The Can’t-Do Culture

I had to Google the P in PSAT to find out what it stands for, which is “preliminary,” not “practice.” The exam is still practice for my sophomore daughter and her schoolmates, though, a chance to hone their bubble-grid skills a year before the real test -- which, in turn, is a rehearsal for the SAT.

I understand the notion that familiarity improves performance. I also understand our school’s extra prep session and practice exam to help students who break into a cold sweat when they hear the words “standardized test.”

What I don’t understand is the otherwise reasonable mom who called to find out where she could find a PSAT tutor -- and fast -- to better prepare her seemingly competent daughter for a practice version of a pretest.

We usually think of “assisted living” as services provided for the very elderly, for people who can’t walk or talk or think straight. Yet daily life for the rest of us seems more and more like a remedial program: We’re afraid to do anything without outside help; we don’t even trust ourselves to park the car anymore.

That’s not an idle reference. Our new car has a sensor that beeps with increasing urgency when the car decides that I am too close to whatever’s behind me. And the sensor is one nervous driver: It starts shrieking when I still have a good 3 feet of space left, and builds to a horrid crescendo just when I should be feeling victorious for having nailed a parking space between two hulking SUVs. Parallel parking ends up sounding like the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

I used to pride myself on my parallel parking. Now the electronic voice of doubt chimes in before I’ve even cut the front wheel: “Be careful. I said, be careful. You’re not being careful enough. Oh, my god, you’re going to hit the car behind you!”

What else can’t we do by ourselves anymore?

We can’t lose weight, not even with the old-guard Weight Watchers. Oh no, we need someone to deliver slimming prepackaged meals and snacks, as though we have lost the ability to distinguish between rocky road ice cream and a stalk of celery.

The hip among us can’t seem to make their own espresso in the morning. The latest gadget on the home-brew scene is a machine that uses prepackaged, sealed pods of ground coffee -- to spare us the arduous task of pouring some beans into a grinder and pushing a button.

And heaven knows, we can no longer take our children to college for their freshman year on our own. That escapade used to call for a box of Kleenex and a temporary obsession with shelving and a good desk lamp. Now universities offer separation workshops for parents who haven’t figured out that it’s a bad idea to spend the first week of classes camped out in their child’s dormitory lobby.

Institutionalized assistance -- everywhere we look. We all seem to have forgotten the cardinal rule of quivering neuroses: The best way to raise an incompetent is to assume that he always needs help with everything. Metaphorically speaking, a kid whose mother always ties his shoes will grow up having to wear slip-ons.

That’s where we seem to be headed. Our credo has become, “I don’t think I can handle this on my own.” We are timid, riddled by self-doubt and fanatical about micromanaging life’s vicissitudes. I don’t really think my friend’s daughter needs a private tutor for a pretest for a pretest. I think my friend needs to get her daughter that private tutor so she feels that some part of her life is under control.

Remember the tagline from the 1986 horror movie “The Fly”? “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

We are, and we can’t quite figure out what to do about it. George W. Bush tells us that everything is going just fine -- and people are so terrified of change that they intend to vote for him even as they disagree with him. John F. Kerry says that not much of anything is going fine but he can fix it -- yet people are reluctant to vote for him because he is less likable, as though we’re electing a dad, not a commander in chief.

Many of us probably are looking for a dad. In scary times, we regress. We take comfort in the buffers that protect us from the smallest blow, whether it is the tap of a car bumper at 2 miles an hour or an espresso that’s not quite as good as yesterday’s. We don’t allow ourselves to be ambushed by a stealth carbohydrate, and we call that victory -- though we used to know (when we felt more self-confident) that we could survive the occasional bagel with cream cheese.

In our youth-obsessed culture, we like to say that 50 is the new 30, but we’re acting as though 30 were the new 80. I may ask the car dealer if there’s some way to disconnect its reverse sensor, so I can be my own woman again.