14 ms·

How getting richer made teenagers less free

272 points by NavinF 10mo ago

starsky411 10mo ago
This remind me of that saying - no original version but it was like: tough times makes tough people, soft times makes soft people. And I hope it’s not true. But indeed the more choices you have in life, the harder it gets to chose the right thing to do.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  In aggregate, tough times make people malnourished, alcoholic, traumatized, lower IQ, apathetic, aggressive. In no particular order or combination.
  - kakacik 10mo ago
    Look at US during late 40s / 50s. Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse? (apart from the fact that most of those markers slowly improved over time due to overall progress). Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
    - girvo 10mo ago
      > Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse Lead poisoning leading to lower IQs, alcoholism was definitely rampant (though less stigmatised at the time), traumatised from the war, aggressiveness towards spouses and each other (see: war trauma) Yes, it absolutely was.
- komali2 10mo ago
  Good times make soft men, bad times make hard men. I never quite understood what the implication was and I always questioned the historical accuracy because no part of history is so easily defined as "good time" or "bad time."
  - louthy 10mo ago
    It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships. I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
    - arethuza 10mo ago
      Overcoming hardships may leave people more resilient, but it may also leave them physical and/or psychological wrecks.
      - louthy 10mo ago
        As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’. I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general. Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on. Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
        komali2 10mo ago
        But how do you account for things like cycles of violence and PTSD? I have veteran friends that, sure, could handle being shot at better than me, but on the other hand I can go to a fireworks show without worrying about having a public breakdown. Or I got friends that suffer for lack of the structure the military provided and just veg out now, picking fights at the bar for a little excitement. Hell I guess you can describe them as "hard men" but I wouldn't want to be that way and it doesn't seem to make you more successful in modern society.
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  How did we end up in a world where the stupidest memes are considered insightful.
  - berdario 10mo ago
    Not only stupid, but also a nazi meme... Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
    - rkomorn 10mo ago
      I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
- gherkinnn 10mo ago
  Why can't this meme die? It is so obviously rubbish. Good times allow for a people to divert more energy to specialisation and growth and might and art and then displace the "hardened" people.
  - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
    all living creatures are selfish to the core and will always optimize to minimize effort and maximize personal reward , therefore existing in a soft gentle system will result in acclimatization to a soft gentle system ... this universe is hostile impersonal harsh brutal and altogether basically not a place that anybody could ever be prepared for after having congealed in an insular bubble like the global west ... it is enjoyable seeing everyone here utterly in denial about this ... reminds me of militant atheists lambasting religion and then doubling down when i suggest that maybe healthy community gathering and values is more important than whether or not god is real ...
    - actionfromafar 10mo ago
      Yep. That's why bees and ants simply don't exist.
      - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
        zooming out a bit , humans look a lot like ants
- meindnoch 10mo ago
  This is a famous quote by the renowned warrior-philosopher Joe Rogan.
  - dredmorbius 10mo ago
    Predates him significantly, I suspect: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315310>.
- UncleMeat 10mo ago
  I swear, people will do anything to make claims about history except speak with actual historians.
- dredmorbius 10mo ago
  The original quote is from G. Michael Hopf, in Those Who Remain (2016): "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8751435-hard-times-create-strong-men-strong-men-create-good-times https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8751435-hard-times-create-s...> It reflects many former cyclical-view-of-history / social cycle theory concepts, dating back literally thousands of years: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory>
komali2 10mo ago
> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward. This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are leading to an increasingly alienated generation of kids. I grew up in suburbs and I couldn't even safely bike to my friend's house because the sidewalk would randomly end before arriving at his neighborhood, and the stroad next to it was at 45mph speed limit (thus in Texas: 60mph) and mostly filled with massive pickup trucks that probably couldn't even see me. So, my options before my parents got home were to play WoW and browse 4chan or do my homework, and if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. Imo this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit." I was into manosphere stuff, mildly zenophobic, incredibly transphobic, and insufferably cynical. Getting to college and seeing the disgust on people's faces when I'd drop a 4chan joke was a complete culture shock to me. Took me a good 2 years to adjust to "normal society," by then I also had to overcome a reputation as an asshole. I can't even imagine what it's like for kids like me these days now that there's full on weaponized Discords trying to convince them to shoot up schools for the lulz. At least on 4chan that kind of stuff got banned or mocked.
- ensocode 10mo ago
  Probably you won't be the freak anymore in today's online society as most of the others do the same
- squeefers 10mo ago
  > so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach
  - nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
    sidewalk ended apparently. i am imagining some super hostile urban planning. like did a cyclist cheat with the planner's spouse? is there not another route?
chiefalchemist 10mo ago
The constrain isn’t merely financial, it’s broader than that. Teenagers are less free because adults and society have bulldozed the adversity out of teen lives. This sheltering is creating generations that are more - not less - fragile. Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
- A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
  I don't think that's it. There's definitely a kind of frenetic adversity in the whole college admissions process, at least for kids who are inclined to go that route. If anything, it has gotten much worse over the past 30 years; it's much more stressful than it used to be, and it's easy for teens to imagine that every little thing carries high stakes. If by "adversity" you mean helping the family put food on the table, I certainly agree that there's less of that. Today we have more weird, more detached, and less rational forms of adversity.
  - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
    I think it’s a broader awareness of a K shaped socioeconomic trajectory, that the odds of an upward trajectory drop considerably if you don’t follow the standard path into a top 20 university, metro, etc. as economic opportunities continue to agglomerate.
    - kjkjadksj 10mo ago
      What gives me pause with that take is that it only really applies to certain geographical regions of the country. I grew up in a place where today you can still get a starter home for about 100k. The nicest homes, akin to the Home Alone house, on the market are around 500k or less. You don’t need a glamorous job to be a homeowner here, to own a couple cars on the comparatively cheap insurance rates, to send your kid to the very competent in state university. It is still the same break it has always had since the region is stagnant in population. Ironically the lack of growth actually helps the people when you consider the affordability it offers. However the mass media is blind to this region, you won’t hear about it save for browbeating over 1950s population counts, missing the point entirely of what that really means in practice for the people who live there. K shaped economy doesn’t just refer to class, but of geography. There is a hidden line out of the middle of that K going dead straight.
nicgrev103 10mo ago
It's 10pm; do you know where your kids are? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJeBbhPYBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJeBbhPYBs
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
  10pm is a different animal. Out that late and I dont know where they are? 18+ (Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
  - m4ck_ 10mo ago
    It wasn't uncommon for kids under 18 to be out that late just a couple of decades ago. In the 90s/early 00's 10pm was like a weekday, school night curfew.
  - kasey_junk 10mo ago
    My parents generation was so laisse faire with their child rearing that they ran ads to remind them to go figure out where we were.
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      In fairness: I drove through your home state regularly when I lived in Michigan and the billboards we saw were fucking bananas, including one about how radiators are hot and parents shouldn't restrain their children against them.
      - kasey_junk 10mo ago
        The woke mind virus has won if you can’t chain your child to scalding radiators without the government using the fake news media to condemn it.
  - svpk 10mo ago
    As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet? Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
password54321 10mo ago
[flagged]
- A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
  Who are "they" and what is their aim? Don't be afraid. What's the worst that can happen if you speak plainly?
  - UncleMeat 10mo ago
    It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today. Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
  - password54321 9mo ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/12/04/james-cameronavatar-director-calls-testosterone-a-toxin-heres-the-response/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/12/04/james-camer...
reedf1 10mo ago
> Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS What?? > Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same. I am speechless. Has so much changed in the 20 odd years since I was a kid? I was playing outside unsupervised from maybe age 9. What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
- myko 10mo ago
  I'm an 80s kid, I was playing outside at age 6 unsupervised / with my friends. I feel like this should be pretty normal and totally agree with your last line: What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
  - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
    I teach my kids their biggest risk is a driver distracted by their phone in a vehicle with a hood height at or above the kids’ head height.
    - walthamstow 10mo ago
      Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.
      - Hendrikto 10mo ago
        Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin. The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
        walthamstow 10mo ago
TrackerFF 10mo ago
I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurricular activities. Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
- 3D30497420 10mo ago
  It doesn't even require poverty/rural areas/etc. I grew up in (basically) sub-urban USA to a solidly middle-class family and I was always out wandering around the neighborhood or on my bike.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- squeefers 10mo ago
  > and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty > We'd be outside all day long > most of my peers have middle-class jobs. >Their kids are barely outside. wonder what the link is there then?
  - suslik 10mo ago
    The link is: the first part was 'then', the second is 'now'.
  - squeefers 10mo ago
    what absolute cretins downvoted that?
- dns_snek 10mo ago
  > Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space. Is that surprising? All of that sounds fully consistent to me when parents suffocate their kids with expectations and activities instead of meeting their actual needs. They feel like they're suffocating them because they are, they feel inadequate because deep down they know it's wrong, and kids feel like they're not getting enough space because they aren't.
owisd 10mo ago
If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org https://letgrow.org
- ozozozd 10mo ago
  One of the testimonies mentions a 4 year old cooking dinner (pancakes, eggs and sausages). That takes an unbelievable a level of dexterity for a 4 year old. Reminds me of those social media posts of 4 year olds saying things that are way beyond the wisdom they may possess. I call BS.
  - duncan_britt 10mo ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/uq0jon/big_brother_makes_meal_for_lil_brother_and_feeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/uq0jon/big_bro...
lm28469 10mo ago
And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.
- Aeglaecia 10mo ago
  wonder whats gonna happen in a decade or two when our youngest and brightest minds have all been penned by a culture disconnected from reality
  - squigz 10mo ago
    There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.
    - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
      while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine
      - throawayonthe 10mo ago
        how old are you? the avg ~20 year old has indeed already grown up with addictive social media youtube came out 20 years ago, the iphone 19 years ago, instagram 15 years ago, musical.ly 11 years ago and merged with tiktok 7 years ago... we are so cooked frfr
        Aeglaecia 10mo ago
        old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather
        10mo ago
aleksandrm 10mo ago
I'm sorry, but this is a bullshit article.
