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We Have Ruined Childhood
- esotericn 7y agoIs this exclusive to childhood? It feels to me, though this could well be a socio-economic bubble thing, that people are just scrambling everywhere. Hyperfocused on something; anything. Maybe it's their career; maybe it's their cause; whatever. But the innocence of just living, existing; hanging out in this beautiful world we call home; seems to be fading for many. Happiness must be now, not future, otherwise future it will always be.
- LocalH 7y agoSociety demands far too much of everyone's time, from childhood through adulthood. It's not simply enough to balance work and life, to get by most people have to spend more time working than not when sleep is taken into account (if a person gets enough sleep, many do not). Society is a greedy bastard. It gets a pound of flesh in the long run, no matter what.
- leggomylibro 7y agoI agree, a better title might be something like, "We Have Ruined Life". But I guess that's a tiny bit melodramatic. Still, start with the subtitle - I'd be surprised if you don't relate to it: "[A]an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable." With just those sentences, there's nothing to indicate that the author is talking about children, and the article continues as it started. It says that children are more depressed than before, but who isn't? It says that suicidal ideation and attempts have increased among children since 2007, but that also sounds like something that adults have shared. It points to the lack of a safety net and a lack of help for parents, but is that lack of stability really unique to parenting? Doesn't it suffuse every part of our lives, including our families? I'm curious - does anyone here feel like you could actually rely on communal structures for anything in a time of need? Anyone in the States? On a personal note, this sort of lack of a shared community is why I'm moving soon, although I don't seriously expect anything to be better in a different location. People are people everywhere, and maybe that's our problem - when our reward systems get hijacked to divert more and more of our time to the highest bidder, we end up collectively helpless and anesthetized. Didn't Marx once say that "religion is the opium of the people"? Well, religious participation has been dropping like a stone lately - maybe twitter has supplanted that role. And to think that we used to use the term 'holy war' as an ironic way to talk about how people wasted their time with ideological internet arguments - it's not so funny now, is it?
- arvinsim 7y ago> Didn't Marx once say that "religion is the opium of the people"? Well, religious participation has been dropping like a stone lately - maybe twitter has supplanted that role. And to think that we used to use the term 'holy war' as an ironic way to talk about how people wasted their time with ideological internet arguments - it's not so funny now, is it? Reminds me of Chesterton's quote. > For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
- OrgNet 7y ago> Is this exclusive to childhood? It applies to most of the world
- jklp 7y agoI have an XKCD bookmarked for this exact thing - with quotes as far back as 1871 about how modern life is just too hectic https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ Notable quotes such as: > It is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. In olden times it was different. -- The Medical Record, 1884 > If we teach the children how to play and encourage them in their sports ... instead of shutting them in badly ventilated school rooms, the next generation will be more joyous and will be healthier than the present one. -- Public Opinion: A comprehensive summary of the press throughout the world, Volume 18, 1985 > Our modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine, is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school -- The Journal of Education, Volume 29, 1907
- esotericn 7y agoGame, set, and match.
- rabidrat 7y agoI wonder if there are any quotes like this from before the Industrial Revolution.
- Nasrudith 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they were found back in Roman times - in the cities only of course since while farms do require a lot of labor they aren't as time-pressured.
- w-ll 7y agoThanks, I haven't seen this one yet. > There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly. cracked me up
- mbrumlow 7y agoI have a child. I love him very much. I can not fathom why any parents would not have free time as priority. Free time is amazing. Here is why. - I get a break. - My child gets to learn how to learn on his own. - My child builds independence. - My child learns to manage his time on his own. I see this playing out in the work force too. Far too many people I have worked with that are younger need to be told exactly what to do or they are lost and helpless. Free time is a win win win.
- rusk 7y agoI'm the same. I consider myself very, very privileged.
- Scoutmaster 7y agoWhat I've observed: they don't want any type of failure for their kids. I'm a Scoutmaster, and I have one parent who lashed out at me because I asked him not to interfere when the Scouts were trying to do something for themselves. I didn't let that affect me, I just thanked him for his feedback. Thankfully, I have the support of everyone else in the troop. What saddens me, is seeing first-hand how bad these parents are for their kids. I feel bad for them. Those kids are going to grow up broken. This parent's kid only has fun when his parent isn't there. I've never seen him with a smile when his parent is around.
- hos234 7y agoNewton's father died when he was 3 months old and his mother ditched him as a kid and when she returned years later made him quit school to take care of the pigs. The reason he went on to become the Isaac Newton everyone knows, was because of the role all the other Adults around him played, not his parents. Don't write off that kid. I teach part time and see this a lot. Especially from fellow teachers. Oh this kid has an alcoholic abusive dad, that kid has a mom with cancer, those 2 have family members in jail etc etc, followed by go easy on the struggling kid or this kid has no hope etc. If the kid flunks a test or skips class let it slide etc. All this compounds the issue. What is required is the opposite of just sympathy. Help them find their strengths and interests. Show them how to focus on positives and tune out negatives. Encourage whatever small steps you see them taking. Sensitize the other kids around them to be supportive. Show them examples of resilience and what it takes to be resilient. All these small things add up. Basically don't focus on the parent, focus on things you can do for the kid. It's very hard to reprogram dysfunctional adults and get them to change, but kids are very different story. And there are few things more beautiful and satisfying, than watching a kid who has struggled for years and years, overcome and kick ass.
- tptacek 7y agoDoes this feel to anyone else like a lengthy characterization of a very particular time/place of 20th century child rearing? And, if it does, is there a reason to believe that we got parenting exactly right in, what, American circa 1950-1970, after starkly different parenting norms both before and after?
- forkandwait 7y agoLet's add "affluent and white and fortuitously non alcohol addicted" to "1950-1970" and I think you nailed it.
- jacobolus 7y agoNot being alcohol addicted is not “fortuitous”. Fortuitous means purely by chance; accidentally; without any known cause.
- tlb 7y agoIt also means "Resulting in good fortune; lucky" in which sense the word fits perfectly. https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous
- jacobolus 7y agoIt is sometimes used like “lucky” because people who have no idea what it means get it confused with “fortunate” and use the two interchangeably. If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened. If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous. Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
- 7y ago
- protomyth 7y agoWell, if you report 24x7 hate and danger, scare the crap out of people, and report that there is danger behind every tree, then yes, childhoods are ruined. Things are getting safer and the only way you would know it is go look at the CDC stats. Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
- bgravinz 7y agoThe wisdom of the "may you live in interesting times" curse rears its head once again.
