A FANCIER’S NOTEBOOK
SUSI
SZEREMY
Combating the
“Snowflake Generation”
T
alk with a fancier long enough and inevitably the subject of the “greying” of our sport comes up. We fret
over the future of our respective breeds, club members wring their hands over how to attract new and younger
members, and the AKC grapples with finding relevancy with
a generation raised on the “Adopt, Don’t Shop” mantra. It’s
natural to wonder how best to attract the young when the
future of the sport has wrinkles.
In reality, the fancy already has a young demographic. We
call them junior handlers, and while we talk a good game
about the importance of supporting them, the fact is that we
could do more. Junior finals should be part of the evening
lineup for televised dog shows not only to show how much
we value them, but to also attract young viewers to the sport.
College tuition prize money at premier shows should get serious, and more clubs might consider “adopting” a junior by
helping mentor and/or sponsor their career.
Every enterprise needs an occasional renaissance, and our
sport is no different, but as I see it, there’s a more compelling reason to encourage our juniors than to safeguard the future of our
sport. We need them to help safeguard the future of our society.
Many Young People Today Are “Snowflakes”
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How Junior Showmanship Can Help
The end result of overprotecting children is a group of individuals who lack the resiliency children learn in a competitive environment such as Junior Showmanship. Early on,
juniors learn about winning and losing, teamwork, effort,
competition and, sooner or later, the importance of balance.
They must take criticism from strangers, fellow competitors,
friends and parents. They don’t always win, and they learn
that life isn’t always fair.
In time, they’ll learn about good breeding practices where
they’ll inevitably encounter words like bitch, semen, penis and
other steamy biological references, and they’ll be able to talk
about breeding without blushing or giggling foolishly. Contrast
this with some Harvard law students who in 2014 asked professors to include “trigger warnings” when teaching rape law,
with some even suggesting rape law not be taught at all, and
at least one who asked that the word “violate” not be used because it might distress the students.
Junior Showmanship isn’t perfect or, at times, even pretty:
Children can encounter stage parents (both their own and
that of the competition), snarky competitors, biased judges,
ugly comments, spectator scrutiny and any manner of things
that can and do go wrong. There is room for criticism: Some
juniors compete with a finished champion that could show
itself and thereby miss the point of what Junior Showmanship
is supposed to be about, but guess what? The show ring is a
lot like real life, and few of us emerge out of it unscathed.
Some of us have advantages from the start, some of us don’t.
The more “reality” that youngsters encounter in the somewhat protected environment of a show ring, the more resilient
they’ll be in a big bad world that comes without a safety net.
In adversity, a “Snowflak e” will be most apt to run and hide,
but I’d lay odds that a junior handler will say, “Bring it.” I’ll put
my future in the hands of that junior over the melt-on-contact
sensibilities of a “Snowflake” any day. DIR
KICHIGIN/SHUTTERSTOCK
Living among us are young adults who, in their short lives thus
far, have been rewarded for simply taking breath, figuratively
speaking. Many of them, as children, received soccer and Little
League trophies just for participation, and attended schools
that eliminated letter grades and valedictorian and salutatorian honors because they were seen as encouraging an “unhealthy” level of competition. A Columbia University survey in
2007 found that 85 percent of American parents thought it was
important to tell their kids that they’re smart, as opposed to telling them that hard work, a good disposition or consistent effort
was valued at least as much. Many Millennials have grown up
in a world where self-esteem trumps actual accomplishment,
“trigger warnings” must accompany their forays into the real
world, and being offended is to be avoided at all costs.
It doesn’t seem to have worked out. A growing body of
research indicates that the self-esteem movement has hurt
kids more than it has helped them. A review of more than 150
praise studies by Reed College and Stanford scholars determined that highly praised students become risk-averse and
lack perceived autonomy. No surprise, then, that we now have
the “Snowflake Generation”: Young adults so easily offended
that they demand “safe zones” at college campuses where
they are protected from words and ideas they don’t like.
The fact that some Millennials have become this way is
rooted in how their parents raised them, coupled with society’s tolerance of their hypersensitivity. Some parents have
gone to ludicrous lengths to eliminate all risk and disappointment from their children’s lives, and worse, they’ve done it
to spare themselves the unpleasantness of dealing with their
children’s rejection, disappointment or failure — some of the
basic “food groups” of just being alive.
DOGSinREVIEW.com
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8/17/16 11:47 AM