- ForceBru 10mo ago
  Care to elaborate? Why do you think it's bullshit?
CalRobert 10mo ago
For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards. Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked) Or here's a more polished, edited video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside. What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
- dirkc 10mo ago
  I recently had a trip to NL and was very surprised to see jobs for children being advertised there!
  - CalRobert 10mo ago
    Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username) There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do. I just wish this were available to more families.
    - dirkc 10mo ago
      I was quite surprised to see grocery stores with my name on it :)
    - Aromasin 10mo ago
      It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints. The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
deleted 10mo ago
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jfjfrjtjtitjmi 10mo ago
> Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been. I would disagree. There now far less legal protections from dog attack. 20 years ago aggressive behaviour and attack was very clearly defined! I refuse to allow my children to park, it is full of aggresive dogs and their shit. Animal parks are too dangerous (bcos of dogs). Support animal fraudsters invaded every "safe" niche. They are free to molest, maul and attack children. Victim blaming and gaslighting (dog is not "reactive", just agressive). If kid gets mauled, it has to go through painful rabies shots, instead of just testing the predator! And there is not a chance to get any compensation, since dog owner had no way to know dog could attack anyone (first bite is free).
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  In San Francisco, a coyote bit a child in Golden Gate Park. The animal rights idiots blamed the child for playing in the park and running in the bushes. Rightfully the coyote was destroyed but allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. They do weird things like this.
  - delichon 10mo ago
    > allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. I've never met a Matriarchist before.
    - renewiltord 10mo ago
      You know what, I’m happy to lose the franchise if it will take it away from the childless women. These people who redirect their obviously innate mother instinct to wild animals are far too risky to allow near government.
lordnacho 10mo ago
Even in my lifetime, it seems like growing up has become increasingly a sort of highwire-walking. Especially in the educated segment that I find myself in, it seems like you HAVE to do certain things to grow up "successfully". When I was a kid, there were no expectations beyond getting a degree, and even that was a particular quirk in my father's thinking; my uncle did not make it a given for his kids. Through my old school I know a guy who is also at my old uni, so I compare notes with him. Nowadays, everyone feels like they have to have an internship every year to get a job. Well, to do that, you needed to be at a top uni, getting top grades. To get into top uni, you needed to go to a good high school, and to do that, you needed to go to a good primary school. I ended up living in this little bubble where everyone in my local area hires a tutor for their kid. The kids do the typical middle-class activities: an instrument or other performance art, a team sport, or maybe an individual sport. Everything is done with the goal of getting into the best senior school, or the best university. The parents are all of the type who went through this gauntlet. Two lawyers, a lawyer and a doctor, finance and law, and so on. Everyone is spending a hefty chunk to afford to live here, and on their kid's education. To circle back to the point of the article, these are professions that make a lot of money. They didn't exist in nearly the same scale as they did a hundred years ago, and London benefits from being the world centre of at least one of these formerly tie-wearing professions, so there's enough of a concentration here to make you think your kid could get one of these jobs in a few years. But the road is long, and not every kid is going to enjoy becoming a lawyer or a banker. But it's also the case that it's hard to see how you could live in your childhood neighborhood without one of these jobs, so the parents steer the kids down the road before they are really old enough to decide. I wonder if having fewer kids is behind the rat-race atmosphere. With all your eggs in one basket, they need to be well protected. If you had 4 kids, like my uncle, you wouldn't have time to puff them all down the same path.
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  It's because the gap has widened between the "good paying jobs" and everything else (the "shit jobs"). The former has become more scarce which means you have to hustle more to get them or you're getting the later.
locallost 10mo ago
One reason I think this is the case is because working with children, broadly teaching, pedagogy etc. is also something that needs to be learned. Parents in the past realistically did not have the time to spend so much time with their children. We have more time now, but lack the skills (in general) to do it effectively. What I see often is kids not really having the freedom to make mistakes and figure out things on their own. In my case I realized how bad I am at teaching during covid lockdowns and home schooling. The desire to help was there, but it's difficult to grasp the level the kids can understand. One solution for me was to say, work on it on your own, and try as best as you can. Doing it wrong is allowed and if you are really confused, ask me. But with a lot of parents, they run around their kids trying to help them do everything right from the beginning. I just don't think that can work.
elil17 10mo ago
"No one in America today lives under the cloud of desperation that these children did." Is this true? Certainly many fewer people do. However, there have been high profile child labor busts recently: - 13yo child in a car factory: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/hyundai-child-labor-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/hyundai-child-la... - 54 migrant children in meat packing plants: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/settlement-child-labor-dol-department-of-labor-2025/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/settlement-child-labor-dol-depa... And further, some forms of child labor are still the norm here: America has unrestricted child labor after age 16, and in fact many children do drop out of school at that age to support their families
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  Not to mentions calls to weaken child labour laws in certain states to try and make up the difference in abducted workers: https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-solutions-to-the-u-s-worker-rights-crisis/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-...
zkmon 10mo ago
