9 ms·

I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land,

by chez17 13y ago

I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much? * That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.

001sky 13y ago
Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis. Please. Try. Harder. [NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]
- jlgreco 13y ago
  When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan. “I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.” His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=...
  - 001sky 13y ago
    His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  This Plus, policies are not made by a generation but politicians and social and economic circumstances. There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. The narrative is in the "not even wrong" category.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    I can't make any sense of your perspective. Policies very much are made by a generation; they are very much not made by politicians. Look at the discussion of drinking -- politicians have decided that no one shall drink before the age of 21, the masses have decided something different, and the masses are having things 100% their own way. The society reflects what the populace wants. > There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. Of course there's never been a meeting. The generation doesn't meet. But it does decide policy. Who meets to set the price of copper?
protomyth 13y ago
Woah, hold up there. I am a little before the OP poster (70's) and we most surely did not do what you said. It was the f'n generation before us (born in the 60's) that did the freak out and made everything "safe first". They started their crusade in the 80's and really got going in the 90's. The OP and even someone born in the 70's were a bit young for it. Now, I do see this schedule-every-second-vibe from my generation and am not liking it one bit[1]. My younger brother is trying to find or build decent play equipment for his boy as he grows up. 1) some organized sports is fine, but this scheduling every waking minute of your child's time is psycho
L_Rahman 13y ago
Part of the problem is that the race for college has been pushed earlier and earlier as admissions has gotten more competitive. Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply. When success in life in large part is still defined by one's undergraduate institution you can see why parents would focus on that at the expense of everything else. I'm not a parent yet, and am not planning to be in the near future, but I've been thinking a lot about parenting now that I'm fully out of my childhood and it basically seems to come down to a bunch of tough compromises.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I wouldn't think that breaking an arm or two while in elementary school would have much of an effect at all on college admissions. I mean, if anything, it should give the kid some more life experiences to draw upon while writing their admissions essay, right?
  - AlisdairSH 13y ago
    No, but excelling in high-school extra-curricular activities does. And the perception is you don't excel at extra-curricular activities unless you start young. In my neighborhood, kids started working with professional strength coaches in middle-school in an effort to make varsity football or basketball. Excessive instruction in music was common. 2-3 sports a season on top of volunteer work or part-time jobs. It's all in an effort to get a leg up at college admissions time. And it's absolutely insane.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I don't think volunteer work and part-time jobs really factor into the equation with the age group that I am picturing, though with teenagers they are important of course (Particularly I think finding a shitty part-time job that lets you goof off with your peers, then get yelled at by a boss (who honestly doesn't really expect better) is relatively important) Starting them off in a sport or two seems fine, that's how I grew up anyway, but at least in my case there wasn't an excessively strong drive to excel there. I certainly wasn't going for a sports scholarship, so keeping fit and just being able to write "Sports, k-12" on my college application was good enough. One or two kids had really driving parents and I think the rest of us always felt bad for those kids, but it wasn't the norm.
Zimahl 13y ago
After I graduated college I worked for the same college doing IT for housing and dining. I worked with a fellow alumnus who was in a fraternity in the late 60s. He told a story about their fraternity running a paid bar in the basement every Friday and Saturday night. The brothers would drink so much that they couldn't be bothered to successfully run the bar, so they split the profits with the sorority next door and the sorority sisters would take care of everything for them. The reason why this is relevant is that he would often rail against the same university that was cracking down on underage drinking because parents were worried about their kids. It was typically the same parents who partook in these shenanigans about 40 years before - yet didn't want their kids to have the same experience. Talk about complete hypocrites.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Not that it diminishes the point, but many of those parents were likely in university during the 70s to early 80s, when the drinking age was as low as 18 in many (but not all) states. Hypothetically many of these parents drank legally as freshmen in college but do not want their children to drink illegally as freshmen in college. I'd still call them hypocrites, or at least accuse them of lacking in the critical thinking department, but hypocrites to a much lesser extent.
