8 ms·

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/t

I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least once while they're doing homework it will be very easy to catch issues like this.

_mlbt 2y ago
Not only this, but parents should be involved before children go to school. Teachers have repeatedly told us that they could tell that we read to our children regularly as babies and preschoolers.
- hluska 2y ago
  That’s neat in a bad way - I have heard the same thing in parent teacher interviews. When my kid was born, I turned into a dude who cries. This stuff makes me cry. I like being involved in my child’s life and absolutely love reading to her. I can’t imagine just not doing my favourite thing with my favourite person. Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.
jjice 2y ago
> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still. Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too. I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique. I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  When there were three television channels, children and adults found other things to do when there was nothing to watch. That's where you developed non-passive life skills. Now TikTok gives a continuous dopamine hit tailored to their psych profile. Just click on the pictures like a proper trained ape.
- bestouff 2y ago
  I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".
  - jjk7 2y ago
    We're in Canada; doing the same. But most of my kids' classmates are on YouTube all the time. The brainrot content is unavoidable and it's creating issues for my kids' socialization.
    - texuf 2y ago
      My parents didn't get me a nintendo when I was a child. My socialization also suffered, but I ended up with a job making AAA games and they did not so I consider it a fair trade now that I'm older.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.
    - wngr 2y ago
      I totally agree with you, but those shows are not what parent means.
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
The post looks like a result of ego defence mechanisms in action. “I keep giving crack cocaine and Xanax to my sister, and it made me realize the next generation is cooked!” Such a bizarre conclusion.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dns_snek 2y ago
I doubt that any of those parents would be receptive to concerns or criticism. I can only hope that in 20, 50, or 100 years, absent-minded parenting is going to be widely recognized as a form of child abuse.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I agree but the amount of stuff parents are expected to do to raise a child now are ridiculous. Many don’t give a shit but for the ones that do, the list is getting untenable. Adding anymore is just going to exacerbate the population decline problem.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rhelz 2y ago
// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents // Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents. LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs. We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.
- Maxatar 2y ago
  I think blame should be taken to mean "root cause" as opposed to a moral culpability. The degree to which a parent takes an active role in their child's education is incredibly important, more important than their teachers or the school they go to, and sadly many parent's do not take much of an interest in their children's education, thinking that it is mostly something schools manage.
- hb53821 2y ago
  By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step. LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form. I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
  - rhelz 2y ago
    Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...
wendyshu 2y ago
You mean uninterested?
- JellyBeanThief 2y ago
  It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.
  - 47282847 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - fivelorn 2y ago
      Who knew it was this easy? Thank you, citizen.
      - qwerpy 2y ago
        Unironically is it that hard? I managed to not impregnate anyone until I met my wife in my 30s. Likewise for her. Likewise for many of my friends. Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. You apply basic biology knowledge and protection and if all else fails there are multiple ways to “fix” the issue before it gets to the point where a baby is born.
        HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        Enjoying that 30,000ft high horse?
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        > Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. Bingo^, especially the “in my circles.” The catch of course is that people have little to zero control over which circles they’re born and raised into, thus creating a vicious cycle. Good job avoiding a bad outcome, but in the same way it was easy for you due to the circles you arrived on earth in, it’s hard for others due to the circles they arrived on earth in. This is all true even with high degree of agency. Taking two people with the same degree of agency, one born into or closer to certain norms will have an easier time than one born outside of or further away from those norms.
casey2 2y ago
[flagged]
- Mr_Bees69 2y ago
  TTS sucks and is slower than reading, dont even get me started on STT. Also, jesus christ, we got on to hitler FAST.
ruraljuror 2y ago
Not sure if there is more context within the subreddit, but I don't see much here to blame on the parents. Which parents? These specific ones or in general? Parents are basically responsible for everything for a child except when they're not and they often get that wrong too. A 5th grader is ratted out by her brother for cheating on her homework using artificial intelligence: I guess Mom & Dad are now also the household AI sleuth. No, I won't admit blame, but I sure do hope for my and my children's sake that parents start figuring this out. Perhaps the artificial intelligence could think twice before helping a 5th grader cheat? So what should the parents be blamed for here? Giving unsupervised access to AI? Failing to educate their child? I lean toward the former in the form of age gating. While I acknowledge that these corporations themselves have the ethicists (not sure of the degree of involvement from pedagogical experts), I don't think we can trust them when it comes to kids. For as much as we hear Mira Morati say AI will revolutionize education with personalized tutors, we get a post like this. Sadly, the stakes are more dire. The kid who committed suicide after the fantasy AI chatbot conversation seemed to have a pretty involved mother. We already had one guineau-pig generation with social media, but AI ups the ante; and I think more should be done to keep it out of the hands of children. But the cat is out of the bag, so now it is mostly up to parents individually and politically.
K0balt 2y ago
This exactly. But now disinterested parents have a new threat that will allow them to imagine that their kids are fine when in fact they are on their way to debilitating ignorance. On the other hand, pervasive reliance on ChatGPT by the greater part of a generation or two, globally, is going to be great for subscription revenues. Let me call my broker.
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
> it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. Parents are not teachers and teachers are not parents I do not teach my kids math, even though I could, it's their duty to learn at school and it's their teachers' job to teach them. OTOH, I don’t expect them to learn proper table manners or public behavior from their school teachers. EDIT: grammar
- etempleton 2y ago
  I think there is a difference between teaching your child and your child entering kindergarten knowing their letters and being out of diapers. Yes, children entering kindergarten still in diapers is on the rise and significant problem.
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    [dead]
glonq 2y ago
Having put three kids through the public education system, I can confidently say that the system is broken from top to bottom; comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, government, and taxpayers all striving to do their worst. I would love to see how we could wipe the slate clean and totally re-invent what education in the 21st century could really be.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Absolutely. Citations below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/3/837/352045/Pregnancies-in-the-United-States-by-Desire-for https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/3/837/3520... https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-data https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