As children (not even teens), we were allowed to roam the farms around the village and swim in any farm-well we like entire day in the hot sun. Jump from trees into the well, chase animals, walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays. We used to get random thorns in the feet. The kid would pluck it out by surgical poking with steel pin in his own foot. That's what I call as rich childhood.
- HexPhantom 10mo ago
  The tragedy is that we responded to the real dangers of the past by trying to eliminate all risk, and in doing so stripped away most of the texture that made childhood feel real
  - renewiltord 10mo ago
    We did not try to eliminate all risk. That is a lie. We increased risk by allowing criminals to go on the street and then criminalized permitting your child to be a victim. The risk remains. We just added another risk. If I let my 6 year old daughter cross King St in San Francisco and a car illegally turning right while she is in the crosswalk kills her, who will society prosecute harder? Me or the driver? I think I know. If a sex offender who has been repeatedly released from jail by a judge who feels that “this time, his fourth time, it’ll be different” assaults my daughter society will judge me not him. I might lose any surviving children, presumably for willful neglect. And you will go out and say that incarceration is bad or whatever. Don’t give me this bullshit. “Try to eliminate all risk”? No. You just decided you want to punish the risk-takers. That’s very different. “Crime is because of poverty”. Yeah, dude, the reason that Bill Gene Hobbs goes around touching little girls is because he’s poor. Give me a break. “Try to eliminate all risk”. Pull the other one. Obviously the crime rates look great, you don’t convict anyone anymore. No crimes committed.
    - _vqpz 10mo ago
      You are talking to yourself
- 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
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dlisboa 10mo ago
The one thing this thread has shown me: It's very easy to be a parent when you have no children.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
HexPhantom 10mo ago
If you remove physical autonomy and replace it with algorithmic spaces optimized for engagement rather than growth, you shouldn't be surprised when teens struggle with agency, goals, or mental health...
hilbert42 10mo ago
It's true that children in the first decade or so of the 20th Century considered work normal and not that unpleasant despite their often horrific work conditions. The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920. These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/
casey2 10mo ago
富不过三代 Wealth does not last three generations. Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.
- joncrane 10mo ago
  I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
- dredmorbius 10mo ago
  That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise. See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)>
elias_t 10mo ago
> In 1950, there were 2.7 suicides per 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds. Today, there are 7.5 (though that’s down from a 1990s peak of 13.2). Little typo, looking at the link it's 11.2 not 13.2. Someone knows why this peak?
- jchallis 10mo ago
  One factor is definitely underreporting. Several “accidental deaths” in the 1950s were code for suicide.
  - elias_t 9mo ago
    So before it was underreporting and after it was proper categorization? If that was the case we would have seen a more smooth curve before and after I think
HFguy 10mo ago
“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.” That is quite a quote. Hard to believe that wasn't long ago.
senordevnyc 10mo ago
I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about: - cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life. - bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars - sexual harassment: she’s only ten, but sadly in some neighborhoods, that’s old enough that she’s likely to get hassled. That’s a sad fact of life she’ll have to deal with at some point, but I’m not ready yet - bullying: I had several encounters with groups of older kids when I was off free-ranging as a kid - subway: some deranged homeless person throws someone off the platform or stabs someone every week here I could go on, but the bottom line is that the potential harm outweighs the potential benefit for me right now. In my mind there’s no right answer here, just pros and cons. Appealing to how things were a century ago, or even when I grew up, is pretty irrelevant. My daughter might mature a couple years later than I did, and I can live with that. Also, I’m just pretty fundamentally unimpressed with most moral panics. “The Anxious Generation” seems like just the latest entry in a tradition stretching thousands of years where people worry about how the changes in society are ruining the next generation, and long for a return to how life was when they grew up. However, each generation somehow manages to figure it out.
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  I understand and worry about my kids the same age too. But the paradox I myself admit to is that those perceived dangers aren't new nor have they increased significantly since I was young in the 70s -- other than scooters being new -- and yet I, and pretty much every other kid, had tons of freedom and was just fine. So it's mostly about the fears in my head, not the reality on the ground.
  - senordevnyc 10mo ago
    Yeah, but “I made it just fine” is poor logic to me. This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking, mom drinking while pregnant, no seatbelts, etc. They were mostly fine too.
Desafinado 10mo ago
Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults. Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer. Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia. My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
- melagonster 10mo ago
  If patients are lawyers, doctors, or engineers, this system will still work for them.
- ericmcer 10mo ago
  Modernity has also made life really fucking complicated. A 16 year old could walk to the factory, get some paper money and then do what they wanted with it. Nowadays lets say your 16 year old wants a car and a job. To do that they need to schedule multiple tests with DMV, lessons with a driving instructor, update insurance documents and find the time to do hours of practice with you. At the end of that they need to navigate buying a used/new vehicle and setting up insurance. Then they need to navigate the world of job applications, and if they manage to get hired they will need to have their direct deposit bank account setup and have some kind of credit card payment system setup so they can use the money. Seriously just typing this I get exhausted. It makes sense why parents are hovering over their kids because there are 10,000 things that need to get handled just to like be a "person". You can either watch your kid drown in a mire of bureaucracy or just let them focus on school and offload all of it from them.
  - Desafinado 10mo ago
    That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job. Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves. When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.
seydor 10mo ago
i don't think they mind

