10 ms·

This isn't as much about place as it is about time and could have easily been entitled, "Why 1950s Parents Are Superior." We were raised in the U.S. in the 50s

by edw519 15y ago

This isn't as much about place as it is about time and could have easily been entitled, "Why 1950s Parents Are Superior." We were raised in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s much like the French children in the article. We weren't treated like children, but like small adults. There were no children's menus in restaurants. If we wanted to go to out to eat, we dressed and acted properly and ate real food with our parents. If we wanted to go to little league, piano lessons, or anywhere else, we got off our butts and found a way to get there while Dad was at work and Mom was watching younger siblings. We walked to school from age 5. If we were late for dinner, we didn't eat. If we were late getting home at night, we didn't get to go out again. If we wanted money we got a job, not an allowance. If we misbehaved...I don't know what would happen. We didn't misbehave; we just knew better. Most of our cousins and friends were the same, with a few exceptions. That was just the way it was. Then somebody somewhere fucked it all up and now schools are surrounded by parents in minivans picking up special people who never really grow up. No wonder. The French aren't different, just late. Just give them a few more years and they'll fuck it all up, too.

thibaut_barrere 15y ago
Do you mean you believe that what you describe for 50s/60s matches what is happening currently in France? If so that's far from it, at least from the people I know here (and I know a couple :-). Children here aren't considered small adults, and there's no way (for most at least) they walk to school when aged 5 etc. I don't think (honestly) that Europe or France is just applying the same recipes years after the US; things are really different for some parts, not happening later IMO.
Avshalom 15y ago
The kids who grew up in the 50/60's and thought "this sucks" are the ones who "fucked it up." Apparently they were the super majority, having grown up in 80/90s I'm fairly glad they did too.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- nooop 15y ago
  Reading the description, i agree this seemed to kind of suck. But I'm French and also wanted to say; it wasn't like that when I grow up in the 80/90s, and it also not at all like that now. Children are treated like children not miniature adults, but adults are simply not there to unconditionally serve caprices of their children and give them 100% attention all the time they are around, and be stupidly paranoid about what could go wrong if they aren't protected by a bodyguard 24/7 (I'm exaggerating, but you see the idea...) Of course if you always spoil kids and never gives them limits and make them believe the world is 100% safe when somebody is watching over them and so unsafe otherwise that they have formal interdiction to explore on their own, they will get agitated and misbehave and drive you crazy. Not really news to most French people I think... They are various other factors also, depending on the precise context. For example, in Paris and Petite Couronne most people lives in tiny flats (by American standard and even by French standard in other regions) and you can't afford to let your child make a mess for too long in the living room (or even in their own room) because that would occupy the whole area. So making them tidy up more often mechanically increase discipline. I think that that kind of thing can become cultural and applied even by people who have more space. The way an important proportion of people live in a country impact the way the whole typically behave (and even more true because there is less multiculturalism isolated from each other than in the USA)
Tichy 15y ago
Or maybe to have well behaved kids you just have to give them a good beating now and then? Just saying - I don't mean to advise beating kids (I would never do it, and it is also illegal where I live), but to point out that below the surface, not everything is necessarily what it seems to be. These articles advising strictness towards kids pop up with steady frequency... They might benefit the parents more than the kids. Funny how it is portrait as being advantageous for the kid to leave them crying in the night, so "they can learn to fall asleep again". Or maybe they just got some emotional scars, but hey, they can sleep. I took the opposite approach with my kid (16 months) - we always rushed to his bed side when he was crying. He did not sleep through the night from day one, but in general, he is very pleasant company. We wanted to give him confidence and I think so far it has worked. He doesn't need to terrorize us because he knows in general we treat him fairly.
- gbog 15y ago
  > we treat him fairly What do you mean here? Your kid is not a neighbor you would have to treat fairly our not, he or she is your own blood, you love your kid, you don't treat them. That's a part of American education problem, kids are like clients, with rights and all.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    I am not American. Also not a native speaker, didn't know how to describe it better. What I mean is we take good care of him, so he doesn't need to protest all the time. Why should he wake up screaming in the night if there is no issue? So either there is an issue, in which case he screams, we appear and try to fix it. Or there is no issue, in which case he also doesn't scream. It is no fight or power game, as with the "let them scream" school of parenting. Of course he is only 16 months now, so I can not really make that many claims about the effectiveness of our parenting... Also kids just may be different, but I didn't see the french woman take that many samples, either (did she check the French suburbs, I hear there is a lot of troubled youth around). Also, of course kids have rights.
