Perspectives Winter/Spring 2019

18 | DR. PALLAVI PATEL COLLEGE OF HEALTH CARE SCIENCES FACULTY Perspectives Changing Tides The Lost Art and Benefits of Social Interaction BY ROBERT C. GROSZ, ED.D., ACSM We are riding a radical wave of behavioral change by traditional standards. Our social existence seems to be less gracious as we trans- ition from one way of life to another. There are so many names given to generations: Baby Boomers, Beat, Lost, Millennials, X, etc. However, if we consider a generation to be around 25 years, we can see we are in a transitional, generational change of behavior covering the past 25-plus years. Through the 1970s, we were more sensitive to how we conducted our social lives. Our social interactions were very important. The terms personal contact and personal communication had more meaning. There was more concern for the development of personal socialization, beginning with the education of children through early adulthood. The first one or two grades focused on the social development of the child. Learning how to interact one-on-one or face-to-face was an important objective in these early grades. This quality of our relationships was important. Avoiding loneliness or avoiding being alone was a constant, universal objective. We were— and are—social animals. In the mid-to-late 1980s, we started seeing a rise in depression, suicide rates, and children being born to mothers younger than 30 and outside of marriage. Coin- cidentally, we also started to see a rise in less concern for one-on-one, face-to-face contact and social develop- ment. The concern for a rise in loneliness and being alone was becoming a viable issue in health care, includ- ing messages from the Office of the Surgeon General. Regimentation in activities and demand for aca- demic performance were becoming increasingly preva- lent in the introductory years of education. One of the “victims,” so to speak, was less opportunity for a child to make a choice, either in early schooling or in play. FACULTY PERSPECTIVES