a job, I feel worthless’ (ibid.). This feeling is a direct outcome of performance related praise which means that the speaker attributes her failure to herself, rather than the state of the economy. The author goes on to observe that,It’s part of the American way to get a lot of self-worth from your job. Meanwhile, one of the reasons there aren’t enough of those jobs out there is that America no longer makes enough stuff. Young people feel that void, intrinsically. Making stuff is what got us smiles from our parents … And since we are, as a generation, more addicted to positive reinforcement than any before us, and because we have learned firsthand the futility of finding that affirmation through our employers, we have returned to our stuff-making ways … this is a golden age for creativity and knowledge for their own sakes. Our pastimes have become our expressions of mastery.
(ibid.) In titling the article The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright, Malone is saying that a generation of young American adults has found a new set of values, based on the mastery of skills which were once merely seen as a route to self-advancement in the workplace.