    - gbog 15y ago
blackRust 15y ago
-- "Just give them a few more years and they'll fuck it all up, too" I feel you've profoundly missed the point and failed to provide reasons beyond "that way just the way it was".
samstave 15y ago
I call shenanigans; this is about economics. Dad had FAR more buyIng power on his $4-6000 per year salary than we do today. He didn't have to commute as far and the price of gas and food was far lower than today. Further, people simply went out and ate out far less and just lived on less. This is about the evil of marketing to convince generations to consume. This is about greed.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Dad had FAR more buyIng power on his $4-6000 per year salary than we do today. ...people simply went out and ate out far less and just lived on less. These two statements contradict each other.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    Not from a "keeping up with the Joneses" basis. Or from a "you spent less because you had to spend less" basis. The first assumes that a large amount of spending is done in order to signal or gain social advantage. Signaling would be ostentatious consumption to express a higher social status. Gaining would be, say, buying a house in a good school district in order to gain social advantage for your children. A perverse logic of a constrained-resource economy may be that such socially-driven spending may increase, not decrease. The second assumes that one didn't need to go out to eat, because one spousal partner (OK, the wife) stayed home and incorporated the roles of cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc., which are now frequently treated as external expenses. Likewise shorter commutes with cheaper gasoline. There is no contradiction.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Not from a "keeping up with the Joneses" basis. On a "keeping up with the joneses" basis, we are exactly as rich now as we always were. In 1950, 1960, and today, there were 50% of people above the median. If your dad had more "keeping up with the joneses" buying power, it's only because someone else's dad had less. Incidentally, when you compare people to their parents, you find that income went up vastly more than you think. It's only when you compare people today (Americans and immigrants) to the parents of Americans that incomes appear to have stagnated. http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and-simpsons-paradox-cause-the http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and-simpsons-p...
rickmb 15y ago
Wow, I thought the illusion that other cultures are simply behind the US instead of genuinely different had all but disappeared. (With the exception of Micheal Arrington of course.)
martythemaniak 15y ago
"Then somebody somewhere fucked it all up" This somebody was the Baby Boomers, which sounds like your generation. Not only will BBs be one of the very few generations to leave this place worse off than they found it, but BBs have also screwed up parenting to the point where we now have to have a "radical" parenting movement ("Free Range Kids") that desperately tries to restore some some sanity. I grew up in Eastern Europe during communist times, which was very old-school and worlds apart from today's parenting, but still managed to provide me with a great childhood. If I want to bring up my kids in the same way (lots of independent, unsupervised play from very early on, real responsibilities), then I'd be viewed as some kind of pariah and my neighbours will probably call child services.
- Tichy 15y ago
  "Not only will BBs be one of the very few generations to leave this place worse off than they found it" You mean as opposed to fighting world wars and stuff like that?
  - alan_cx 15y ago
    Er, BBs are after WW2. Vietnam and Iraq were not WWs. And yeah, those people, my parent's generation sure did screw it all up.
    - Tichy 15y ago
      That's what I meant, the previous poster claimed that BBs screwed stuff up as opposed to previous generations - but previous generations did stuff like fight world wars and drop atomic bombs around. What exactly did the BBs screw up. Do you want the good old values of early 20th century back? Women belong into the kitchen? No sex before marriage? And what not...
      - martythemaniak 15y ago
        I was specifically referring to the massive economic fuckover they've been responsible for over the last 30 years. Not to mention the coming 20 years of kids having to support unsustainable retirement lifestyles with huge debt burdens.
bane 15y ago