  - samspot 13y ago
    Are we ever allowed to change our mind about something without being called a hypocrite? I don't think changing as you age is hypocrisy.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      The hypocrisy appears when they don't pass the same judgement on themselves. Do they disapprove of what they did when they were younger, or do they think "oh, well that was all fun and games, but these kids should not be drinking"? I had this discussion with my mother (who went to school in the early 70s) when I entered school. Her position boiled down to it being reasonable for her to drink because it was legal, and unreasonable for me to drink simply because it was illegal. Now, I don't equate legality to morality, in no small part because she didn't raise me to do that. When pressed to actually explain her disapproval, she relented and admitted that her position was hypocritical. Hypocrisy isn't about changing your mind. It is about holding yourself to a different standard.
coldtea 13y ago
On the topic of clildren freedom and modern day restrictions etc, I always found this small article from the Austin Chronicle about life in the fifties very illuminating. It also explains the origins of the saying "This is where I came in" (and we have the same saying in my country, with exactly the same origins!): "In today's America, where parents chauffeur kids to "play dates," only on the poorest streets do 7-year-olds still roam free ... but they don't go to movies much because tickets are so pricey ... the concession stand is even more expensive ... and you can't just walk into any movie (it might not be rated for kids) ... and you have to know the exact time a film starts ... and shopping-mall movie theatres are rarely within walking distance. Today you're blitzed by TV ad campaigns and product tie-ins in fast-food joints, so you know all about a Hollywood film before it starts ... and today's urban parents panic if their grade-school children disappear, unaccounted for, for hours on end. Fifty years ago, none of that was so. In the larger cities, two or three movie theatres were in walking distance of most neighborhoods. Each had but one screen. The program began with a newsreel, a few cartoons, and brief "coming attractions" (not today's compilations that tell the whole story). Then the "features" began -- plural, features, for all neighborhood theatres played double, sometimes triple, features, two or three movies for the price of one ticket. Nothing was rated, there were no sex scenes or obscenities; anyone could go to any movie. Admission price for a kid was rarely more than a quarter. Popcorn for a dime, a Coke for a nickel. They weren't supposed to sell kids tickets during school hours, but they did. As for kids roaming about -- "Go play in traffic," our parents would say, and they wouldn't be surprised if we didn't walk in 'til dinnertime, which in our immigrant neighborhood wasn't until after 7." http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2003-08-22/174046/ http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2003-08-22/174046/
- yardie 13y ago
  50 years ago the movie business was a vertical market. The movie distributor was the producer, studio owner, the cast and crew were employees, and they owned the theater. Look at the old spaghetti westerns and the opening credits were studio, producer, cast, major crew, and that was it. The movie simply started. And the end credits were just as short. Now the cast and crew are contractors, producers, studios, and theaters are separate entities with each one having to grow 10% annually. The last movie I watched had 10 minutes of end credits. Movies have gotten far more complex in production and there are a lot of hands in the pot now.
deerpig 13y ago
You make a very good point. The Boomers (myself included) had freedom to play, explore, and get into trouble. But as a generation we have royally screwed up our own kids. I've lived in East Asia for the last 25 years and was appalled to see what educational systems in Japan and Hong Kong did to children, and the kind of employees they make later in life. Later I moved to SE Asia and in the countryside you still see children leading healthy childhoods, while the middle class, especially in the cities seem hellbent on screwing up their children's lives. When I first moved to Thailand things were okay, now they are terrible. Now that I live in Cambodia I am seeing the same processes happen. It's very sad. The exception, and it's a very small exception, is in some of the International schools you see scattered around Asia. There are a few very good schools out here, where children are brought up in a mixed culture and linguistic environment, are given a great deal more freedom to explore and time to play, and choose for themselves. International schools are set primarily to educate children of expat families living abroad. But it's becoming common to see more and more local children being enrolled in the better of these schools. I know a school in Hong Kong who has had to limit the number of local children that they enroll because otherwise there wouldn't be any expat children in the school at all. Because I so rarely visit the States, I didn't realize until the last five or six years how bad things had become. Most American children now are subject to the worst of the old American industrial education system and the worst of the eastern, the student is an open vessel for the teacher to pour his wisdom into, all in one package. I would never raise a child in the States, because IMHO it would be tantamount to child abuse.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Some of it was inevitable overcrowding/overbuilding of towns. We can have all the morals we can afford.

