4 ms·

How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation

36 points by throwup238 2y ago

chmod775 2y ago
It's accepted for parents to not be reasonable where it concerns their children. Unlike other instances of a person's judgement being impaired, it's not the norm to let another person be reasonable for them - or for them to seek out rational advice. The outcome is that parents compromise their children's development because they're afraid their child will get struck by lightning under a blue sky. Chances are we're raising a generation of adults even worse than the last few: already many spend most of their conscious thought jumping at shadows, never grew out of relying on a parental figure, and have next to no agency. Luckily there's still enough fully formed adults around to shepherd them through life, but I do worry how bad the next bunch going is going to be.
kreyenborgi 2y ago
How do Americans deal with other parents? I've heard so many strange stories about parents getting arrested for things that seem perfectly normal across the pond, like letting your kid walk to school or the store (or that Danish lady whose child was taken away from her by cops because she had it in a carriage outside the cafe, a normal thing to do in Denmark, such an insane response to a simple cultural difference)
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes these absurd consequences end up forcing parents to raise sheltered children who have too much intake of social media insanity because they can’t just play outside all day on their own. And that lack of self reliance and poor digital exposure leads to their development issues that carry into adulthood. But at the same time, American cities are unpredictable and there is often a rational fear of crimes for parents. In some cities crime is due to a lack of law enforcement. In others it is due to poverty and lack of opportunity. In others it is due to uncontrolled immigration (for example poorly assimilated refugee groups). In others it is due to uncontrolled school environments, where your “good” kid may run into problems with the “bad” kids they share a classroom with. With all of this going on, parents can feel like they have to be controlling and in a constant alert state to avoid something unexpected happening to their precious children. And that fear leads them to this style of parenting, not just fear of consequences from police officers. But if you go away from cities, to rural areas, you’ll see parenting is more comparable to European parenting.
imdsm 2y ago
To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.' But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors. Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong. And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries. But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit. And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.
Animats 2y ago
It's an ad for a non-profit which offers experiences for kids. It takes a while to get to the ad, though.
knallfrosch 2y ago
1) Some years ago, I lived opposite from a school with children aged 6–18. Some used the bike – the school was reachable by a bike path–, others walked, took the bus or the tram. Then there was the parent-taxi group, who were hauled into their parents' SUV right after school. I wonder how they were ever able to spend time with their friends, be spontaneous or just ... "explore." 2) 1995. In our village, some children aged 6 took the bus alone. As a child myself, I was amazed by that. I would have never imagined to do that (I lived in walking distance myself, so I walked.) But these pupils weren't "alone", of course. They might have felt alone at first, but of course everyone knew a six-year-old with a backpack at 7:30 is headed to school. The other children in the bus know. The bus driver knows. Everyone knows. You can't really get lost.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  The SUV parents made it much more dangerous for the bike kids to ride to school, leading to more SUV parents, etc.
trte9343r4 2y ago
> Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years” Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. If there would be an aggressive dog in a neighbourhood, a few decades ago, it would get solved pretty fast. Today, murderous beast is not put down, even after disfiguring a person! Instead it gets processed through no-kill shelters, and goes to new family with falsified history! Today we have many more dogs. No training. Large work dogs who need attention and space, go crazy in tiny apartments! And attacking kids is somehow normalized. They were "walking a wrong way" on public street, and that somehow confused and scared "reactive" dog! Maybe there is less gun killing, but that does not mean there are no dangers!
- lupusreal 2y ago
  The way people raise dogs does seem worse. When I was a kid, people would chain their unruly dogs to trees in the back yard. Today people would be scandalized by that, and certainly don't want to hear that their precious super special pupper is anything less than a good dog. Dogs off-leash even in public seem far more common now, as do owners excusing bad behavior and refusing to correct it. If your pitbull or german shepherd starts jumping on me, I don't want to hear you say "oh he's just excited!" And I don't want to hear about how well trained your dog is if you need to shout commands at it a dozen times before it listens. People are treating their dogs like children (even people who have real children) and spoiling them with a hands-off you're-so-special mentality.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I’ve seen a massive increase in entitled dog owners in the past ten years. But especially since COVID. It worries me when a clearly inexperienced owner is walking their badly trained pitbull or whatever off leash through the park, near children.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  > Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. Of course. The real-world numbers do not match your worldview so there must be a large dark figure of unreported cases. This is a case of your fears twisting your perception. Take your dog example. I don't know where you live, I live in Germany. With about 10 million dogs [1] there are about 5 fatal incidents per year [2]. If the dog is not killed in the ensuing police action [3] it is often "amtlich getötet" (officially killed). The dog owner is usually criminally charged with involuntary manslaughter, because dogs going haywire is in virtually all cases a failure of the owner. There are no reported cases of bringing a dog back into circulation after a fatal incident. These are the numbers in Germany. [1] Despite the URL the data is from 1998 to 2022. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/157642/umfrage/todesfaelle-durch-hundebisse-nach-bundeslaendern-von-1998-bis-2007/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/157642/umfrag... [2] https://www.zzf.de/marktdaten/heimtiere-in-deutschland https://www.zzf.de/marktdaten/heimtiere-in-deutschland [3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfriesland/Frau-in-Po-und-Arm-gebissen-Polizist-erschiesst-aggressiven-Hund,aktuelloldenburg15150.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfr...
4878241143 2y ago
This is an ad
- smcin 2y ago
  Lenore Skenazy is one of the researchers frequenlty cited by Jonathan Haidt.
Barrin92 2y ago
Focusing on tech or anxiety is too superficial and misses the deeper reason. The nature of parenting has completely changed. For modern parents today kids are really more like a tool for self-actualization (so is almost everything else), personal projects, rather than independent people in their own right. That's why they're so obsessed with following them around, kids are just an extended version of the life project that is you and so every minute of the day must be spent optimizing it. It's why this phone anxiety isn't prevalent in all classes but this discussion always evolves around members of the middle class and up. It's also I think one of the most important factors of falling birth rates that nobody ever seems to talk about. If you're obsessed with one kid every waking hour of the day nobody simply has the time to have another one.