- Causalityl 7y agoIndeed. There is no better example of a failure to do basic math than running active shooter drills when 98% of child gun homicides happen outside of school hours.
- jcranmer 7y agoColumbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, and Red Lake are the mass shootings of my lifetime to take place in schools. Virginia Tech and another community college also saw mass shootings, if you want to include tertiary education. Note that three of these are in the top 10 (and 2 in the top 5) if you rank them by deaths.
- Causalityl 7y agoYes they did. They are also a tiny drop in the bucket of child gun homicides, an even smaller drop for child gun deaths, and an incredibly small bump in child deaths overall.
- jcranmer 7y agoActive shooter drills aren't about preventing child gun homicides. They're about active shooter situations inside schools, which are actual events that have happened. You may debate how useful they are, or if the frequency of school shootings is sufficient to justify them, but I will point out that the number of times I have had to evacuate a school (admittedly, due to a bomb threat) is equal to the number of times we had to "assume the position" for a tornado threat (exactly once).
- badcede 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4
- jimmaswell 7y agoI've thought about this a decent amount and I just can't agree that unsupervised outdoor wandering is a good thing before maybe middle school. Kids are stupid and even the smart ones get peer pressured into doing stupid things that can injure or kill them. Like when I crushed my wrist riding a bike downhill on a paved road in 2nd or 1st grade. Those kids apparently rode on roads all the time which looking back seems irresponsible as hell. Unsupervised in a house or on a property in a good area is fine too. I just can't agree with letting small kids wander into cities or roads or forests on their own. On the other hand I feel like open-ended and/or educational video games like Minecraft fill a similar need for self determination/experimentation/exploration just fine to a degree.
- ryeights 7y ago> Kids are stupid and even the smart ones get peer pressured into doing stupid things that can injure or kill them. This happens to adults too (especially sheltered ones). It’s a part of life. Wouldn’t you say it’s important for kids to make those kinds of mistakes and learn some important lessons about the real world while the consequences are still relatively small?
- jimmaswell 7y agoYour decision-making ability is usually objectively much better as an adult.
- neom 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
- The_rationalist 7y agoAre you aware this is a retrograde sect?
- odessacubbage 7y agocould you elaborate?
- knolax 7y agoThere are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding Waldorf Schools. Some say that it's a cult.
- Nasrudith 7y agoTo be fair it was based upon occultist principles. Saying it was based upon a cult is technically correct. Whether that it is currently relevant is another question - most of the criticisms I have seen is about being antivaxxer.
- bildung 7y agoIMO it would be false to not describe Waldorf pedagogics as a cult. Steiner literally said he got his insights through visions where god spoke to him. And most axioms of Waldorf pedagogics have been been empirically falsified in the past decades. Luckily the parental household still is the strongest indicator for intellectual outcome of the kids. And as the kids in Waldorf schools are usually self-selected from middle and upper class households, one usually hasn't many dire social or economic problems in a class. So all in all the negative effect of Waldorf schools isn't big.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoI have three school age kids and I'd put the difficulties of modern parenting into two bins: 1. Increasingly, both parents work full time and don't/can't rely on family for child care. The "and" is critical here, because in the past you might have had a single parent or dual income parents, but also had grandmothers and aunties as support. An increasingly mobile workforce, and smaller families mean that familial support structures are dwindling. 2. "Being a kid" is illegal. If you're under 12 in most of Virginia, you can't be unsupervised by an adult for more than three hours and can't be unsupervised overnight until you're 16. States have been turning schools into prison-lite since at least the 90s [1] 2.a. Other parents are your worst enemy in this case. I can't tell you how many times a "concerned" parent has approached one of my kids - while I could see them - about if they were lost, because there wasn't a parent literally hovering over them. That doesn't even get to all the insane competitiveness of everything that keeps everyone on edge. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/how-america-outlawed-adolescence/501149/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/how-ame...
- l33tbro 7y agoWhat would you say your typical response is to 2.a.? I'm anticipating this a bit when I do eventually have kids. Also, please elaborate on the insane competitiveness. This entire subject fascinates me (and others?) greatly, as I really want to have the best grasp I can of what I'm in for.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI don't have a kid (yet), and I started to write out my plan, but then I changed it. Now it I'm thinking about this: Treat them like you would treat a beggar or salesperson you don't want to interact with, say "No thanks" with minimal eye contact and keep moving (or if stationary, ignore them).
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI’ve been there and it’s a bit annoying, but not entirely so. I give my 2 year old kid wide birth at the park, and sometimes other parents think he is completely un watched. I put up with it because my kid has gotten lost before, and other parents have been very helpful at that point (unfortunately giving lots of space can backfire at the store when he just runs off and gets lost). There is a TV show in Japan (sure you can find it on YouTube) where parents send their 3 or 4 year old kid to the store by themselves for the first time and then have them followed by a film crew (this right of passage is typically unfilmed and unsupervised of course). I know that can’t happen in the states, but I can dream!
- koolba 7y agoThat’s a hell of a clickbait headline for a supposed paper of record. I don’t even disagree with the premise. It doesn’t make it less disgusting though. That aside, the weight of this sits on the parents, not society. Parents dump their children into scholastic programs and extra curriculars not because of the results, they do so because they’re lazy and refuse to do the tasks themselves. They think it’s difficult to discipline children and would rather pay someone to watch their child scribble with crayons while they sip a latte then spend an hour actually reading to them. This also leads to them feeling like the time a child spends “doing nothing” is a bad thing. Far from it. That’s when a child learns to be bored. Show me a child that’s never been bored and I’ll show you one that’s never going to be independent. The first step of independence is occupying the space between your ears.
- mattrp 7y agoWith five kids of my own, I can certainly say that an hour of play would reduce the perfectly groomed worlds of most people to rubble while leaving them in tears. That’s not to argue against play it’s just that you have to accept that it’s not quite something you can post to Instagram.
- koolba 7y agoI can assure you that no child gives two shits about how many likes your Saturday activity received on any social media platform. A handful of worms, a skinned knee, and arms covered in poison ivy they’ll remember. The perfect sunset shot they won’t.
- nemo44x 7y agoAt least childhood runs well into your 30’s today.
- defterGoose 7y agoI wish comments like this required an age verification to post. "You must be this crotchety to denigrate millenials."
- cableshaft 7y agoI'm in my 30s, and I kinda still feel like a child. I'm just a child that has bills, debt, health problems, and people and animals that depend on me.
