THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say: 1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot

THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say: 1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ... 2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum. 3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing) Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first. 4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared. The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex. 5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look. 6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid. Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't. 7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses. 8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses. It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.