by chez17 13y ago

001sky 13y ago

Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis. Please. Try. Harder. [NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]

jlgreco 13y ago
When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan. “I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.” His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html?_r=...
- 001sky 13y ago
  His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).
joe_the_user 13y ago
This Plus, policies are not made by a generation but politicians and social and economic circumstances. There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. The narrative is in the "not even wrong" category.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  I can't make any sense of your perspective. Policies very much are made by a generation; they are very much not made by politicians. Look at the discussion of drinking -- politicians have decided that no one shall drink before the age of 21, the masses have decided something different, and the masses are having things 100% their own way. The society reflects what the populace wants. > There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. Of course there's never been a meeting. The generation doesn't meet. But it does decide policy. Who meets to set the price of copper?

protomyth 13y ago

Woah, hold up there. I am a little before the OP poster (70's) and we most surely did not do what you said. It was the f'n generation before us (born in the 60's) that did the freak out and made everything "safe first". They started their crusade in the 80's and really got going in the 90's. The OP and even someone born in the 70's were a bit young for it. Now, I do see this schedule-every-second-vibe from my generation and am not liking it one bit[1]. My younger brother is trying to find or build decent play equipment for his boy as he grows up. 1) some organized sports is fine, but this scheduling every waking minute of your child's time is psycho

L_Rahman 13y ago

Part of the problem is that the race for college has been pushed earlier and earlier as admissions has gotten more competitive. Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply. When success in life in large part is still defined by one's undergraduate institution you can see why parents would focus on that at the expense of everything else. I'm not a parent yet, and am not planning to be in the near future, but I've been thinking a lot about parenting now that I'm fully out of my childhood and it basically seems to come down to a bunch of tough compromises.

jlgreco 13y ago
I wouldn't think that breaking an arm or two while in elementary school would have much of an effect at all on college admissions. I mean, if anything, it should give the kid some more life experiences to draw upon while writing their admissions essay, right?
- AlisdairSH 13y ago
  No, but excelling in high-school extra-curricular activities does. And the perception is you don't excel at extra-curricular activities unless you start young. In my neighborhood, kids started working with professional strength coaches in middle-school in an effort to make varsity football or basketball. Excessive instruction in music was common. 2-3 sports a season on top of volunteer work or part-time jobs. It's all in an effort to get a leg up at college admissions time. And it's absolutely insane.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I don't think volunteer work and part-time jobs really factor into the equation with the age group that I am picturing, though with teenagers they are important of course (Particularly I think finding a shitty part-time job that lets you goof off with your peers, then get yelled at by a boss (who honestly doesn't really expect better) is relatively important) Starting them off in a sport or two seems fine, that's how I grew up anyway, but at least in my case there wasn't an excessively strong drive to excel there. I certainly wasn't going for a sports scholarship, so keeping fit and just being able to write "Sports, k-12" on my college application was good enough. One or two kids had really driving parents and I think the rest of us always felt bad for those kids, but it wasn't the norm.

Zimahl 13y ago

After I graduated college I worked for the same college doing IT for housing and dining. I worked with a fellow alumnus who was in a fraternity in the late 60s. He told a story about their fraternity running a paid bar in the basement every Friday and Saturday night. The brothers would drink so much that they couldn't be bothered to successfully run the bar, so they split the profits with the sorority next door and the sorority sisters would take care of everything for them. The reason why this is relevant is that he would often rail against the same university that was cracking down on underage drinking because parents were worried about their kids. It was typically the same parents who partook in these shenanigans about 40 years before - yet didn't want their kids to have the same experience. Talk about complete hypocrites.

jlgreco 13y ago
Not that it diminishes the point, but many of those parents were likely in university during the 70s to early 80s, when the drinking age was as low as 18 in many (but not all) states. Hypothetically many of these parents drank legally as freshmen in college but do not want their children to drink illegally as freshmen in college. I'd still call them hypocrites, or at least accuse them of lacking in the critical thinking department, but hypocrites to a much lesser extent.
- samspot 13y ago
  Are we ever allowed to change our mind about something without being called a hypocrite? I don't think changing as you age is hypocrisy.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    The hypocrisy appears when they don't pass the same judgement on themselves. Do they disapprove of what they did when they were younger, or do they think "oh, well that was all fun and games, but these kids should not be drinking"? I had this discussion with my mother (who went to school in the early 70s) when I entered school. Her position boiled down to it being reasonable for her to drink because it was legal, and unreasonable for me to drink simply because it was illegal. Now, I don't equate legality to morality, in no small part because she didn't raise me to do that. When pressed to actually explain her disapproval, she relented and admitted that her position was hypocritical. Hypocrisy isn't about changing your mind. It is about holding yourself to a different standard.