For the most part, this didn't really start to shift until the late 80's I think. I remember coming home from school to no parents till 7:30 or 8:00, running around as I wished (within some very loose limits several miles across), playing with friends etc. "Be home by dark" and "let us know where you'll be" were pretty much the only rules. When I was in middle school my parents moved from the apartment complex I grew up in to a house in the country...sometime in the late 80s, but my school was back in a local small city. The first day at school, I left school to walk to the local mall where my parents would pick me up after work and the principal nearly had a heart attack. "But he has to cross 4 or 5 intersections!" "What if something happened?!" My parents were non-plussed, but unfortunately relented, and for the rest of the year I paid $5 for a taxi to drive me 4 blocks to the mall. It felt ridiculous. None of the other parents thought it was unusual. Today? There's two bus stops on my street. One for the middle school that's less than a quarter mile away and one street crossing over, and for the high school that's less than a half mile away and one street crossing over -- both have clear pedestrian walks and lights. They stand there, 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the noisy bus to pick them up, then make 3 or 4 more stops, then drive the quarter of half mile to their schools where they're dumped off. I don't even know what to say when I leave for work and see the lot of them huddled there waiting to be shuttled the minimal distance that they all run and walk and play after school anyways.
- forcefsck 15y ago
  " They stand there, 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the noisy bus to pick them up, then make 3 or 4 more stops, then drive the quarter of half mile to their schools where they're dumped off." Can't help correlating "sheeple".
exit 15y ago
> If we were late for dinner, we didn't eat. If we were late getting home at night, we didn't get to go out again. those don't fit in with examples of being treated like an adult.
- batista 15y ago
  And adult has to know that his actions have consequences. Treated like an adult does not mean doing whatever you liked.
david927 15y ago
France is exactly like parenting in the 50's and 60's, and in some ways that's better but in the vast majority of the ways, that's much worse. We've made huge progress in our understanding of parenting and France throws it out to do it the way their grandparents did it, to their general disservice. I'm an American living in France, raising my child here. The two big things the French get wrong (that the 50's got wrong) that outweigh everything else they get right are: 1. Corporal Punishment. The French beat their children. Innumerable studies have been done and the results are remarkable consistent: Don't do it. Don't spank. Don't hit. In the 50's it was acceptable to hit your wife and kids. Let's not turn the clock back on that. Please. 2. Children should be seen, not heard. Like in the 50's, the French don't interact much with their kids. This is a terrible mistake. Yes, kids need some alone time -- that's a cop out. They'll make it clear when they do. The big mistake was that we started thinking that good parenting was karate classes and doing puppet shows, but this is like baking cookies: fine occasionally, but don't over do it. Take time with your child, let them direct their play, mainly watch. This is huge for them and one of the best things you can do as a parent. See your child. Understand your child. Be there for your child.
- bpyne 15y ago
  Is corporal punishment wide-spread in French parenting? I wondered as I read the article about that.
- scriptproof 15y ago
  This Wikipedia article is interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence. USA and UK ranked lowest among industrial nations with respect to the wellbeing of children. Comments are all a matter of personal experience.
  - david927 15y ago
    Thanks for that, but "well being" also includes child neglect and other forms of abuse other than punishment, so it's not really what I'm talking about here. The French, as a culture, condone slapping and hitting their children much more than most other cultures. If we want to talk about one culture versus another, that should be included and sadly, that alone outweighs any of the other positive aspect of French parenting.
jacobr 15y ago
I don't like idealizing 50s and 60s parenting, and I firmly believe most things have gotten better (as described by other commenters), but the article was a good read. A single family cannot change everything though. Traffic has increased so much around schools (with parents in a hurry to work) that even parents that would normally let their kids walk often drive their kids. This was not the case just a decade ago. Another thing is non-supervised play. Kids used to play and do sports in their neighborhood, now there's no one available for your kid to play football, because everyone else is at organized football practice.
bambax 15y ago
> The French aren't different, just late. Interesting, but why would we be that late? Some things are physically impossible. There is no parking space in front of my kids' school (I have 3: 6/3/2), and so it's not possible for everyone to drive their kids to school in SUVs at the same time. Most people walk their kids to school, and most kids at age 7 go to school by themselves. I also can't imagine not having three meals a day and letting my kids just take things out of the refrigerator at any time (there is almost nothing in the refrigerator that can be eaten as is, anyway; if you can't cook you can't eat). It's true we're a little more lax than our parents, but not that much, I think. We'll see.
scriptproof 15y ago
It is not clear why, after 2012-1950=62 years, they need just a few more years to become american parents.

