10 ms·
So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would co
by Zenst 8y ago
So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions.
Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today.
After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These are activities people still alive today will recall.
With that, online is still in part a wild-west and new playfield, open, less restrictions compared to real life and with that, perhaps the logical outlet for teenage freedom.
But even that is slowly being eroded away with the same mentalities that drove children into 1984 style parenting.
With that, todays children may very well in their 50's look at the children of the time and feel how restricted and curtailed they are compared to the freedoms they enjoyed in their time. That would not surprise me, but equally, when do laws, rules, restrictions reach a zenith when no more need be added or changed! Until then, the lamentations of life march on.
- RobLach 8y ago50 years from now teens will have a subscription to curated experiences for them to get together in-person for while their typical interpersonal interactions will happen over the Internet where it’s nice with a relatively null marginal cost.
- wangchungtonite 8y agoThis is rather depressing and hopefully not true but likely is. Reminds me of the movie “Surrogates”
- arcticfox 8y ago> 50 years from now This sounds like 5 years from now to me, if not today in large part
- BurningFrog 8y agoIt will be 5 years from now in China. The rest of us can watch and learn.
- proy24 8y agoShit I was a teenager only 8 years ago but cannot relate to todays teenagers at all..In contrast I could very easily relate to people in their 20s when I was a teenager.
- asdff 8y agoI can see it now. We are already turning groceries into a subscription service, why stop there? $19.99 a month for a coffee a week, and the store is closed to starbucks nonsubscribers or they buy a day pass for $7. Oh but did you know new subscribers get spotify free for one month??? Huge companies have already captured the market and can afford buy out any alternatives or pay for favorable policy, only a matter of time until they matriculate our piecemeal purchases into guaranteed regular profit.
- swiley 8y agoI’m pretty sure we’re already starting to do this.
- ryanmercer 8y agoSo, escape rooms?
- brightball 8y agoFWIW, Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts are a pretty great place to get those same skills and experiences. Great opportunity to get a well rounded childhood.
- sanderjd 8y agoI'm a fan of these sorts of programs as well, but adolescents also really really need unstructured time together.
- wtallis 8y agoA properly executed Boy Scout program[1] should give adolescents a lot of unstructured time and leave them with the sense that they spent a weekend hanging out with their friends having fun. It's only at the Cub Scout level where it's appropriate for adults to be planning and leading a highly structured weekend of activities. When I take my troop camping, even if there's a fixed plan for an activity during the day (eg. if we've hired a whitewater rafting outfitter for the day), by 4 or 5PM on Saturday we're back in camp and the scouts' time is their own from then until mid-morning Sunday when they need to be packed up and ready for the drive home. They're still loosely supervised by adults, but there's no adult telling them when to start cooking dinner or when to go to bed. [1] The program is officially no longer known as Boy Scouts in the US, now that it's starting to go co-ed.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoIn the Boy Scouts troop I was in, no one was allowed to spend time at the parents/adult leaders tent. There's several obvious reasons for this, but one is to force kids, especially those who have a parent volunteering, to spend time away from them and learn some independence. I think it was a great policy.
- sanderjd 8y agoYep, this is totally right and an important part of the program. But still not a substitute for spending unstructured time with peers. If nothing else, teenagers should be spending time with possible love interests, flirting, saying the wrong things, saying the right things, figuring out why which is which, that sort of thing. For the large majority of kids that wasn't going to happen at BSA events. Maybe that will change with the broadening to include girls, but I suspect that sort of stuff will be frowned on rather than encouraged; it's just not the goal of the program.
- paulsutter 8y agoSurely kids still try to make gunpowder, what are you talking about? And for who but kids are pocket knives and chenistry sets made? > there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife.
- Zenst 8y agoIn the UK, both are now illegal, can't even sell a knife to anybody under 18, same with glue and many things above and beyond alcohol and tobacco. Equally, having a knife in public, would be mandatory jail in the UK in the current climate. For a child, they would be taken into care and some serious nightmares for the parents from social services and the police. As for explosives, all the above, but far worse. By default you would get classed a terrorist until proven innocent style justice on that one, again the current climate.