_mlbt 2y ago

Not only this, but parents should be involved before children go to school. Teachers have repeatedly told us that they could tell that we read to our children regularly as babies and preschoolers.

hluska 2y ago
That’s neat in a bad way - I have heard the same thing in parent teacher interviews. When my kid was born, I turned into a dude who cries. This stuff makes me cry. I like being involved in my child’s life and absolutely love reading to her. I can’t imagine just not doing my favourite thing with my favourite person. Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.

jjice 2y ago

> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still. Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too. I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique. I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
When there were three television channels, children and adults found other things to do when there was nothing to watch. That's where you developed non-passive life skills. Now TikTok gives a continuous dopamine hit tailored to their psych profile. Just click on the pictures like a proper trained ape.
bestouff 2y ago
I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".
- jjk7 2y ago
  We're in Canada; doing the same. But most of my kids' classmates are on YouTube all the time. The brainrot content is unavoidable and it's creating issues for my kids' socialization.
  - texuf 2y ago
    My parents didn't get me a nintendo when I was a child. My socialization also suffered, but I ended up with a job making AAA games and they did not so I consider it a fair trade now that I'm older.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.
  - wngr 2y ago
    I totally agree with you, but those shows are not what parent means.

LudwigNagasena 2y ago

The post looks like a result of ego defence mechanisms in action. “I keep giving crack cocaine and Xanax to my sister, and it made me realize the next generation is cooked!” Such a bizarre conclusion.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dns_snek 2y ago

I doubt that any of those parents would be receptive to concerns or criticism. I can only hope that in 20, 50, or 100 years, absent-minded parenting is going to be widely recognized as a form of child abuse.

dyauspitr 2y ago
I agree but the amount of stuff parents are expected to do to raise a child now are ridiculous. Many don’t give a shit but for the ones that do, the list is getting untenable. Adding anymore is just going to exacerbate the population decline problem.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rhelz 2y ago

// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents // Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents. LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs. We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.