by edw519 15y ago

thibaut_barrere 15y ago

Do you mean you believe that what you describe for 50s/60s matches what is happening currently in France? If so that's far from it, at least from the people I know here (and I know a couple :-). Children here aren't considered small adults, and there's no way (for most at least) they walk to school when aged 5 etc. I don't think (honestly) that Europe or France is just applying the same recipes years after the US; things are really different for some parts, not happening later IMO.

Avshalom 15y ago

The kids who grew up in the 50/60's and thought "this sucks" are the ones who "fucked it up." Apparently they were the super majority, having grown up in 80/90s I'm fairly glad they did too.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nooop 15y ago
Reading the description, i agree this seemed to kind of suck. But I'm French and also wanted to say; it wasn't like that when I grow up in the 80/90s, and it also not at all like that now. Children are treated like children not miniature adults, but adults are simply not there to unconditionally serve caprices of their children and give them 100% attention all the time they are around, and be stupidly paranoid about what could go wrong if they aren't protected by a bodyguard 24/7 (I'm exaggerating, but you see the idea...) Of course if you always spoil kids and never gives them limits and make them believe the world is 100% safe when somebody is watching over them and so unsafe otherwise that they have formal interdiction to explore on their own, they will get agitated and misbehave and drive you crazy. Not really news to most French people I think... They are various other factors also, depending on the precise context. For example, in Paris and Petite Couronne most people lives in tiny flats (by American standard and even by French standard in other regions) and you can't afford to let your child make a mess for too long in the living room (or even in their own room) because that would occupy the whole area. So making them tidy up more often mechanically increase discipline. I think that that kind of thing can become cultural and applied even by people who have more space. The way an important proportion of people live in a country impact the way the whole typically behave (and even more true because there is less multiculturalism isolated from each other than in the USA)

Tichy 15y ago

Or maybe to have well behaved kids you just have to give them a good beating now and then? Just saying - I don't mean to advise beating kids (I would never do it, and it is also illegal where I live), but to point out that below the surface, not everything is necessarily what it seems to be. These articles advising strictness towards kids pop up with steady frequency... They might benefit the parents more than the kids. Funny how it is portrait as being advantageous for the kid to leave them crying in the night, so "they can learn to fall asleep again". Or maybe they just got some emotional scars, but hey, they can sleep. I took the opposite approach with my kid (16 months) - we always rushed to his bed side when he was crying. He did not sleep through the night from day one, but in general, he is very pleasant company. We wanted to give him confidence and I think so far it has worked. He doesn't need to terrorize us because he knows in general we treat him fairly.

gbog 15y ago
> we treat him fairly What do you mean here? Your kid is not a neighbor you would have to treat fairly our not, he or she is your own blood, you love your kid, you don't treat them. That's a part of American education problem, kids are like clients, with rights and all.
- Tichy 15y ago
  I am not American. Also not a native speaker, didn't know how to describe it better. What I mean is we take good care of him, so he doesn't need to protest all the time. Why should he wake up screaming in the night if there is no issue? So either there is an issue, in which case he screams, we appear and try to fix it. Or there is no issue, in which case he also doesn't scream. It is no fight or power game, as with the "let them scream" school of parenting. Of course he is only 16 months now, so I can not really make that many claims about the effectiveness of our parenting... Also kids just may be different, but I didn't see the french woman take that many samples, either (did she check the French suburbs, I hear there is a lot of troubled youth around). Also, of course kids have rights.
  - gbog 15y ago

blackRust 15y ago

-- "Just give them a few more years and they'll fuck it all up, too" I feel you've profoundly missed the point and failed to provide reasons beyond "that way just the way it was".