- ryanmercer 7y agoI mean, I'm 34... after a friend's funeral I went to his brother's house a couple weeks ago. He had an entire room of action figures and vintage toys, another room full of emulator cabinets, pinball, pachinko (and he is NOT a tech type - he installs windows for a living on the road for weeks at a time). My Facebook feed is almost constantly full of friends (and even my nephew in his mid 20's) posting cosplay photos at cons, photographs meeting artists/actors at cons, showing the comic book-related material they bought at cons, talking about comic book movies, talking about comic book movie panels at cons. Same in my IG feed. Then, uh, look at Mixer, Twitch... lots of 20-40 year old people playing video games and D&D with small to massive followings.
- sak5sk 7y agoDepressed kids are a symptom of a sick society and bleak outlooks. You have to try really hard to point a finger at a single culprit, but we all know that's just not the case. Sure, play is one important factor but let's consider for a moment some additional points to connect for a bleak picture: 1. We purposely build addiction into social media which leads to more screen time. Anecdotally, there are so many examples of people quitting social media and feeling much better. Screen time is a huge factor for sure. 2. We put undo stress on our kids with all of the testing requirements.I remember how much anxiety and stress I got in school just thinking about the upcoming test. Now test frequency is completely insane when compared to when I was in school. I can only imagine how much stress this is adding to a kid's day. So yeah, I think testing plays a big role in this too. 3. Kids (teens), are constantly exposed to the fear-mongering headlines bombarding them day in day out. Since we set up our media to profit from pageviews, we've created a situation where it pays to play up to people's fears. Kids read these things too and in many cases do not have the mental models or capacity to differentiate clickbait bs. vs substantive information. Hell, even adults (as witnessed by at least 50% of US population) can't differentiate between fact and fiction. 4. Lack of play time. OF COURSE kids are not going to develop properly if they can't learn to socialize and participate in society. OF COURSE they'll distance themselves back into the screen where, OOPS, they'll read more of those nasty headlines and while at it think about the upcoming test. It doesn't help that we now have (billion?)-dollar gaming companies pulling every trick in the book to build addiction into every interaction. What better way to escape the problems of the real world than to retrieve into the virtual one? I can't blame them... this is what I personally did as a teen. 5. Climate change - probably one of the most understated reasons that leaves children hopeless. While we keep debating on the best ways to solve our climate problems, kids are left hopeless about their futures. We have grown ass adults taking to Twitter to insult teens for trying to take some sort of action while those same grown ass adults are sitting on their hands or swiping their facebook feeds. 6. Increased hopelessness, depression and isolation among adults - how are kids supposed to learn to explore on their own and that there is more to life than your screen when their parents are increasingly isolating themselves from the world. When you have a government that is hellbent on making your life more difficult by fueling inequality, what possible hope do you have as a child when you see how your parents struggle to make ends meet? "oh so this is what I have to look forward to..." You could pick apart any one of those points to trace the origins and have enough to write a Times essay. The point being, it's one massive clusterfuck with multiple points of failure. If we want our kids to have any sort of a decent and bright future full of joy, we should start looking at how to fix our own problems. Start looking at reducing inequality, proactive automation readiness, better social systems, fewer guns, policies to reduce consumption, subsidies for alternative energies and de-carbonization, complete education reform to do away with insane testing, strict laws on what can and cannot make it into consumer apps in terms of addiction building, and so on and so on.
- jasoneckert 7y agoAm I the only one who read the title of this article and immediately thought of https://media.tenor.com/images/3bc06466fab83db4d2192334e877eeaa/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/3bc06466fab83db4d2192334e877e... ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoThis seems to also be fear mongering as for example teen suicide is still down from the early 90’s. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm Things are different, but that does not always mean they are worse.
- wallace_f 7y agoThere are so many different variables at play in determing that though. I remember in my football team's locker room, one guy ended up with an erection and beat up, spit on. I got to deal with hearing "faggot" for years just for being the one person saying to stop. I can't imagine that kind of thing happening today as often. There are good and bad changes.
- casefields 7y agoWow. Males are triple the rate of females.
- masonic 7y agoFemales attempt more, males succeed more.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoThat’s similar for adults. If you look at the number of suicide attempts the difference diminishes however. A possible reason for this is guys tend to use methods of suicide that have low rates of failure (eg guns) while women tend to use methods that leave open a window where you can be saved (eg pills). Why that is I don’t know but I suppose women on average have a more social nature and don’t want to leave behind a huge physical mess for others to clean up, but that’s pure speculation on my side
- belorn 7y agoWhen it comes to teens, suicide by guns has dropped significant while the difference in deaths between girls and boys has increased. Looking at statistics and research here in Sweden where gun ownership by families with children is rather low, the explanation is more focused on difference in how depression express itself different in boys compared to girls and how adults in the near environment respond to that, difference in the rate that boys reach out to adults for help, and alcohol as self-medication.
- jweir 7y agoWho is We? Actually I think I get it - we had kids in NYC too. But we left and I find the stories in the article to be rather alien now. Kids running free from house to house and playing on their own. Is that really so rare outside of some of the big cities?
- themoat 7y agoNot from my experience. The kids on my block played all summer long on bikes, with hoses, and at the nearby park. I'm guessing from 5 or 6 different houses on the street, all different ages. Just kids being summer kids. Same story when I visited family in Colorado. Just kids playing outside like kids. Coming over unsupervised to play with the kids. Seems like I might not live in the areas where the sky is falling, but I see kids reading outside, playing outside, and generally being away from their parents all the time in my own neighborhood
- nhebb 7y ago> For youngsters these days, an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. I'm over my free NYT limit, but the lead caught my eye. Is this a by-product of raising kids in the city, or just a symptom of a tightly wound parent? I have three kids and their free play was never restricted. I work out of a home office in a kid-packed neighborhood. I hear kids of all ages playing outside after school, on weekends, and all day long in the summer. Not seeing the desert.
- mLuby 7y agoIf you have Pocket, you can add the article and then immediately read it in Pocket.