272 points by NavinF 10mo ago

This remind me of that saying - no original version but it was like: tough times makes tough people, soft times makes soft people. And I hope it’s not true. But indeed the more choices you have in life, the harder it gets to chose the right thing to do.

actionfromafar 10mo ago
In aggregate, tough times make people malnourished, alcoholic, traumatized, lower IQ, apathetic, aggressive. In no particular order or combination.
- kakacik 10mo ago
  Look at US during late 40s / 50s. Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse? (apart from the fact that most of those markers slowly improved over time due to overall progress). Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
  - girvo 10mo ago
    > Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse Lead poisoning leading to lower IQs, alcoholism was definitely rampant (though less stigmatised at the time), traumatised from the war, aggressiveness towards spouses and each other (see: war trauma) Yes, it absolutely was.
komali2 10mo ago
Good times make soft men, bad times make hard men. I never quite understood what the implication was and I always questioned the historical accuracy because no part of history is so easily defined as "good time" or "bad time."
- louthy 10mo ago
  It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships. I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
  - arethuza 10mo ago
    Overcoming hardships may leave people more resilient, but it may also leave them physical and/or psychological wrecks.
    - louthy 10mo ago
      As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’. I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general. Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on. Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
      - komali2 10mo ago
        But how do you account for things like cycles of violence and PTSD? I have veteran friends that, sure, could handle being shot at better than me, but on the other hand I can go to a fireworks show without worrying about having a public breakdown. Or I got friends that suffer for lack of the structure the military provided and just veg out now, picking fights at the bar for a little excitement. Hell I guess you can describe them as "hard men" but I wouldn't want to be that way and it doesn't seem to make you more successful in modern society.
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
How did we end up in a world where the stupidest memes are considered insightful.
- berdario 10mo ago
  Not only stupid, but also a nazi meme... Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
  - rkomorn 10mo ago
    I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
gherkinnn 10mo ago
Why can't this meme die? It is so obviously rubbish. Good times allow for a people to divert more energy to specialisation and growth and might and art and then displace the "hardened" people.
- Aeglaecia 10mo ago
  all living creatures are selfish to the core and will always optimize to minimize effort and maximize personal reward , therefore existing in a soft gentle system will result in acclimatization to a soft gentle system ... this universe is hostile impersonal harsh brutal and altogether basically not a place that anybody could ever be prepared for after having congealed in an insular bubble like the global west ... it is enjoyable seeing everyone here utterly in denial about this ... reminds me of militant atheists lambasting religion and then doubling down when i suggest that maybe healthy community gathering and values is more important than whether or not god is real ...
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    Yep. That's why bees and ants simply don't exist.
    - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
      zooming out a bit , humans look a lot like ants
meindnoch 10mo ago
This is a famous quote by the renowned warrior-philosopher Joe Rogan.
- dredmorbius 10mo ago
  Predates him significantly, I suspect: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315310>.
UncleMeat 10mo ago
I swear, people will do anything to make claims about history except speak with actual historians.
dredmorbius 10mo ago
The original quote is from G. Michael Hopf, in Those Who Remain (2016): "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8751435-hard-times-create-strong-men-strong-men-create-good-times https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8751435-hard-times-create-s...> It reflects many former cyclical-view-of-history / social cycle theory concepts, dating back literally thousands of years: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory>

komali2 10mo ago

> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward. This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are leading to an increasingly alienated generation of kids. I grew up in suburbs and I couldn't even safely bike to my friend's house because the sidewalk would randomly end before arriving at his neighborhood, and the stroad next to it was at 45mph speed limit (thus in Texas: 60mph) and mostly filled with massive pickup trucks that probably couldn't even see me. So, my options before my parents got home were to play WoW and browse 4chan or do my homework, and if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. Imo this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit." I was into manosphere stuff, mildly zenophobic, incredibly transphobic, and insufferably cynical. Getting to college and seeing the disgust on people's faces when I'd drop a 4chan joke was a complete culture shock to me. Took me a good 2 years to adjust to "normal society," by then I also had to overcome a reputation as an asshole. I can't even imagine what it's like for kids like me these days now that there's full on weaponized Discords trying to convince them to shoot up schools for the lulz. At least on 4chan that kind of stuff got banned or mocked.

ensocode 10mo ago
Probably you won't be the freak anymore in today's online society as most of the others do the same
squeefers 10mo ago
> so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan. because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
  sidewalk ended apparently. i am imagining some super hostile urban planning. like did a cyclist cheat with the planner's spouse? is there not another route?

chiefalchemist 10mo ago

The constrain isn’t merely financial, it’s broader than that. Teenagers are less free because adults and society have bulldozed the adversity out of teen lives. This sheltering is creating generations that are more - not less - fragile. Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.