Maxatar 2y ago
I think blame should be taken to mean "root cause" as opposed to a moral culpability. The degree to which a parent takes an active role in their child's education is incredibly important, more important than their teachers or the school they go to, and sadly many parent's do not take much of an interest in their children's education, thinking that it is mostly something schools manage.
hb53821 2y ago
By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step. LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form. I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
- rhelz 2y ago
  Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...

wendyshu 2y ago

You mean uninterested?

JellyBeanThief 2y ago
It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.
- 47282847 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - fivelorn 2y ago
    Who knew it was this easy? Thank you, citizen.
    - qwerpy 2y ago
      Unironically is it that hard? I managed to not impregnate anyone until I met my wife in my 30s. Likewise for her. Likewise for many of my friends. Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. You apply basic biology knowledge and protection and if all else fails there are multiple ways to “fix” the issue before it gets to the point where a baby is born.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        Enjoying that 30,000ft high horse?
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        > Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. Bingo^, especially the “in my circles.” The catch of course is that people have little to zero control over which circles they’re born and raised into, thus creating a vicious cycle. Good job avoiding a bad outcome, but in the same way it was easy for you due to the circles you arrived on earth in, it’s hard for others due to the circles they arrived on earth in. This is all true even with high degree of agency. Taking two people with the same degree of agency, one born into or closer to certain norms will have an easier time than one born outside of or further away from those norms.

casey2 2y ago

[flagged]

Mr_Bees69 2y ago
TTS sucks and is slower than reading, dont even get me started on STT. Also, jesus christ, we got on to hitler FAST.

ruraljuror 2y ago

Not sure if there is more context within the subreddit, but I don't see much here to blame on the parents. Which parents? These specific ones or in general? Parents are basically responsible for everything for a child except when they're not and they often get that wrong too. A 5th grader is ratted out by her brother for cheating on her homework using artificial intelligence: I guess Mom & Dad are now also the household AI sleuth. No, I won't admit blame, but I sure do hope for my and my children's sake that parents start figuring this out. Perhaps the artificial intelligence could think twice before helping a 5th grader cheat? So what should the parents be blamed for here? Giving unsupervised access to AI? Failing to educate their child? I lean toward the former in the form of age gating. While I acknowledge that these corporations themselves have the ethicists (not sure of the degree of involvement from pedagogical experts), I don't think we can trust them when it comes to kids. For as much as we hear Mira Morati say AI will revolutionize education with personalized tutors, we get a post like this. Sadly, the stakes are more dire. The kid who committed suicide after the fantasy AI chatbot conversation seemed to have a pretty involved mother. We already had one guineau-pig generation with social media, but AI ups the ante; and I think more should be done to keep it out of the hands of children. But the cat is out of the bag, so now it is mostly up to parents individually and politically.

K0balt 2y ago

This exactly. But now disinterested parents have a new threat that will allow them to imagine that their kids are fine when in fact they are on their way to debilitating ignorance. On the other hand, pervasive reliance on ChatGPT by the greater part of a generation or two, globally, is going to be great for subscription revenues. Let me call my broker.

peoplefromibiza 2y ago

> it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. Parents are not teachers and teachers are not parents I do not teach my kids math, even though I could, it's their duty to learn at school and it's their teachers' job to teach them. OTOH, I don’t expect them to learn proper table manners or public behavior from their school teachers. EDIT: grammar

etempleton 2y ago
I think there is a difference between teaching your child and your child entering kindergarten knowing their letters and being out of diapers. Yes, children entering kindergarten still in diapers is on the rise and significant problem.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  [dead]

glonq 2y ago

Having put three kids through the public education system, I can confidently say that the system is broken from top to bottom; comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, government, and taxpayers all striving to do their worst. I would love to see how we could wipe the slate clean and totally re-invent what education in the 21st century could really be.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Absolutely. Citations below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressure.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/3/837/352045/Pregnancies-in-the-United-States-by-Desire-for https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/3/837/3520... https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-data https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...