- taurath 7y agoI mean. I’m not okay either. I work to try to reduce my screen time as much as I can but when it’s part of the job and also an always ready hit of dissociative dopamine in my pocket it creates an awful feedback loop that I’m not equipped to handle. At work as a programmer, you’re “supposed” to spend some free time doing projects and have “hobby development”, so you can reach the next career echelon. Even not in a programming career, everything is rushed, it must happen now. People are either on or off, and off is a dissociative activity, desperately trying to save our sanity so that we can be on the next day. We’re rich, but it doesn’t feel like it. I think we need a way for the culture to emphasize “slow down”. If you travel to other countries, you’ll find a much slower pace of life - there needs to be a better way to opt into something like that without giving up basic security. If I quit my job to pursue a slower pace of life, it’s almost a guarantee that I will lose my health insurance. I probably would have to move to another area, but the “slow” areas are either riddled with their own problems or are the playgrounds of the super rich. Where’s the calm, collected, slow middle? I’d like to find it. My job is even very good about work life balance and I struggle with this.
- tjr225 7y agoThis is why we need to advocate for this stuff from our government. If enough of us agree that we should make this possible, it can happen.
- Simon_says 7y ago> If enough of us agree Then the market will sort it out.
- taurath 7y agoThings like... community gathering that people will actually use (see: night markets anywhere in Asia), banning of outdoor billboards, health care gauranteed whether you’re working a good job, a bad job, or taking a break. Mandatory vacation leave. Overtime pay for even salaried workers. Plenty of things that could say that we as a society mean to do more than make the rich richer for a .1% chance to become the rich.
- chapium 7y agoThese articles are always about the privileged gatekeeping how others raise kids.
- spodek 7y agoI recommend to any parent Peter Gray's column in Psychology Today, Freedom to Learn https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn and his book Freed to Learn https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994 https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R.... He writes about how kids learn on their own if we don't straightjacket them too much and how we're straightjacketing them. Also Lenore Skenazy's Let Grow: https://letgrow.org https://letgrow.org, a program to help restore childhood. She was called the worst mom in America after she wrote how she let her 9-year-old take the subway home, embraced the title, and started the free range kid movement.
- RaceWon 7y ago> I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation. Hey I'm old too. We played Lawn Jarts--the ones with the points on them. We rode in cars without seatbelts. We bike rode without helmets. Played tackle football without equipment on the frozen ground. We played Hardball at 6. And we Fought with each other. When I was 7 some older kid took my ball; my mom said "You gotta learn to fight your own battles", that was my first black eye, and it hurt like hell. My dad did go to his house to speak with his dad, since the kid was about 13 years old. But that lesson about standing up for yourself was the most invaluable lesson I ever received.. I grew up in the World of Men where at times might does right, and tbh it still sorta does.
- neverartful 7y agoYour first paragraph made me laugh. I'm that old too. We also regularly rode in the bed of pickup trucks, especially coming home from a baseball game. Playground equipment today is very different. No merry-go-round, see-saws, monkey bars, etc. Even the swing sets are not always there.
- Renevith 7y agoCheck out some newer playgrounds. Now that they have this soft rubbery ground, all the "dangerous" stuff is back! :-) I live within walking distance of two different parks that have all four of what you named, in San Francisco.
- oska 7y agoThe playground equipment I see these days is simply awesome. Yes, improved safety, but also markedly more imaginative and fun-looking (climbing walls, flying foxes, monkey bars and other 'hang-from' stuff that's incorporated into interesting structures you can move around, still lots of swings). I don't see many see-saws but they were always pretty lame. I also don't see any merry-go-rounds but I didn't like them as a child anyway. I think kids have it so much better in terms of playground equipment these days, at least where I live. I do wonder that I don't see it getting more use though.
- Waterluvian 7y agoMy wife and I have 2.5 and 0.7 year olds. Because of remote work, I have the luxury of living basically anywhere. My wife and I made the move from a 300k city to a 40k city about 45 minutes away. There's many reasons we did. Chiefly, it's far far cheaper. But also, it's calmer and quieter and just a nicer way to live. What we didn't expect to see, which we are absolutely delighted about, is how different childhood seems to get lived in a much smaller city. There have been roving bands of children on bikes all summer getting into who knows what kind of awesome mischief. We go on completely random drives 3 or 4 times a week, just wandering the city to get to know it better (and get the youngest to nap) and we see kids and young teens all over the place without parents. Anecdotally of course, but I wonder if smaller cities/towns lend themselves to a far more trusting, free, safe environment to grow up. When I picture letting my boys, when older, go out on their own, I'm thinking about the difference between here and where I used to live. The scariest street has 4 lanes total and is a 50km/h. There's no rapid transit to smoosh them. There's a wonderful central park just one traffic light away. Literally everything in the city is a bike ride away.
- Zoo3y 7y agoWould you happen to live somewhere in Europe?
- Waterluvian 7y agoCanada.
- zerr 7y agoInteresting, how did you get/negotiate remote work (in Robotics?) - did they list some particular position explicitly as remote?
- zild3d 7y agoAgree, lived in Ithaca, NY for 3 years. Small city with lots of nature surrounding (waterfalls and gorges in walking distance). Teens and young kids seem largely free to roam and play outside
- werber 7y agoI'm squarely a millennial dating someone gen z and the differences between our upbringings are staggering. Last week I went on a trip with all of his friends and while we were fucked up the friends parents started talking to us through their nest cam outside. I can't imagine being a kid today.
- Rotdhizon 7y agoSeems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets anymore with your friends, someone will call the police on you. Can't hang out in the woods, as those have mostly been torn down to make way for new neighborhoods, and the woods that do remain are typically private property. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a place that still has a good wooded area where there's no busy bodies, you are out of luck. Can't hang out at the mall, they will kick you out if you aren't accompanied by an adult. Can't hang out at your favorite local joints anymore, they'll kick you out. I was also among the last generations that really got to experience freedom and a playful world as a child, I can't imagine growing up in the world today. The biggest problem are people who can't mind their business and people who have been conditioned to fear the world. The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.
- api 7y ago> The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime. Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone. I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians... Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'" As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.