- ada1981 8y agoMy friends and I grew up field testing pretty much everything in the anarchist cook book. Our summers were filled making exotic explosives and blowing things up. It’s a wonder we all lived, with no major injuries or jail time. Our antics would land a kid these days in Guantanamo Bay.
- BFLpL0QNek 8y agoHaving a copy of the anarchist / jolly roger cookbook would have you serving jail time in 2019. I remember a time where you would see printed copies at car boot sales or numerous geocity copies.
- watwut 8y agoI know kids who have pocket knifes and it does not strike me as something weird. But, making explosives and fires while not knowing how to keep it safe is something that rightfully disappeared. Such activities did not ended up well all the time actually.
- deepGem 8y ago"even having a pocket knife" .. I must have given away at least 5 swiss army knives to TSA. The teenager in me still clings on to a pocket knife.
- vorpalhex 8y agoA good pocket knife has a lot of utility, and now you can probably afford a nicer knife to carry.
- ghaff 8y agoI almost never have a pocket knife with me these days because wherever I put it, it's just a matter of time before I leave it in some bag that I throw into carry-on for a plane trip.
- abledon 8y ago"Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today." I cringed watching the new ALITA: Battle Angel movie, (Spiritual successor to Avator, directed by James Cameron). There was a teen romance section where the android and hot guy went through the tropes (riding on the back of his bike hugging tight, sneaking into his bedroom, watching him put on a tight fitting shirt) it was weird because in Japan they are intensely lonely with people paying for surrogate GF's etc... and the robot industries are starting to develop 'romance' robots.
- burgerboy 8y agoLol spiritual successor to Avatar what the fuck are you talking about
- technofiend 8y agoEstes model rockets still offer a little bit of that wild freedom. You build something yourself and shoot it into the sky on a pillar of flame. And if you're really lucky you get it back in the end.
- ryanmercer 8y ago>Estes model rockets still offer a little bit of that wild freedom Until you get arrested for trespassing launching or retrieving, or you take out someone's drone and they sue you, or it lands on someone's property and they sue you, or someone calls protective services because "a couple of yutes were playing with 'explosives', no parent in sight". Sigh. :(
- technofiend 8y agoI almost said freedom and uncertainty but yeah it requires some planning and some common sense. Like finding a large enough area you won't land on a house and if the wind takes it you let it go. Mine often fed the trees. :shakes fist: Damn trees!
- milquetoastaf 8y agoif you go around worrying about every little thing like this, you will never live
- slavik81 8y agoGood luck finding anywhere legal to launch them. None of the places I used as a kid can be used anymore.
- CalRobert 8y ago50 years from now there's a decent chance they'll be coping with the fallout from climate change (or hey, maybe antibiotic resistance?) and the collapse of the power structures that stifles the existence of current teenagers.
- ams6110 8y agoMight end up being more fun. Sounds better than sitting in a bedroom in front of a screen for 12 hours a day.
- low_common 8y agoI want my kids to either grow up in a huge city like NYC where I live or a rural area. I spent a year in a small town in rural NC and your kids can grow up wild. I think the suburbs are the stifling force here. They're too safe.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoI agree, it kills me to see a bus stop filled with idling cars of parents too scared to let their kids walk. Suburbs are incredibly stifling. Most of the recently built ones I've seen don't have sidewalks at all, it's very car-centric and closed off.
- low_common 8y agoFor sure. Here in NYC, I at least see kids walking home and hanging out with each other. If you can afford it, I'd say it's a great place to raise a kid.
- Konnstann 8y agoI grew up in the suburbs in Northern Virginia, Everything is in biking distance, including shopping malls, the Potomac River, all sorts of parks, etc. Schools in my district require at least 1 parent to be present at the bus stop in the morning and at drop-off time for elementary school kids. Whether or not that's the right way to go about it I don't know, but past that age everyone walks to school/bus stop alone.
- asdff 8y agoThe suburbs are super restrictive for kids to interact. I had a friend who lived in a development that had like 1.5mi of winding roads and cul-de-sac before you hit his house. It took almost 5 minutes by car just to hit the exit of the development, which was a 45mph road without any nearby crosswalk and you'd definitely die on a bike. The place had no sidewalks either. If you don't have a license and the only means of travel is by car, what do you do? You get on facetime/videogames with your friends.