36 points by throwup238 2y ago

It's accepted for parents to not be reasonable where it concerns their children. Unlike other instances of a person's judgement being impaired, it's not the norm to let another person be reasonable for them - or for them to seek out rational advice. The outcome is that parents compromise their children's development because they're afraid their child will get struck by lightning under a blue sky. Chances are we're raising a generation of adults even worse than the last few: already many spend most of their conscious thought jumping at shadows, never grew out of relying on a parental figure, and have next to no agency. Luckily there's still enough fully formed adults around to shepherd them through life, but I do worry how bad the next bunch going is going to be.

kreyenborgi 2y ago

How do Americans deal with other parents? I've heard so many strange stories about parents getting arrested for things that seem perfectly normal across the pond, like letting your kid walk to school or the store (or that Danish lady whose child was taken away from her by cops because she had it in a carriage outside the cafe, a normal thing to do in Denmark, such an insane response to a simple cultural difference)

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Yes these absurd consequences end up forcing parents to raise sheltered children who have too much intake of social media insanity because they can’t just play outside all day on their own. And that lack of self reliance and poor digital exposure leads to their development issues that carry into adulthood. But at the same time, American cities are unpredictable and there is often a rational fear of crimes for parents. In some cities crime is due to a lack of law enforcement. In others it is due to poverty and lack of opportunity. In others it is due to uncontrolled immigration (for example poorly assimilated refugee groups). In others it is due to uncontrolled school environments, where your “good” kid may run into problems with the “bad” kids they share a classroom with. With all of this going on, parents can feel like they have to be controlling and in a constant alert state to avoid something unexpected happening to their precious children. And that fear leads them to this style of parenting, not just fear of consequences from police officers. But if you go away from cities, to rural areas, you’ll see parenting is more comparable to European parenting.

imdsm 2y ago

To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.' But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors. Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong. And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries. But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?

mschuster91 2y ago
> It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit. And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.

