As teachers, we are always aware of the pressures and expectations that young people face these days and the impact that this can have. I found myself thinking about the relationship between modern social trends and how we can best support the young men in our care.
One thing that has clearly changed over the past 20 years is television. Not just in a technological sense, but also in a social sense. The changing nature of TV viewing habits has in large part been a result of advances in the technology of TV. For example, we now have on-demand access to content like never before. Viewers can binge-watch entire series when we want and our TV will even track what we watch and provide suggestions as to what we might like to watch next. We are constantly getting more varied and higher quality TV available to us, literally at the click of a button.
I remember when I was growing up that I had to wait for 8.30pm on a Saturday night to watch my favourite show. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I had to be on the lounge, fixated on the box. If I missed it there was no rewind. If I wanted to go to the toilet I held it and if the phone rang (the old-fashioned landline) it was ignored. If I was late home and missed the opening credits, there was no catch up. More importantly for a teenage boy of the 90s, if I missed my show I wasn’t part of the conversation held in the quad first thing Monday morning. I didn’t have the social capital to contribute to the latest opinion about what had happened and silently resigned myself to waiting stoically for another whole week.
This may seem flippant or light-hearted but it has some very real connections to modern life. What I learnt throughout my childhood and adolescence was that I had to wait for the things I wanted. This delayed gratification taught me to be patient, to enjoy the tension, build up and excitement that came with it. To savour in the undiluted pleasure of watching my show from opening credits to next week’s trailer. It taught me that in life you can’t always get what you want, when you want. Not so these days.
Today’s teens are used to instant gratification. They expect to be entertained immediately and have toddler-like tantrums when the Wi-Fi drops out during buffering. And to be honest, who can blame them? As human beings, we are hard-wired to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. This triad of motivations, not only sums up teenage boys, but also explains underlying triggers behind behaviour and the strategic manner in which companies target our emotions. The reason why on-demand TV works so well is because it satisfies these intrinsic motivations. The problem, therefore, is in teaching self-control to our young people.
TV is only part of the issue and it’s a wonderful metaphor which encapsulates the change in society faced by our boys. They are exposed to pressures, demands and expectations which have never been dealt with before. The on-demand society in which we live teaches us to expect more, want more and get more. Our social media feeds show us people who are better looking, richer, more fashionable and more successful than ourselves. We are constantly compared to each other’s highlight reels which are in stark contrast to the day-to-day reality of our lives. Add young people looking for a sense of identity to this mix and no wonder we see anxiety, depression and other mental health issues amongst younger and younger teens.
Our responsibility as educators and mentors is to support our boys when they are dealing with the expectations and demands placed on them. It is fair to say that we have never seen such a complex set of expectations and cannot yet determine how it will manifest itself later in life.
Perhaps they will one day muse over the shortcomings of having to sift through pages and pages of suggested TV shows, only to give up and Google cat memes instead.
Jonathan Hall (Head of Mulrooney House)