6 ms·

> Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids. I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My ki

> Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids. I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation. Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture). The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.

nathanaldensr 6mo ago
Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Why that is is a matter of debate.
- mothballed 6mo ago
  I don't know if it's the parent that is neurotic so much as that it only takes 1 of 1000 assholes, who now have their little snitch device in their pocket 24/7, to call the child snatchers (CPS). And the child snatchers are legally barred from revealing who your accuser is, so the anonymous cowards can fuck up your life for weeks at no cost to themselves and with the utmost convenience. This effectively means every single person who views your child, now has veto powers on your parenting. The end result of that is people parent in the most paranoid, liability averting way possible. When I was a kid the Karens against childhood autonomy existed but it actually cost them time and money to rat us out since they would have to drive home to a telephone, so long as we didn't play near houses. If an asshole raised hell we were gone by the time they could call the authorities.
  - watwut 6mo ago
    The actual threat of CPS 8s grossly exagerrated here. And the fear is one of the symptoms.
    - mothballed 6mo ago
      Here's a few examples that's happened to me personally (1) I didn't personally appear at bus stop, thinking my kid would be able to just walk the short distance from the stop to our house. Nope, school did not let kid off bus, given a timer to show up at the transportation office before child services will be called. (2) Let my kid walk on our own property, someone drives up and starts interrogating them why they are "alone." Fortunately I was actually watching from further away and I managed to diffuse the situation before they alerted the authorities. (3) Took my kid to the park so they could have a nice time outside in public. Whoops, looks like my child is a difference race than me. That means I am a kidnapper. Karen (from bodycam, a passing yuppie looking cyclist) calls police, who arrive and scare the shit out of me and my kid and detain us for about an hour. Not released until a woman's voice comes on the phone (they literally did not check, just any female voice) says the man can let his child play at the park. They also contacted child services of both the city of the park, and my hometown -- fortunately even though the city of the park looked like they were ready to fuck with me my hometown CPS did tell them to kick rocks and since I left town there was nothing further they could do.
      - sigseg1v 6mo ago
        Holy shit. I'm so sorry that this happened to you. That's not right.
    - IcyWindows 6mo ago
      I've had CPS call me up and question me about about play someone observed through a window. It's a real thing.
      - WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
        I was in the process of creating a brochure about our family. It's be available at our front door, to help facilitate CPS agents on their visits. It'd have a map to the fridge and to the kids' bedrooms, the names of their schools and contact numbers for family. All this due to a disgruntled neighbor who endlessly called cps (anonymously), with a variety of bizarre accusations. I suspect CPS got so sick of seeing us, they eventually ignored the calls.
- rhubarbtree 6mo ago
  Millennials seem to have their shit together more than any generation since the silent generation, at least in the UK.
  - jeffbee 6mo ago
    Silent Americans are the most fucked up generation ever. They are the ones actually responsible for most of the bullshit that people attribute to Boomers.
    - reverius42 6mo ago
      Just wait til GenX is elderly.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    I'm GenX, but had kids a little late, so most of my kid's friends either 1. have Millennial parents or 2. are raised by their Boomer grandparents (parents not much in the picture). The differences in how these two sets of caretakers behave is astounding. Take a typical visit from the friend to my house to play with my kid: The friends who are with their grandparents show up. Grandpa parks his car in my driveway, and walks the kid to my door. We greet, kid runs off to play, and we shoot the shit for a while, asking how things have been going, maybe Grandpa wants to check out the latest on my woodworking project, whatever. Then Grandpa says goodbye, I'll be back later, and heads out. The friends who are with their Millennial parents show up. Dad parks his car waaaaay out by the curb, never even going on my property. Kid gets out of the car and walks himself to my door. Dad speeds away in his car, never even acknowledging us. Dad comes back to pick the kid up, same thing. Parks way far away, texts his kid, and the kid excuses himself and runs all the way out to the car. I don't even know the names of any of my kid's friends' Millennial parents! This pattern repeats across N = about 6.
    - Ancapistani 6mo ago
      I'm a Millennial, and I do something much like this intentionally. I make it a point to explicitly put my kids into situations where they are responsible for themselves and are uncomfortable because of it. The transition to adulthood was rough for me for several reasons, and looking back I think that was one of them - my parents always did things for me, but never expected me to do things on my own. I almost certainly go overboard with this, but that's the nature of things.
- WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
  > Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Truly, this hasn't been my experience. I'm GenX (edit: not GenZ), my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My 25yo kids understand behavior and psychology better than my parents ever did. The reason my kids grew up imprisoned is there was nowhere for them to go. The risk to their well-being was never from strangers but from cars and police.
  - orthoxerox 6mo ago
    You probably meant GenX.
  - jaredklewis 6mo ago
    > I'm GenZ, my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials. P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^ I agree with everything in your top level comment.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
      > My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, You're right. I fat fingered my post.
  - avadodin 6mo ago
    25yo is solid GenZ
  - opo 6mo ago
    >...my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) If your parents were WW II vets, wouldn't they be part of Greatest Generation (often considered to be those born 1901–1927)? Silent Generation are often considered to be those born 1928–1945. They weren't adults when WW II was fought.
- watwut 6mo ago
  The things, grandparents are more neurotic. Just had less options.
lazyasciiart 6mo ago
> nearly no one seems to have noticed it. I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".
- eleventen 6mo ago
  Indeed. _everyone_ has noticed it. Nobody really has any plan to fix it. IMO the urbanism movement comes closest to having some practical plans.
- WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
  > I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, I had minor children from the early 90s to the late 10s. Parenting discussions were pretty much an ongoing thing. When I contrasted my childhood with my kids', there would be a long pause while the other parents realize it didn't used to always be this way. Perhaps in the last decade awareness has bloomed and for whatever reason, I'm not coming across it. I hope so. That would be great.
  - machomaster 6mo ago
    The discussion about the negative aspects of helicopter parenting is as old as the term itself.
  - lazyasciiart 6mo ago
    Foster Cline’s famous parenting book, Parenting with Love and Logic, was published in 1990 and contains warnings about helicopter parenting. The “free range kids” movement, an explicit counter-trend, was worldwide news in 2008 after a woman discussed letting her kid take the subway alone (https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/skenazy https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/skenazy). The overprotective parenting trend is widely recognized to have been accelerated by the media saturation of stranger kidnappings in the 80s, including Adam Walsh. “As of April 30, 2018, the term ‘helicopter parents’ yielded 2 million hits on Google. From March 2014 to February 2018, the keyword ‘helicopter parents’ was searched monthly”. https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3922&context=dissertations https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3922...
ai_terk_er_jerb 6mo ago
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bombcar 6mo ago
I’ve noticed that people don’t notice when the kids are free range anymore, because they’re all connected to an international network and pinging their location every minute.
gyomu 6mo ago
We’ve also eradicated the unsupervised peer socialization that kids experienced with the free range. It’s common for a child these days to only ever be around other kids in very supervised environments with adults present (play dates, school, organized activities). Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience. I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do). I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...
emptysongglass 6mo ago
I agree this is a terrible loss. On the other hand, new dads are actually learning how to feel their feelings, communicate those feelings in a healthy way, and tell their children they love them. Millennial dads were (mostly) a distant mess who for whatever reason saw the expression of feelings as "weak".
- emptysongglass 6mo ago
  I just realized I completely missed the grammar on this one: I meant dads of millenials.
wil421 6mo ago
Sounds like you choose to live in a place without free range area. My neighborhood is covered with kids. Lots of kids on e-bikes after school on the main roads too. Plus a lot of packed are revamping side walks to accommodate bikes, golf cars, e-bikes and everyone on foot.
Drunkfoowl 6mo ago
[dead]
mancerayder 6mo ago
I'm encountering people in their lower 20's who seem to really struggle emotionally, and use psychological lingo to describe themselves and each other in a way that really didn't exist when I was in my 20's. On the one hand this is great - I am a huge supporter of understanding and accepting ourselves non-pejoratively - anxiety, depression, etc. On the flip side they talk sometimes like the forces are from outside them, like they have no agency. And they also talk like the words came from somewhere else, "My generation compared to previous generations..." <- unless you lived those previous generations, which is impossible, you heard that from somewhere, probably a paper, and probably from a professor in school.
adfm 6mo ago
[dead]

nathanaldensr 6mo ago

Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Why that is is a matter of debate.

