WHY ARE CHILDREN SO DIFFERENT TODAY? by Jane Nelsen, EdD and Chip DeLorenzo, MEd
When working with Montessori teachers, we always start by
however, there have been some significant changes in society in
asking them to list their current stressors. Inevitably, they share
the last fifty years that have impacted children. We believe that
that children exhibit a high degree of disrespect, entitlement,
these changes provide an explanation for some of the differences
and lack of self-regulation. Children don’t listen to adults. Teachers
that we are seeing in children’s behavior today; it can help us
overwhelmingly agree that these behaviors are more frequent and
prepare the social-emotional environment in our classrooms to
blatant now than when they grew up or when they first started
help compensate for outside factors beyond our control (e.g., video
working with children. Teachers who’ve been in their profession for
games, diet, materialism, entitlement, and child-centered homes
a while observe that schoolwide misbehavior seems more intense
where children decide what and where to eat, what to watch on
than in previous generations. They often ask: What happened to
TV, etc.). Fifty years ago, the world was rife with models of
the good old days, when children respected adults? Where are all
authoritarian leadership and submission. You could find examples
these behavioral issues coming from? Is it environmental? Is it
at home, where dad’s word was final; in workplaces where the boss
parenting? Too much screen time?
was the boss; and in schools where the teacher was considered
The Culture Shift
was cultural support for top-down (or vertical) leadership. Parents
Was there really such a thing as the good old days? We know
didn’t ‘advocate’ for their children. If a child was reprimanded at
that, since there have been children, there has been misbehavior;
school or in his neighborhood, his parents were likely to take the
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a highly respected authority figure. In those good old days, there
©MONTESSORI LEADERSHIP | WWW.MONTESSORI.ORG/IMC | VOLUME 23 ISSUE 1 • 2021