- wingspar 7y agoDo you think the paranoia leads to lower crime, via vigilance and reporting? And/or does the actual crime lead to ‘acceptance’ as displayed in the Anaheim boards? Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 7y agoI wish http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ were a better website. Plenty of good ideas though. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting
- chrissnell 7y agoI am a parent of two boys—ages 7 and 4–and I hardly recognize the negative forces that this author laments over because my wife and I have simply chosen not to raise our kids that way. When my boys get home, we get outside and do sports. We’re in the middle of (tackle) football season right now and that’s what my 7 year-old does five days a week for two hours every evening. It’s exercise, fun, camaraderie, and lessons for life, all rolled together. My four year-old spends the practices on the sidelines, digging in the dirt with other little brothers and sisters and chasing the bigger kids around the track when they run laps. When football season is over, we move on to other team sports. When those are over, we ride our bikes around the neighborhood and play pick-up football games in the front yard. What we don’t do: iPads, TVs, or smart phones. It’s not that came into parenthood with some anti-technology mindset. Rather, we let our kids have these devices and we saw immediately the negative effects on their behavior, attitude, and motivation, and so we took them away. They get to use them on the rarest of circumstances: during airplane rides or as a brief reward for a week of good behavior. Adam Carolla once said that the problem with kids isn’t all of the things that we’ve added to childhood, it’s all the things we’ve taken away. Sports, free time, boredom, tree forts, and neighborhood exploration have all been curtailed. For much of this, we have over-involved, over-concerned mothers to thank (and a bunch of dads that think like moms). It doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody is forcing us to raise our kids in the post-millennium style. You can raise tough, resourceful, happy, outdoors-loving kids if you want to. If you are a parent of little ones, have a look at this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/magazine/the-anti-helicopter-parents-plea-let-kids-play.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/magazine/the-anti-helicop...
- diminoten 7y agoGreat, and now your kid isn't going to be as well versed as their peers in the technology that drives literally everything. They'll be left behind as the kids who were allowed to grow/learn using modern tools fly past them. You can't win. Everyone damages their children, stop pretending like you're some kind of exception. Additionally, this nostalgic "My childhood was great these kids don't get what I had" is bullshit. The options available to children today to grow, explore, learn and interact with others has exploded. We did "ruin" your childhood, and made it immensely better. Trying to give your child the childhood you had is abuse via neglect, at this point.
- EGreg 7y agoHere are some hard economic truths. Both parents work. That’s a big part of it. Women have joined men in the corporate workforce and are encouraged to work 10 hour days and move up the corporate ladder. This together with automation and outsourcing and trickle down economics (eg lower capital gains tax than income tax) has contributed to wage stagnation. In the past, taking care of children was indirectly valued economically, because in many households, there was a division of labor and only one parent was available to work for the market. So now it takes both parents to pay the same rent that one breadwinner could pay before. Now that both parents are trading a large part of their time to work for corporations instead of taking care of kids, most of the kids are being put in a public school - it has become essentially a glorified daycare center to watch the kids while the parents work. So the work is outsourced to professionals in the school zoned for their residence (nevermind failing schools). They are told to sit down and shut up for 8-10 hours a day. The teachers are told not to do anything rash if the kids act out. There is not much they can do to stop it. The kids that are too troublesome are put in special ed and/or medicated with ADD medications that are chemically similar to methamphetamines. Working adults also do this to their parents sometimes, putting them in nursing homes which keep them medicated if they are too anxious. Sadly, it gets worse. There is an opioid epidemic among men and a quarter of middle aged women are taking antidepressants. People are lonely, often living alone without family or village, getting amazon or food deliveries, speaking for 5 seconds with the delivery person, and no one knows most of their neighbors. We in the US need to have a hard look at our society instead of medicating everyone. A major step forward would be a UBI and a 30 hour workweek. Men AND women can be amazing parents to their children and caretakers to their own parents if given the chance economically. PS: And the animals too, we need to end factory farming and overuse of antibiotics and thinking it’s ok. This is a sick society.
- golemiprague 7y agoBeing a housewife has still much more economic value than the average woman in the workforce, and that's even after artificially skewing the market by outsourcing house work to illegal Mexicans on slave wages. An average housewife used to take care of the kids, prepare healthy food, clean the house, do the laundry, take care of the elders, trim the flowers in the garden, help with homework and give emotional support. Think about all the people you need to employ to do all those jobs and their cost. On the other hand at the workplace women are failing, they hardly create new businesses and therefore don't generate any new jobs, they hardly represented in jobs that are difficult, dangerous, physical or technology related. Not even in music where they usually perform but don't create, how many women bands do you know? A huge chunk of them are working in government positions, basically being payed by men generated taxes, the collective "men" replaced the husband. There is an average wage gap of 25% but in terms of true contribution to the economy the pay gap should be much higher, we are bleeding money to enable this feminist utopia which turns out to be more of a dystopia. It will be much better for everyone if women will be encouraged again to become housewives, not everybody as there are exceptions and some women should be in the workforce, but the whole ideology of women must go out to work need a second thought, that's for sure. A lot of women will miss the social aspect of going out to work and we should also think how to bring back the village environment into our cities, like setting up common places for cooking and other home related work, being stuck in a suburban home 1950' style is also not going to work.
- tomohawk 7y agoFear ruins everything. As adults, we fear failure, so we try to prevent our kids from experiencing it. As adults, we fear not winning, so we re-invent games so there are no winners. Everyone wins! (except everyone actually loses). We fear lawsuits, so we don't let kids play on our property, and we don't let them skateboard, and we don't let them do things unless its an organized activity with licensed/bonded/insured supervision.
- 0xDEEPFAC 7y agoOne thing overlooked in the article is that we no longer have mothers at home. Society looks down on such women without considering how important constant attention is to children in their formative years. Working households also have more stress and more bills (two cars, childcare, etc). Why these points weren't considered for the article is beyond me.
- golemiprague 7y agoYou know too well it is because it is the NYT and they got certain agenda so they won't say a word which could interpreted even slightly against the religion of feminism.
- harambae 7y agoTrue, they're probably trying to avoid feminist wrath by getting into that. Along vaguely similar lines, there is a higher incidence of birth outside of marriage than in the past in the USA [0] which ends up affecting some of those things indirectly (if more father influence would push the child in the direction of the outdoors, etc) But most importantly, there's no "P" in hexidecimal. [0] https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nonmarital-births-figure-1.png https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nonma...
- higherkinded 7y ago>Youngsters these days What a marvelous start, good luck looking trustworthy. It's straight up the same as it was generations and generations before. I also love the emphasis on video games imposed in this article, from the very beginning. I have a different opinion on this. While I can confirm that some team-based games can tilt someone, it's unlikely that it contributes to mentioned suicide rates in any meaningful way. It's just the same kind of "youngsters these days" activity as it was before. The actual reason may lie deeper in the current state of human society. Fearmongering by the crackpot young adults who still didn't grow up themselves is but one manifestation of what's happening in the bigger picture. I'm ashamed to admit, being the part of this "young adult" generation myself, that we're a laughable bunch of irresponsible wimps, relying on everything but ourselves to relieve the stress posed onto us by the ordinary "adult" problems. As the result, some of us easily fall the cult-like mobs, failing to recognize the stupidity of our derived positions and causing problems to people around us while hypocritically stating that we just want to make the world better. Our generation isn't strong enough. We ruin each other and the majority of us is too immature to take care of our "youngsters", which is the real reason behind them going rabid or just straight out killing themselves. We are the ruined generation and we ruin our societies, and what's more important, our kids, the ones who are supposed to be the next building blocks for it. And it's most probably our fault. Or wait, do the games cause that? It's always someone else's fault, it's the guns who kill people, not the other people, it definitely must be the case this time, isn't it? What a mess.