mothballed 6mo ago
I don't know if it's the parent that is neurotic so much as that it only takes 1 of 1000 assholes, who now have their little snitch device in their pocket 24/7, to call the child snatchers (CPS). And the child snatchers are legally barred from revealing who your accuser is, so the anonymous cowards can fuck up your life for weeks at no cost to themselves and with the utmost convenience. This effectively means every single person who views your child, now has veto powers on your parenting. The end result of that is people parent in the most paranoid, liability averting way possible. When I was a kid the Karens against childhood autonomy existed but it actually cost them time and money to rat us out since they would have to drive home to a telephone, so long as we didn't play near houses. If an asshole raised hell we were gone by the time they could call the authorities.
- watwut 6mo ago
  The actual threat of CPS 8s grossly exagerrated here. And the fear is one of the symptoms.
  - mothballed 6mo ago
    Here's a few examples that's happened to me personally (1) I didn't personally appear at bus stop, thinking my kid would be able to just walk the short distance from the stop to our house. Nope, school did not let kid off bus, given a timer to show up at the transportation office before child services will be called. (2) Let my kid walk on our own property, someone drives up and starts interrogating them why they are "alone." Fortunately I was actually watching from further away and I managed to diffuse the situation before they alerted the authorities. (3) Took my kid to the park so they could have a nice time outside in public. Whoops, looks like my child is a difference race than me. That means I am a kidnapper. Karen (from bodycam, a passing yuppie looking cyclist) calls police, who arrive and scare the shit out of me and my kid and detain us for about an hour. Not released until a woman's voice comes on the phone (they literally did not check, just any female voice) says the man can let his child play at the park. They also contacted child services of both the city of the park, and my hometown -- fortunately even though the city of the park looked like they were ready to fuck with me my hometown CPS did tell them to kick rocks and since I left town there was nothing further they could do.
    - sigseg1v 6mo ago
      Holy shit. I'm so sorry that this happened to you. That's not right.
  - IcyWindows 6mo ago
    I've had CPS call me up and question me about about play someone observed through a window. It's a real thing.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
      I was in the process of creating a brochure about our family. It's be available at our front door, to help facilitate CPS agents on their visits. It'd have a map to the fridge and to the kids' bedrooms, the names of their schools and contact numbers for family. All this due to a disgruntled neighbor who endlessly called cps (anonymously), with a variety of bizarre accusations. I suspect CPS got so sick of seeing us, they eventually ignored the calls.
rhubarbtree 6mo ago
Millennials seem to have their shit together more than any generation since the silent generation, at least in the UK.
- jeffbee 6mo ago
  Silent Americans are the most fucked up generation ever. They are the ones actually responsible for most of the bullshit that people attribute to Boomers.
  - reverius42 6mo ago
    Just wait til GenX is elderly.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  I'm GenX, but had kids a little late, so most of my kid's friends either 1. have Millennial parents or 2. are raised by their Boomer grandparents (parents not much in the picture). The differences in how these two sets of caretakers behave is astounding. Take a typical visit from the friend to my house to play with my kid: The friends who are with their grandparents show up. Grandpa parks his car in my driveway, and walks the kid to my door. We greet, kid runs off to play, and we shoot the shit for a while, asking how things have been going, maybe Grandpa wants to check out the latest on my woodworking project, whatever. Then Grandpa says goodbye, I'll be back later, and heads out. The friends who are with their Millennial parents show up. Dad parks his car waaaaay out by the curb, never even going on my property. Kid gets out of the car and walks himself to my door. Dad speeds away in his car, never even acknowledging us. Dad comes back to pick the kid up, same thing. Parks way far away, texts his kid, and the kid excuses himself and runs all the way out to the car. I don't even know the names of any of my kid's friends' Millennial parents! This pattern repeats across N = about 6.
  - Ancapistani 6mo ago
    I'm a Millennial, and I do something much like this intentionally. I make it a point to explicitly put my kids into situations where they are responsible for themselves and are uncomfortable because of it. The transition to adulthood was rough for me for several reasons, and looking back I think that was one of them - my parents always did things for me, but never expected me to do things on my own. I almost certainly go overboard with this, but that's the nature of things.
WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
> Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Truly, this hasn't been my experience. I'm GenX (edit: not GenZ), my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My 25yo kids understand behavior and psychology better than my parents ever did. The reason my kids grew up imprisoned is there was nowhere for them to go. The risk to their well-being was never from strangers but from cars and police.
- orthoxerox 6mo ago
  You probably meant GenX.
- jaredklewis 6mo ago
  > I'm GenZ, my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials. P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^ I agree with everything in your top level comment.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
    > My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, You're right. I fat fingered my post.
- avadodin 6mo ago
  25yo is solid GenZ
- opo 6mo ago
  >...my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) If your parents were WW II vets, wouldn't they be part of Greatest Generation (often considered to be those born 1901–1927)? Silent Generation are often considered to be those born 1928–1945. They weren't adults when WW II was fought.
watwut 6mo ago
The things, grandparents are more neurotic. Just had less options.