samstave 15y ago

I call shenanigans; this is about economics. Dad had FAR more buyIng power on his $4-6000 per year salary than we do today. He didn't have to commute as far and the price of gas and food was far lower than today. Further, people simply went out and ate out far less and just lived on less. This is about the evil of marketing to convince generations to consume. This is about greed.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
Dad had FAR more buyIng power on his $4-6000 per year salary than we do today. ...people simply went out and ate out far less and just lived on less. These two statements contradict each other.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Not from a "keeping up with the Joneses" basis. Or from a "you spent less because you had to spend less" basis. The first assumes that a large amount of spending is done in order to signal or gain social advantage. Signaling would be ostentatious consumption to express a higher social status. Gaining would be, say, buying a house in a good school district in order to gain social advantage for your children. A perverse logic of a constrained-resource economy may be that such socially-driven spending may increase, not decrease. The second assumes that one didn't need to go out to eat, because one spousal partner (OK, the wife) stayed home and incorporated the roles of cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc., which are now frequently treated as external expenses. Likewise shorter commutes with cheaper gasoline. There is no contradiction.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Not from a "keeping up with the Joneses" basis. On a "keeping up with the joneses" basis, we are exactly as rich now as we always were. In 1950, 1960, and today, there were 50% of people above the median. If your dad had more "keeping up with the joneses" buying power, it's only because someone else's dad had less. Incidentally, when you compare people to their parents, you find that income went up vastly more than you think. It's only when you compare people today (Americans and immigrants) to the parents of Americans that incomes appear to have stagnated. http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and-simpsons-paradox-cause-the http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and-simpsons-p...

rickmb 15y ago

Wow, I thought the illusion that other cultures are simply behind the US instead of genuinely different had all but disappeared. (With the exception of Micheal Arrington of course.)

martythemaniak 15y ago

"Then somebody somewhere fucked it all up" This somebody was the Baby Boomers, which sounds like your generation. Not only will BBs be one of the very few generations to leave this place worse off than they found it, but BBs have also screwed up parenting to the point where we now have to have a "radical" parenting movement ("Free Range Kids") that desperately tries to restore some some sanity. I grew up in Eastern Europe during communist times, which was very old-school and worlds apart from today's parenting, but still managed to provide me with a great childhood. If I want to bring up my kids in the same way (lots of independent, unsupervised play from very early on, real responsibilities), then I'd be viewed as some kind of pariah and my neighbours will probably call child services.

Tichy 15y ago
"Not only will BBs be one of the very few generations to leave this place worse off than they found it" You mean as opposed to fighting world wars and stuff like that?
- alan_cx 15y ago
  Er, BBs are after WW2. Vietnam and Iraq were not WWs. And yeah, those people, my parent's generation sure did screw it all up.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    That's what I meant, the previous poster claimed that BBs screwed stuff up as opposed to previous generations - but previous generations did stuff like fight world wars and drop atomic bombs around. What exactly did the BBs screw up. Do you want the good old values of early 20th century back? Women belong into the kitchen? No sex before marriage? And what not...
    - martythemaniak 15y ago
      I was specifically referring to the massive economic fuckover they've been responsible for over the last 30 years. Not to mention the coming 20 years of kids having to support unsustainable retirement lifestyles with huge debt burdens.