- XorNot 7y agoNo it's objectively the baby boomers fault. Once they die things will mostly get back to normal since a huge voting block which has systematically defunded infrastructure, welfare and services they benefited from will finally be out of the political system as pathetically reliable voters. They're fortunately aging out of power right now too.
- SuddsMcDuff 7y agoGenuinely, I can't tell if you're trying to refute the point, or illustrate it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- big_chungus 7y agoThis is what is called a "positional arms race". A comparable situation can be seen in football players and steroids. One does it, so all feel they must do it or be "left behind". For all this struggle, no one is better and most are where they started. Now they must also deal with the huge medical issues that steroids can cause. If every one stopped, all would be better. However, no one wants to be the "sucker" who stops: the first to do so actually will lose. It's the same issue here: interesting opportunities have a limited number of slots. My benchmark for getting in is not an "A" or a "B+", it's whatever my classmates have and then some. We all study more, but are not any better for it. There doesn't seem to be a solution that has been devised for this sort of issue in this sort of a case, as it's tremendously difficult to find any viable means of regulating how much free time a child receives (leaving aside the ethical/moral questions about such a practice). It's not just childhood, though. Higher education [0] has experienced it. Indeed, any "positional good" which has a limited number which go to the "best" is likely already experiencing this or will soon. Again, no one has yet found a perfect solution for such an application as this. We've tinkered with the positioning in certain cases (e.g. higher education and affirmative action), but it often doesn't work (in the instance of higher education, while all kids' childhoods may be screwed up, certain groups have theirs screwed up in the "right ways") [1]. I believe another example is the rise among millennials of "experience" vacations. Increased social media usage fuels envy and a perception of being lesser, meaning john doe now feels he needs to take a more exotic vacation and get more pictures with more retouching. I see no easy solution to this. The normal mitigation is government regulation, but I see no "arms control" type solution for number of math problems done. Ideas, any one? [0]: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED474473 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED474473 [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
- alkonaut 7y agoThe question is, why aren't more outcomes acceptable? Why do parents feel a social pressure to make heir kids belong to a certain percentile of "successful" young adults? It could be many explanations, but it's definitely more prominent in the US and China (among middle class/upper middle class) than in e.g. the Netherlands or Sweden. So let's ask: what's the difference? Why do I not need to take my kids to extra curricular activities, and instead I trust I can leave them to play with rocks till it gets dark just like I did myself when I was a kid in the 80's? I think it's down to many factors that makes society less competitive: - I know that if my kid screws up, they'll still be comfortable (have healthcare, pension,...) - Higher education is free so It's not an "investment" or a "risk" that needs to pay off for me or them. I hope they'll study because they find it interesting. If they do, they won't need a great career to pay of student debt. - Admission to higher education is never made on soft or arbitrary values such as past participation in extra curricular activities. If my kid scores better on the standardized tests, they'll snag a position at the best school over any a kid that is the child of a billionaire who was always president of all clubs and plays 24 musical instruments. - Education isn't very competitive. In 20 years of school I never saw a "ranking" where anyones results or grades were published, e.g. where someone was declared "top of class" or similar.
- code_duck 7y agoThis isn’t anything new. In my 90s middle school and high school, the official policy of my school was that we would have an hour of homework per academic class each day. We got out of school at 3:30. With 5 academic classes, a typical bedtime of 10 o’clock, commute times from school of half an hour, and an hour for dinner, that theoretically left zero time for recreation. I’m confused about how they ever thought that was healthy or reasonable.
- oska 7y agoI had to re-read your comment. At first I thought you were saying you had one hour of homework per night. One hour per class per day is insane. I regularly avoided doing homework throughout my school life. The only thing I think that suffered was my understanding of physics & chemistry. I doubt I would have better understanding now in any other subject area if I had done more homework, including maths and the foreign language I studied. Maths because we were given enough time in classes to do exercises in which to learn the concepts; foreign language study because it just wasn't taught terribly well and the homework was in the same vein.
- justinclift 7y ago> I regularly avoided doing homework throughout my school life. Same here. School hours were (something like) 9am to 3:30pm. They have no authority to allocate time after that, no matter how much they'd like to. If they had a problem with it, that was their problem. Not mine. And yep, that seemed to fit well with my later career as a professional (IT) contractor. ;)
- emerongi 7y agoI also never did homework at home and I agree that it was probably for the better. The only bad effect is that homework got associated with bad feelings (anxiety, stress), because I had to find ways to still get them done without doing them at home. Going into university this was hard to undo. We also had the rule of one hour per class per day. The funny thing is that this scales up the more time you spend in school, instead of scaling down. In 10th grade, our school days were longer than my parents' workdays and of course every teacher likes to assign homework on top of that, so you can imagine what the expected load was. In my opinion, homework should be abolished completely. Work should not be taken home. If you want kids to do extra work, have "schoolwork" classes after regular classes, where they can do exercises that teachers provided them that day. At the very least this provides a direct measurement of hours spent on school, provides a clear expectation and forces a cap on how many hours kids spend on school per day. Of course no school would do that because it would be a nightmare.
- canada_dry 7y ago> They don’t learn “how to start a friendship, how to start a relationship, what to do when someone’s bothering you, how to solve a problem.” Consider too that many of these children's parents also don't have good relationship skills. It doesn't really bode well for our communities.
- xwdv 7y agoPeaceful innocent childhoods were a fairly recent phenomenon. In older times being a child often meant forced labor and exposure to brutal or shocking parts of life before you were ready. We didn’t ruin childhood, we took it back to how it used to be.
- flukus 7y ago> In older times being a child often meant forced labor and exposure to brutal or shocking parts of life before you were ready. That was also mostly an aberration (for non-slaves) and mostly during the industrial revolution. Peaceful childhoods certainly existed before then if you look at tribal societies and the way they gradually give kids more and more real responsibility.