Animats 2y ago

It's an ad for a non-profit which offers experiences for kids. It takes a while to get to the ad, though.

knallfrosch 2y ago

1) Some years ago, I lived opposite from a school with children aged 6–18. Some used the bike – the school was reachable by a bike path–, others walked, took the bus or the tram. Then there was the parent-taxi group, who were hauled into their parents' SUV right after school. I wonder how they were ever able to spend time with their friends, be spontaneous or just ... "explore." 2) 1995. In our village, some children aged 6 took the bus alone. As a child myself, I was amazed by that. I would have never imagined to do that (I lived in walking distance myself, so I walked.) But these pupils weren't "alone", of course. They might have felt alone at first, but of course everyone knew a six-year-old with a backpack at 7:30 is headed to school. The other children in the bus know. The bus driver knows. Everyone knows. You can't really get lost.

CalRobert 2y ago
The SUV parents made it much more dangerous for the bike kids to ride to school, leading to more SUV parents, etc.

trte9343r4 2y ago

> Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years” Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. If there would be an aggressive dog in a neighbourhood, a few decades ago, it would get solved pretty fast. Today, murderous beast is not put down, even after disfiguring a person! Instead it gets processed through no-kill shelters, and goes to new family with falsified history! Today we have many more dogs. No training. Large work dogs who need attention and space, go crazy in tiny apartments! And attacking kids is somehow normalized. They were "walking a wrong way" on public street, and that somehow confused and scared "reactive" dog! Maybe there is less gun killing, but that does not mean there are no dangers!

lupusreal 2y ago
The way people raise dogs does seem worse. When I was a kid, people would chain their unruly dogs to trees in the back yard. Today people would be scandalized by that, and certainly don't want to hear that their precious super special pupper is anything less than a good dog. Dogs off-leash even in public seem far more common now, as do owners excusing bad behavior and refusing to correct it. If your pitbull or german shepherd starts jumping on me, I don't want to hear you say "oh he's just excited!" And I don't want to hear about how well trained your dog is if you need to shout commands at it a dozen times before it listens. People are treating their dogs like children (even people who have real children) and spoiling them with a hands-off you're-so-special mentality.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’ve seen a massive increase in entitled dog owners in the past ten years. But especially since COVID. It worries me when a clearly inexperienced owner is walking their badly trained pitbull or whatever off leash through the park, near children.
Propelloni 2y ago
> Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. Of course. The real-world numbers do not match your worldview so there must be a large dark figure of unreported cases. This is a case of your fears twisting your perception. Take your dog example. I don't know where you live, I live in Germany. With about 10 million dogs [1] there are about 5 fatal incidents per year [2]. If the dog is not killed in the ensuing police action [3] it is often "amtlich getötet" (officially killed). The dog owner is usually criminally charged with involuntary manslaughter, because dogs going haywire is in virtually all cases a failure of the owner. There are no reported cases of bringing a dog back into circulation after a fatal incident. These are the numbers in Germany. [1] Despite the URL the data is from 1998 to 2022. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/157642/umfrage/todesfaelle-durch-hundebisse-nach-bundeslaendern-von-1998-bis-2007/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/157642/umfrag... [2] https://www.zzf.de/marktdaten/heimtiere-in-deutschland https://www.zzf.de/marktdaten/heimtiere-in-deutschland [3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfriesland/Frau-in-Po-und-Arm-gebissen-Polizist-erschiesst-aggressiven-Hund,aktuelloldenburg15150.html https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfr...

4878241143 2y ago

This is an ad

smcin 2y ago
Lenore Skenazy is one of the researchers frequenlty cited by Jonathan Haidt.

Barrin92 2y ago

Focusing on tech or anxiety is too superficial and misses the deeper reason. The nature of parenting has completely changed. For modern parents today kids are really more like a tool for self-actualization (so is almost everything else), personal projects, rather than independent people in their own right. That's why they're so obsessed with following them around, kids are just an extended version of the life project that is you and so every minute of the day must be spent optimizing it. It's why this phone anxiety isn't prevalent in all classes but this discussion always evolves around members of the middle class and up. It's also I think one of the most important factors of falling birth rates that nobody ever seems to talk about. If you're obsessed with one kid every waking hour of the day nobody simply has the time to have another one.