bane 15y ago

For the most part, this didn't really start to shift until the late 80's I think. I remember coming home from school to no parents till 7:30 or 8:00, running around as I wished (within some very loose limits several miles across), playing with friends etc. "Be home by dark" and "let us know where you'll be" were pretty much the only rules. When I was in middle school my parents moved from the apartment complex I grew up in to a house in the country...sometime in the late 80s, but my school was back in a local small city. The first day at school, I left school to walk to the local mall where my parents would pick me up after work and the principal nearly had a heart attack. "But he has to cross 4 or 5 intersections!" "What if something happened?!" My parents were non-plussed, but unfortunately relented, and for the rest of the year I paid $5 for a taxi to drive me 4 blocks to the mall. It felt ridiculous. None of the other parents thought it was unusual. Today? There's two bus stops on my street. One for the middle school that's less than a quarter mile away and one street crossing over, and for the high school that's less than a half mile away and one street crossing over -- both have clear pedestrian walks and lights. They stand there, 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the noisy bus to pick them up, then make 3 or 4 more stops, then drive the quarter of half mile to their schools where they're dumped off. I don't even know what to say when I leave for work and see the lot of them huddled there waiting to be shuttled the minimal distance that they all run and walk and play after school anyways.

forcefsck 15y ago
" They stand there, 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the noisy bus to pick them up, then make 3 or 4 more stops, then drive the quarter of half mile to their schools where they're dumped off." Can't help correlating "sheeple".

exit 15y ago

> If we were late for dinner, we didn't eat. If we were late getting home at night, we didn't get to go out again. those don't fit in with examples of being treated like an adult.

batista 15y ago
And adult has to know that his actions have consequences. Treated like an adult does not mean doing whatever you liked.

david927 15y ago

France is exactly like parenting in the 50's and 60's, and in some ways that's better but in the vast majority of the ways, that's much worse. We've made huge progress in our understanding of parenting and France throws it out to do it the way their grandparents did it, to their general disservice. I'm an American living in France, raising my child here. The two big things the French get wrong (that the 50's got wrong) that outweigh everything else they get right are: 1. Corporal Punishment. The French beat their children. Innumerable studies have been done and the results are remarkable consistent: Don't do it. Don't spank. Don't hit. In the 50's it was acceptable to hit your wife and kids. Let's not turn the clock back on that. Please. 2. Children should be seen, not heard. Like in the 50's, the French don't interact much with their kids. This is a terrible mistake. Yes, kids need some alone time -- that's a cop out. They'll make it clear when they do. The big mistake was that we started thinking that good parenting was karate classes and doing puppet shows, but this is like baking cookies: fine occasionally, but don't over do it. Take time with your child, let them direct their play, mainly watch. This is huge for them and one of the best things you can do as a parent. See your child. Understand your child. Be there for your child.

bpyne 15y ago
Is corporal punishment wide-spread in French parenting? I wondered as I read the article about that.
scriptproof 15y ago
This Wikipedia article is interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence. USA and UK ranked lowest among industrial nations with respect to the wellbeing of children. Comments are all a matter of personal experience.
- david927 15y ago
  Thanks for that, but "well being" also includes child neglect and other forms of abuse other than punishment, so it's not really what I'm talking about here. The French, as a culture, condone slapping and hitting their children much more than most other cultures. If we want to talk about one culture versus another, that should be included and sadly, that alone outweighs any of the other positive aspect of French parenting.

jacobr 15y ago

I don't like idealizing 50s and 60s parenting, and I firmly believe most things have gotten better (as described by other commenters), but the article was a good read. A single family cannot change everything though. Traffic has increased so much around schools (with parents in a hurry to work) that even parents that would normally let their kids walk often drive their kids. This was not the case just a decade ago. Another thing is non-supervised play. Kids used to play and do sports in their neighborhood, now there's no one available for your kid to play football, because everyone else is at organized football practice.

bambax 15y ago

> The French aren't different, just late. Interesting, but why would we be that late? Some things are physically impossible. There is no parking space in front of my kids' school (I have 3: 6/3/2), and so it's not possible for everyone to drive their kids to school in SUVs at the same time. Most people walk their kids to school, and most kids at age 7 go to school by themselves. I also can't imagine not having three meals a day and letting my kids just take things out of the refrigerator at any time (there is almost nothing in the refrigerator that can be eaten as is, anyway; if you can't cook you can't eat). It's true we're a little more lax than our parents, but not that much, I think. We'll see.

scriptproof 15y ago

It is not clear why, after 2012-1950=62 years, they need just a few more years to become american parents.