- kingkawn 7y agoNothing is ruined. The thing discussed here is belief that without ruining kids they will not be competitive. This seems a false belief; how can ruining childhood life help them? So nothing is ruined. Do it better. Not so hard.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- m0zg 7y agoOne thing I don't get is parents who insist that their child be "several years ahead" in the school program. This issue is especially pervasive in my upper middle class tech-geek peer group. Why put this stress on the kid? What's the rush? What additional benefits does one get from entering college at 16?
- vakataka 7y agoI am in my mid-twenties and had the pleasure of growing up quite carefree. I still remember how most of my evenings were spent playing with friends until my mother dragged me home for dinner. Although I had other activities like learning music and drama, I would attend those classes only twice a week and had a lot of leisure time. I think things changed by the time I was in high school. I remember once calling a friend for a game and I heard his mother say something like, "don't spend time with those losers. You will not amount to anything...". I have seen parents reject their children's friends because they think of them as underachievers who may bring down their children too. I feel people sometimes take life too seriously.
- JackPoach 7y agoI get the article, but it's impossible to ruin childhood (bar sever abuse cases)
- Phenomenit 7y ago"A similar organization, Let Grow, helps schools set up unstructured free play before and after the school day." Isn't this structured in itself? So odd.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- parasubvert 7y agoIt’s a strange article from an outside-US perspective. My 2.5 year old in daycare has lots of play time (at least 3 hours a day), plus at an hour at home in the morning and evening. Usually about 1 hour is on the iPad (Toca Blocks is her free play game), the rest with books, blocks, in the garden with flowers, on her tricycle... The 9 year old’s “before and after school” program is all about free play time, plus two hours max screen time at home, though in summer this is usually replaced by bike rides and/or play dates or day camps, with ... lots of free time to balance out any structured activities. Other than studying for spelling quizzes, there has been no homework from Kindergarten through grade 3. I regularly see kids at the mall or hanging out in parks. Free time abounds in our world... the biggest issue is there are fewer clusters of neighbourhood kids, friends are more geographically dispersed over a wider area, so play date coordination by parents is a must.
- konart 7y ago>the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that between 2009 and 2017, rates of depression rose by more than 60 percent among those ages 14 to 17, and 47 percent among those ages 12 to 13. I also find this article strange, from where I live 12-15 year olds have plenty of free time and time to play. And after 16, well, it is to be expected to have less free time. You are about to become an adult.
- Grzegrzolka 7y agoUSA is just slowly rotting away. From what I read here about how modern life in US looks like I seriously suspect that there will be some kind of massive epidemic mind deseases outburst there in 15-30 years.
- codingslave 7y agoYeah, I agree. There's real issues that arent being addressed, and maybe they can't be addressed. I consider myself smart, but can't really tell whats true anymore. Which side should I be on, why is the USA declining, its complicated
- 7y ago
- janebrewer 7y agothis is very worrying .. need to think on it
- dmje 7y agoYou guys in the States have it bad. I hear terrible stories about the fear that now surrounds any kind of freedom for kids. Over here in the UK we’re a bit better, but the “give them exams ALL the time” and schools being on their knees, financially, are all too familiar. For me, this journey with my kids has been about a massive slew of things, among the most important: - extending their childhood where possible: encouraging actual play (and discouraging the pseudo-play of screens) - letting them out: outside play when they’re younger (my kids dicked about in streams and woods from about 5/6 years old); now they’re older (14/12) they take themselves off swimming, into town, to the shops, on the bus to the nearest city 2 hours away, etc - reading, reading, reading. Always. - talking and appreciating them as adults and not as kids. This means trying not to patronise, being adult when talking about politics, religion, sex - being more present: for example, I’ve had a Nokia 3310 rather than a smartphone for more than a year now, and a large part of this has been about not being constantly distracted when I’m with other people, particularly my kids - be there: work less, hangout more. I work for myself, but never evenings or weekends, these are family time. I’m gonna be poor and will probably never retire but these years with my kids are as important as it gets. I’d rather be poor forever and have had this time with them. It’s all too short. Kids need all the love, but too often this becomes smothering.
- jamisteven 7y agoThis, having recently moved from the states to Switzerland I can say with confidence that this phenomenon is primarily a US one.
- exhaze 7y agoWhy don't you just find a WFH job where you don't make so little money that you consider yourself "poor"? I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to spend time with your kids, and I know life is about trade-offs, but it seems a bit extreme to decide that the only way to spend quality time with your kids is to move to a remote village, completely sacrifice earning ability, and reject smartphone technology (I have a smartphone and I have no problem not using it at all during dinner time or when I'm hanging out with friends).
- 7y ago
- _pmf_ 7y ago"We". Maybe the feminist agenda pushing the narrative that creating powerpoints is more satisfying for women than caring for their children has something to do with it.
- _pmf_ 7y agoWasn't it both an exercise and a decoy/distraction operation?
- huffmsa 7y agoThe schooling aspects of this are largely just a fact of life when you attempt to centralize and standardize education at this kind of scale. > Well it's not like that in {{small, rich, socialist European country du jour}} Again, scale. Only Japan and China have really had to deal with this, and their children are likely as stressed and free of free time as those in the US. Large scale means strict standards with zero room for deviation.
- axilmar 7y agoWhile the article is obviously US-Centric, a lot of the things mentioned in it are applicable to other countries as well, including mine (Greece). As a child, I was used to going out each evening in the neighbourhood to play with other kids. All the kids gathered in the nearest park/playground/court, and we played for hours each day, especially the spring/summer months. Today, as a parent of 3 (8, 4 and 1 year old), I have noticed other parents don't let their kids out in the playgrounds any more. Playgrounds have few kids, and most children are very young, below 4 years old. Apparently, older children are occupied daily with structured activities, i.e. sports, foreign languages, swimming, music and other hobbies. My 8 year old daughter really struggled to get new friendships the last two years, since we moved to the appartment we are currently in. None of her classmates are to be found anywhere in the neighbourhood after school.
- Shivetya 7y agoGovernment ruined child hood, in particular over zealous DFACs units have ruined parenthood as well to education where a child not being supervised is a child not enjoying themselves. Seriously, when did we come to the belief that children need structured activities all the time. Easy answer, when government employees stepped in. When politicians and government employees decided they knew better than parents or children what children needed. After all parents might not impart values that politicians decided are correct! Then comes DFACS and the police state to bully parents into complying because the power of state arrayed against them is so one sided that the only chance you have is to surrender your parental rights or be stupid rich enough to fight back.