lazyasciiart 6mo ago

> nearly no one seems to have noticed it. I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".

eleventen 6mo ago
Indeed. _everyone_ has noticed it. Nobody really has any plan to fix it. IMO the urbanism movement comes closest to having some practical plans.
WarOnPrivacy 6mo ago
> I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, I had minor children from the early 90s to the late 10s. Parenting discussions were pretty much an ongoing thing. When I contrasted my childhood with my kids', there would be a long pause while the other parents realize it didn't used to always be this way. Perhaps in the last decade awareness has bloomed and for whatever reason, I'm not coming across it. I hope so. That would be great.
- machomaster 6mo ago
  The discussion about the negative aspects of helicopter parenting is as old as the term itself.
- lazyasciiart 6mo ago
  Foster Cline’s famous parenting book, Parenting with Love and Logic, was published in 1990 and contains warnings about helicopter parenting. The “free range kids” movement, an explicit counter-trend, was worldwide news in 2008 after a woman discussed letting her kid take the subway alone (https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/skenazy https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/skenazy). The overprotective parenting trend is widely recognized to have been accelerated by the media saturation of stranger kidnappings in the 80s, including Adam Walsh. “As of April 30, 2018, the term ‘helicopter parents’ yielded 2 million hits on Google. From March 2014 to February 2018, the keyword ‘helicopter parents’ was searched monthly”. https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3922&context=dissertations https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3922...

ai_terk_er_jerb 6mo ago

[dead]

bombcar 6mo ago

I’ve noticed that people don’t notice when the kids are free range anymore, because they’re all connected to an international network and pinging their location every minute.

gyomu 6mo ago

We’ve also eradicated the unsupervised peer socialization that kids experienced with the free range. It’s common for a child these days to only ever be around other kids in very supervised environments with adults present (play dates, school, organized activities). Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience. I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do). I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...

emptysongglass 6mo ago

I agree this is a terrible loss. On the other hand, new dads are actually learning how to feel their feelings, communicate those feelings in a healthy way, and tell their children they love them. Millennial dads were (mostly) a distant mess who for whatever reason saw the expression of feelings as "weak".

emptysongglass 6mo ago
I just realized I completely missed the grammar on this one: I meant dads of millenials.

wil421 6mo ago

Sounds like you choose to live in a place without free range area. My neighborhood is covered with kids. Lots of kids on e-bikes after school on the main roads too. Plus a lot of packed are revamping side walks to accommodate bikes, golf cars, e-bikes and everyone on foot.

Drunkfoowl 6mo ago

[dead]

mancerayder 6mo ago

I'm encountering people in their lower 20's who seem to really struggle emotionally, and use psychological lingo to describe themselves and each other in a way that really didn't exist when I was in my 20's. On the one hand this is great - I am a huge supporter of understanding and accepting ourselves non-pejoratively - anxiety, depression, etc. On the flip side they talk sometimes like the forces are from outside them, like they have no agency. And they also talk like the words came from somewhere else, "My generation compared to previous generations..." <- unless you lived those previous generations, which is impossible, you heard that from somewhere, probably a paper, and probably from a professor in school.

adfm 6mo ago

[dead]