A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
I don't think that's it. There's definitely a kind of frenetic adversity in the whole college admissions process, at least for kids who are inclined to go that route. If anything, it has gotten much worse over the past 30 years; it's much more stressful than it used to be, and it's easy for teens to imagine that every little thing carries high stakes. If by "adversity" you mean helping the family put food on the table, I certainly agree that there's less of that. Today we have more weird, more detached, and less rational forms of adversity.
- lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  I think it’s a broader awareness of a K shaped socioeconomic trajectory, that the odds of an upward trajectory drop considerably if you don’t follow the standard path into a top 20 university, metro, etc. as economic opportunities continue to agglomerate.
  - kjkjadksj 10mo ago
    What gives me pause with that take is that it only really applies to certain geographical regions of the country. I grew up in a place where today you can still get a starter home for about 100k. The nicest homes, akin to the Home Alone house, on the market are around 500k or less. You don’t need a glamorous job to be a homeowner here, to own a couple cars on the comparatively cheap insurance rates, to send your kid to the very competent in state university. It is still the same break it has always had since the region is stagnant in population. Ironically the lack of growth actually helps the people when you consider the affordability it offers. However the mass media is blind to this region, you won’t hear about it save for browbeating over 1950s population counts, missing the point entirely of what that really means in practice for the people who live there. K shaped economy doesn’t just refer to class, but of geography. There is a hidden line out of the middle of that K going dead straight.

nicgrev103 10mo ago

It's 10pm; do you know where your kids are? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJeBbhPYBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJeBbhPYBs

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
10pm is a different animal. Out that late and I dont know where they are? 18+ (Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
- m4ck_ 10mo ago
  It wasn't uncommon for kids under 18 to be out that late just a couple of decades ago. In the 90s/early 00's 10pm was like a weekday, school night curfew.
- kasey_junk 10mo ago
  My parents generation was so laisse faire with their child rearing that they ran ads to remind them to go figure out where we were.
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    In fairness: I drove through your home state regularly when I lived in Michigan and the billboards we saw were fucking bananas, including one about how radiators are hot and parents shouldn't restrain their children against them.
    - kasey_junk 10mo ago
      The woke mind virus has won if you can’t chain your child to scalding radiators without the government using the fake news media to condemn it.
- svpk 10mo ago
  As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet? Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.

password54321 10mo ago

[flagged]

A_D_E_P_T 10mo ago
Who are "they" and what is their aim? Don't be afraid. What's the worst that can happen if you speak plainly?
- UncleMeat 10mo ago
  It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today. Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
- password54321 9mo ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/12/04/james-cameronavatar-director-calls-testosterone-a-toxin-heres-the-response/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/12/04/james-camer...

reedf1 10mo ago

> Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS What?? > Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same. I am speechless. Has so much changed in the 20 odd years since I was a kid? I was playing outside unsupervised from maybe age 9. What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?

myko 10mo ago
I'm an 80s kid, I was playing outside at age 6 unsupervised / with my friends. I feel like this should be pretty normal and totally agree with your last line: What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
- lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  I teach my kids their biggest risk is a driver distracted by their phone in a vehicle with a hood height at or above the kids’ head height.
  - walthamstow 10mo ago
    Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.
    - Hendrikto 10mo ago
      Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin. The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
      - walthamstow 10mo ago

TrackerFF 10mo ago

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurricular activities. Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.

3D30497420 10mo ago
It doesn't even require poverty/rural areas/etc. I grew up in (basically) sub-urban USA to a solidly middle-class family and I was always out wandering around the neighborhood or on my bike.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
squeefers 10mo ago
> and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty > We'd be outside all day long > most of my peers have middle-class jobs. >Their kids are barely outside. wonder what the link is there then?
- suslik 10mo ago
  The link is: the first part was 'then', the second is 'now'.
- squeefers 10mo ago
  what absolute cretins downvoted that?
dns_snek 10mo ago
> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space. Is that surprising? All of that sounds fully consistent to me when parents suffocate their kids with expectations and activities instead of meeting their actual needs. They feel like they're suffocating them because they are, they feel inadequate because deep down they know it's wrong, and kids feel like they're not getting enough space because they aren't.

owisd 10mo ago

If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org https://letgrow.org

ozozozd 10mo ago
One of the testimonies mentions a 4 year old cooking dinner (pancakes, eggs and sausages). That takes an unbelievable a level of dexterity for a 4 year old. Reminds me of those social media posts of 4 year olds saying things that are way beyond the wisdom they may possess. I call BS.
- duncan_britt 10mo ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/uq0jon/big_brother_makes_meal_for_lil_brother_and_feeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/uq0jon/big_bro...

lm28469 10mo ago

And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.

Aeglaecia 10mo ago
wonder whats gonna happen in a decade or two when our youngest and brightest minds have all been penned by a culture disconnected from reality
- squigz 10mo ago
  There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.
  - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
    while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine
    - throawayonthe 10mo ago
      how old are you? the avg ~20 year old has indeed already grown up with addictive social media youtube came out 20 years ago, the iphone 19 years ago, instagram 15 years ago, musical.ly 11 years ago and merged with tiktok 7 years ago... we are so cooked frfr
      - Aeglaecia 10mo ago
        old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather
      - 10mo ago

aleksandrm 10mo ago

I'm sorry, but this is a bullshit article.

ForceBru 10mo ago
Care to elaborate? Why do you think it's bullshit?