- mieseratte 7y ago> in particular over zealous DFACs units What does DFAC mean in this case? I assume it isn't "Dining Facilities."
- doitLP 7y agoDepartment of Family and Child Services
- bregma 7y agoDepartment of Fish and Crustaceans. It's our brave men in black suits and parades of black SUVs who battle the threat of seafood in our cities in opposition to the allergies brought on by vaccinations. If it weren't for the government pushing those vaccines on our children we wouldn't have to be fighting lobsters tooth and claw. Mostly claw.
- barberousse 7y agoDFACS' also force many children who could be fostered out of falling into homelessness and poverty before they're even 18 because none of them want to report their case or else they'll be separated from their siblings. Got that from the older brother of a pair of young black siblings panhandling on both sides of a crosswalk. You "do something about it" short of taking them in yourself (that's a tall order) and you've just fucked those two brothers' relationship for the rest of their life.
- jhiggins777 7y agoRecommended reading on this topic, "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child" by Anthony Esolen (https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Destroy-Imagination-Your-Child/dp/1610170792 https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Destroy-Imagination-Your-Child/d...)
- geodel 7y agoThough not strictly correct, I feel US rule is kids can't be free until they have their own car. And once they have that, parents must immediately lose their supervision privilege. Aren't there enough stories of outrage that parents get to see their kids' college transcripts without explicit permission.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago> parents get to see their kids' college transcripts ...what?!
- Vaslo 7y agoWhy not let kids do what they want to do instead of jamming the lifestyle we want them to have down their throat? I grew up in a middle of the middle class neighborhood where both parents worked and no one had time to take their kids to these events. Aside from the agreed importance of school, most kids did at most 1-2 things. I played guitar/bass so I took lessons once a week and I also played around on a computer. Some played Football and Baseball, some rode skateboards and BMX bikes. Aside from those who unfortunately got into drugs, all are fine adults doing everything career from Medicine to Concrete. Kids wandered our neighborhood, played all day in the woods, rode bikes down busy streets at age 10 to go the music store. What's happened to us?
- redskull 7y agoWelp...we have these trash leftist teachers...teaching children that this is a "terrible place" and socialism is better...I truly blame all of this on schools....and it needs to change...Awesome a teacher has a leftist ideology...YOUR own personal opinions should stay far away from children especially when they are trash...Saddest part is kid's don't even get taught History correctly anymore. which is MINDBLOWING
- phry 7y agoyou're completely deranged. socialism/communism is barely mentioned at all in the public school system, and never in a positive light. the genocide of native americans was not discussed outside of a cursory mention of the Trail of Tears. watching 'Roots' was about the depth of instruction on slavery. I never heard a single critical word about the US from any teacher, and I was in the public school system all the way through college. I never even had to read Howard Zinn, the classic conservative boogeyman, a single time for any class.
- ausjke 7y agoi grew up in a village, bicycle is the only transportation tool, all kids can play free outdoors, the only danger is deep water, once a while one or two kids got drown somewhere in summer. other than that, it's worry-free for parents, everyone knows everyone, there is no abduction, no gun violence, etc. it's just kids outside to enjoy and explore the true nature. I consider the traffic, the cars on the street in particular, is the No.1 obstacles for kids playing outside in US. My kids' childhood freedom is taken away by cars in the neighborhood 95% of the time, the rest is still concerning, but not a big deal. It's actually a quiet neighborhood but still, hit by a car on the street for young kids is too concerning, so we have kids at home most of the time, where they started killing time with TV, computer, social network, until their childhood is long gone.
- LanceH 7y agoAs my kids started playing youth soccer, it stunned me the difference between their experience and mine. It used to be we would get dropped off at the field an hour early, run around everywhere, eventually play the game, then run around again until we were dragged away. Now, it is show up in time for the warmup, game, leave. This has proven to be the common pattern. Everything is event driven -- kids go to practice, they leave. They go to a friend's house at a certain time, then leave. Play dates are scheduled. There is no just meet outside. We've even ruined adulthood. My parents and their friends would drop in on each other without calling ahead first. I was shocked to discover this wasn't normal when I grew up. Who puts the unprepared house ahead of seeing a friend?
- supernova87a 7y agoWell, I hate to put it so harshly, but maybe parents and kids in the US are realizing that life isn't all play and fun, and that's how the rest of the world has to live each day. And they'd better keep up. This is what happens when the economic / political barriers to competition are pulled out, and you find out that the rest of the world is ready to outcompete your kids, and the cushion you had being the largest, fastest growing, most resourceful country, no longer holds as much as it did in the past. Sometimes life makes you work hard. And if you give in too much to nostalgia and think that kids' lives ought to be lived in a blissful world free of stress, you're going to be eaten alive by kids whose parents (and who themselves) want better for themselves and are willing to sacrifice a little play time in exchange.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago- evaporation of the single earning household - destruction of the middle class - drugs and the drug war - less kids/single kids are more heavily watched - unwalkable neighborhoods and mcmansions
- wglb 7y agoI think there is a large amount of idealization of What It Used To Be Like in this article, an in a lot of contemporary thinking. I recommend reading "Breaking Clean" by Judy Blunt. Therein, she talks about her trek from growing up on a family farm, raising kids, then escaping to a university town. The problem for her boys was that in the city, they were just boys, but on the farm, they were men-in-training.
- prirun 7y agoI grew up in the 60's and 70's. To me, the biggest difference is that moms didn't work back then. Instead, they raised the kids. I know dads seem to help a lot more with the house and kids than they did when I was growing up, but it seems common sense that with both parents working, they can't spend as much time with their kids. This has all kinds of consequences: - day cares and babysitters are tending kids but aren't really raising them (instilling the parent's values, etc.) - families eat out more because neither parent feels like cooking after working all day. - no family time at night because of all the homework being assigned. I never had any homework until high school, but now kids have it in elementary school. Seems nuts. Screens are a problem, but not just with the kids. I have seen a family of 4 waiting for their table at a restaurant, and both the parents have their face in their phone even when their kids don't have phones. The kids are just looking around, bored and lost, with no one paying attention to them. I've seen mothers pushing grocery carts, tapping on their phone, and completely ignoring their kid sitting in the grocery cart. Instead of kids playing with trucks, kids watch other kids play with trucks - on their phone! Weirdest thing I ever heard of...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]