coldtea 13y ago

On the topic of clildren freedom and modern day restrictions etc, I always found this small article from the Austin Chronicle about life in the fifties very illuminating. It also explains the origins of the saying "This is where I came in" (and we have the same saying in my country, with exactly the same origins!): "In today's America, where parents chauffeur kids to "play dates," only on the poorest streets do 7-year-olds still roam free ... but they don't go to movies much because tickets are so pricey ... the concession stand is even more expensive ... and you can't just walk into any movie (it might not be rated for kids) ... and you have to know the exact time a film starts ... and shopping-mall movie theatres are rarely within walking distance. Today you're blitzed by TV ad campaigns and product tie-ins in fast-food joints, so you know all about a Hollywood film before it starts ... and today's urban parents panic if their grade-school children disappear, unaccounted for, for hours on end. Fifty years ago, none of that was so. In the larger cities, two or three movie theatres were in walking distance of most neighborhoods. Each had but one screen. The program began with a newsreel, a few cartoons, and brief "coming attractions" (not today's compilations that tell the whole story). Then the "features" began -- plural, features, for all neighborhood theatres played double, sometimes triple, features, two or three movies for the price of one ticket. Nothing was rated, there were no sex scenes or obscenities; anyone could go to any movie. Admission price for a kid was rarely more than a quarter. Popcorn for a dime, a Coke for a nickel. They weren't supposed to sell kids tickets during school hours, but they did. As for kids roaming about -- "Go play in traffic," our parents would say, and they wouldn't be surprised if we didn't walk in 'til dinnertime, which in our immigrant neighborhood wasn't until after 7." http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2003-08-22/174046/ http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2003-08-22/174046/

yardie 13y ago
50 years ago the movie business was a vertical market. The movie distributor was the producer, studio owner, the cast and crew were employees, and they owned the theater. Look at the old spaghetti westerns and the opening credits were studio, producer, cast, major crew, and that was it. The movie simply started. And the end credits were just as short. Now the cast and crew are contractors, producers, studios, and theaters are separate entities with each one having to grow 10% annually. The last movie I watched had 10 minutes of end credits. Movies have gotten far more complex in production and there are a lot of hands in the pot now.

deerpig 13y ago

You make a very good point. The Boomers (myself included) had freedom to play, explore, and get into trouble. But as a generation we have royally screwed up our own kids. I've lived in East Asia for the last 25 years and was appalled to see what educational systems in Japan and Hong Kong did to children, and the kind of employees they make later in life. Later I moved to SE Asia and in the countryside you still see children leading healthy childhoods, while the middle class, especially in the cities seem hellbent on screwing up their children's lives. When I first moved to Thailand things were okay, now they are terrible. Now that I live in Cambodia I am seeing the same processes happen. It's very sad. The exception, and it's a very small exception, is in some of the International schools you see scattered around Asia. There are a few very good schools out here, where children are brought up in a mixed culture and linguistic environment, are given a great deal more freedom to explore and time to play, and choose for themselves. International schools are set primarily to educate children of expat families living abroad. But it's becoming common to see more and more local children being enrolled in the better of these schools. I know a school in Hong Kong who has had to limit the number of local children that they enroll because otherwise there wouldn't be any expat children in the school at all. Because I so rarely visit the States, I didn't realize until the last five or six years how bad things had become. Most American children now are subject to the worst of the old American industrial education system and the worst of the eastern, the student is an open vessel for the teacher to pour his wisdom into, all in one package. I would never raise a child in the States, because IMHO it would be tantamount to child abuse.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Some of it was inevitable overcrowding/overbuilding of towns. We can have all the morals we can afford.