CDS Director’s Blog: The Panther Press

Do we over parent in the real world and under parent in the digital world?

This was one of the questions proposed by author Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Anxious Generation,” and one of the themes discussed in last week’s CDS Community Book Club.  Thank you to the 30+ community members who joined us last Friday morning here on campus to have a very real and honest discussion about our children and our own experiences with technology, social media, and parenting in general in this “digital age.”   

Think about your most thrilling experience as a child. Would you let your child have this same experience today?

Another provocative question posed to the group during our conversation sparked much debate on how we parent our children nowadays vs how our parents raised us, not too long ago.  Think about this question as you read this. Would you now let your children have some of the same thrilling experiences you had when you were a child?  Would you let them disappear on bicycles for hours at a time unsupervised?  Do your kids have the freedoms and independence that we had as children?  Why?  Why Not?   

The purpose of this book club is to support each other as a community and discuss topics from the book, but you do not have to have read the book to participate.  Quite the contrary, most of the 30+ people in the room have not read the book but were able to participate wholeheartedly in both whole group and small group discussions.   

Please consider coming to our CDS Community Book Club and bringing a friend.  We promise honest and supportive conversations with an aim to support both our kids and each other as we navigate the challenges of parenting in challenging times.   

Our next CDS Community Book Club will be Friday, September 27th, at 8:45 am in the CDS Curassow Room in the Learning Resource Center.  We hope to see you there!