CalRobert 10mo ago

For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards. Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked) Or here's a more polished, edited video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside. What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.

dirkc 10mo ago
I recently had a trip to NL and was very surprised to see jobs for children being advertised there!
- CalRobert 10mo ago
  Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username) There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do. I just wish this were available to more families.
  - dirkc 10mo ago
    I was quite surprised to see grocery stores with my name on it :)
  - Aromasin 10mo ago
    It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints. The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jfjfrjtjtitjmi 10mo ago

> Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been. I would disagree. There now far less legal protections from dog attack. 20 years ago aggressive behaviour and attack was very clearly defined! I refuse to allow my children to park, it is full of aggresive dogs and their shit. Animal parks are too dangerous (bcos of dogs). Support animal fraudsters invaded every "safe" niche. They are free to molest, maul and attack children. Victim blaming and gaslighting (dog is not "reactive", just agressive). If kid gets mauled, it has to go through painful rabies shots, instead of just testing the predator! And there is not a chance to get any compensation, since dog owner had no way to know dog could attack anyone (first bite is free).

renewiltord 10mo ago
In San Francisco, a coyote bit a child in Golden Gate Park. The animal rights idiots blamed the child for playing in the park and running in the bushes. Rightfully the coyote was destroyed but allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. They do weird things like this.
- delichon 10mo ago
  > allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. I've never met a Matriarchist before.
  - renewiltord 10mo ago
    You know what, I’m happy to lose the franchise if it will take it away from the childless women. These people who redirect their obviously innate mother instinct to wild animals are far too risky to allow near government.

lordnacho 10mo ago

Even in my lifetime, it seems like growing up has become increasingly a sort of highwire-walking. Especially in the educated segment that I find myself in, it seems like you HAVE to do certain things to grow up "successfully". When I was a kid, there were no expectations beyond getting a degree, and even that was a particular quirk in my father's thinking; my uncle did not make it a given for his kids. Through my old school I know a guy who is also at my old uni, so I compare notes with him. Nowadays, everyone feels like they have to have an internship every year to get a job. Well, to do that, you needed to be at a top uni, getting top grades. To get into top uni, you needed to go to a good high school, and to do that, you needed to go to a good primary school. I ended up living in this little bubble where everyone in my local area hires a tutor for their kid. The kids do the typical middle-class activities: an instrument or other performance art, a team sport, or maybe an individual sport. Everything is done with the goal of getting into the best senior school, or the best university. The parents are all of the type who went through this gauntlet. Two lawyers, a lawyer and a doctor, finance and law, and so on. Everyone is spending a hefty chunk to afford to live here, and on their kid's education. To circle back to the point of the article, these are professions that make a lot of money. They didn't exist in nearly the same scale as they did a hundred years ago, and London benefits from being the world centre of at least one of these formerly tie-wearing professions, so there's enough of a concentration here to make you think your kid could get one of these jobs in a few years. But the road is long, and not every kid is going to enjoy becoming a lawyer or a banker. But it's also the case that it's hard to see how you could live in your childhood neighborhood without one of these jobs, so the parents steer the kids down the road before they are really old enough to decide. I wonder if having fewer kids is behind the rat-race atmosphere. With all your eggs in one basket, they need to be well protected. If you had 4 kids, like my uncle, you wouldn't have time to puff them all down the same path.

insane_dreamer 10mo ago
It's because the gap has widened between the "good paying jobs" and everything else (the "shit jobs"). The former has become more scarce which means you have to hustle more to get them or you're getting the later.

locallost 10mo ago

One reason I think this is the case is because working with children, broadly teaching, pedagogy etc. is also something that needs to be learned. Parents in the past realistically did not have the time to spend so much time with their children. We have more time now, but lack the skills (in general) to do it effectively. What I see often is kids not really having the freedom to make mistakes and figure out things on their own. In my case I realized how bad I am at teaching during covid lockdowns and home schooling. The desire to help was there, but it's difficult to grasp the level the kids can understand. One solution for me was to say, work on it on your own, and try as best as you can. Doing it wrong is allowed and if you are really confused, ask me. But with a lot of parents, they run around their kids trying to help them do everything right from the beginning. I just don't think that can work.

elil17 10mo ago

"No one in America today lives under the cloud of desperation that these children did." Is this true? Certainly many fewer people do. However, there have been high profile child labor busts recently: - 13yo child in a car factory: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/hyundai-child-labor-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/hyundai-child-la... - 54 migrant children in meat packing plants: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/settlement-child-labor-dol-department-of-labor-2025/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/settlement-child-labor-dol-depa... And further, some forms of child labor are still the norm here: America has unrestricted child labor after age 16, and in fact many children do drop out of school at that age to support their families

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
Not to mentions calls to weaken child labour laws in certain states to try and make up the difference in abducted workers: https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-solutions-to-the-u-s-worker-rights-crisis/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-...

zkmon 10mo ago

As children (not even teens), we were allowed to roam the farms around the village and swim in any farm-well we like entire day in the hot sun. Jump from trees into the well, chase animals, walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays. We used to get random thorns in the feet. The kid would pluck it out by surgical poking with steel pin in his own foot. That's what I call as rich childhood.

HexPhantom 10mo ago
The tragedy is that we responded to the real dangers of the past by trying to eliminate all risk, and in doing so stripped away most of the texture that made childhood feel real
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  We did not try to eliminate all risk. That is a lie. We increased risk by allowing criminals to go on the street and then criminalized permitting your child to be a victim. The risk remains. We just added another risk. If I let my 6 year old daughter cross King St in San Francisco and a car illegally turning right while she is in the crosswalk kills her, who will society prosecute harder? Me or the driver? I think I know. If a sex offender who has been repeatedly released from jail by a judge who feels that “this time, his fourth time, it’ll be different” assaults my daughter society will judge me not him. I might lose any surviving children, presumably for willful neglect. And you will go out and say that incarceration is bad or whatever. Don’t give me this bullshit. “Try to eliminate all risk”? No. You just decided you want to punish the risk-takers. That’s very different. “Crime is because of poverty”. Yeah, dude, the reason that Bill Gene Hobbs goes around touching little girls is because he’s poor. Give me a break. “Try to eliminate all risk”. Pull the other one. Obviously the crime rates look great, you don’t convict anyone anymore. No crimes committed.
  - _vqpz 10mo ago
    You are talking to yourself
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dlisboa 10mo ago

The one thing this thread has shown me: It's very easy to be a parent when you have no children.

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HexPhantom 10mo ago

If you remove physical autonomy and replace it with algorithmic spaces optimized for engagement rather than growth, you shouldn't be surprised when teens struggle with agency, goals, or mental health...

hilbert42 10mo ago

It's true that children in the first decade or so of the 20th Century considered work normal and not that unpleasant despite their often horrific work conditions. The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920. These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/

casey2 10mo ago

富不过三代 Wealth does not last three generations. Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.

joncrane 10mo ago
I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
dredmorbius 10mo ago
That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise. See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)>

elias_t 10mo ago

> In 1950, there were 2.7 suicides per 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds. Today, there are 7.5 (though that’s down from a 1990s peak of 13.2). Little typo, looking at the link it's 11.2 not 13.2. Someone knows why this peak?

jchallis 10mo ago
One factor is definitely underreporting. Several “accidental deaths” in the 1950s were code for suicide.
- elias_t 9mo ago
  So before it was underreporting and after it was proper categorization? If that was the case we would have seen a more smooth curve before and after I think

HFguy 10mo ago

“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.” That is quite a quote. Hard to believe that wasn't long ago.

senordevnyc 10mo ago

I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about: - cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life. - bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars - sexual harassment: she’s only ten, but sadly in some neighborhoods, that’s old enough that she’s likely to get hassled. That’s a sad fact of life she’ll have to deal with at some point, but I’m not ready yet - bullying: I had several encounters with groups of older kids when I was off free-ranging as a kid - subway: some deranged homeless person throws someone off the platform or stabs someone every week here I could go on, but the bottom line is that the potential harm outweighs the potential benefit for me right now. In my mind there’s no right answer here, just pros and cons. Appealing to how things were a century ago, or even when I grew up, is pretty irrelevant. My daughter might mature a couple years later than I did, and I can live with that. Also, I’m just pretty fundamentally unimpressed with most moral panics. “The Anxious Generation” seems like just the latest entry in a tradition stretching thousands of years where people worry about how the changes in society are ruining the next generation, and long for a return to how life was when they grew up. However, each generation somehow manages to figure it out.

insane_dreamer 10mo ago
I understand and worry about my kids the same age too. But the paradox I myself admit to is that those perceived dangers aren't new nor have they increased significantly since I was young in the 70s -- other than scooters being new -- and yet I, and pretty much every other kid, had tons of freedom and was just fine. So it's mostly about the fears in my head, not the reality on the ground.
- senordevnyc 10mo ago
  Yeah, but “I made it just fine” is poor logic to me. This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking, mom drinking while pregnant, no seatbelts, etc. They were mostly fine too.

Desafinado 10mo ago

Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults. Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer. Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia. My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.

melagonster 10mo ago
If patients are lawyers, doctors, or engineers, this system will still work for them.
ericmcer 10mo ago
Modernity has also made life really fucking complicated. A 16 year old could walk to the factory, get some paper money and then do what they wanted with it. Nowadays lets say your 16 year old wants a car and a job. To do that they need to schedule multiple tests with DMV, lessons with a driving instructor, update insurance documents and find the time to do hours of practice with you. At the end of that they need to navigate buying a used/new vehicle and setting up insurance. Then they need to navigate the world of job applications, and if they manage to get hired they will need to have their direct deposit bank account setup and have some kind of credit card payment system setup so they can use the money. Seriously just typing this I get exhausted. It makes sense why parents are hovering over their kids because there are 10,000 things that need to get handled just to like be a "person". You can either watch your kid drown in a mire of bureaucracy or just let them focus on school and offload all of it from them.
- Desafinado 10mo ago
  That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job. Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves. When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.

seydor 10mo ago

i don't think they mind