"Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised or lightly supervised. They were able to resolve disputes, which they had a strong motivation to because they wanted to keep playing. They also planned their time and managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds self-esteem and mental health."
Neighborhoods used to be packed with kids running around all the time. Now they are empty. There are quite a few kids in my neighborhood, but the only time you see them is when they get off the school bus. None of them roam the neighborhood or anywhere. There is a huge park in my neighborhood, too. It's always empty. I never see packs of kids walking on the sidewalks going to the theater or to corner stores. School playgrounds are empty and stay empty unless school is in session.
When I was growing up from age 6, my mom would tell me to be home by dinner, and I'd spend all day running around with friends or adventuring by myself. This was the norm for every kid I grew up with.
I like that article. I have had concussions, broken bones and a lot of other injuries in my youth, probably almost died a few times. I wouldn't want to miss any of them. I find it sad that a lot of today's parents try avoid any kind of physical displeasure for their kinds while at the same time putting a lot of psychological displeasure on them in the form of school and job anxiety.
I think that things like breaking your arm are essential to the experience of growing up.
I broke my arm by swinging on a wet tree branch when I was about 10 years old. It was a very crude, but effective way for me to learn that there are consequences to my actions. Obviously it's not the only time I learned this, and it wasn't like I didn't realise that my actions have consequences before that, but these things reinforce that learning.
I think that learning to battle through physical pain and unpleasantness is essential to learning how to battle through mental pain. I've been in a lot of situations when hunting, hiking, sailing, etc. where it gets hard and it stops being fun. You're cold, wet, hungry, and tired, and it's getting dark. But you have to keep going, because you are responsible for your own shit. You can't just give up in the middle of a hike, you can't just give up when your boat is a couple of km from the shore and you're battling a headwind. There's a certain mental fortitude that you can only build with physical adversity.
I have two toddlers and I've signed (or plan to sign) them up for two things: swim lessons & tumbling.
* I don't care/want them to be Olympic swimmers but if they fall in a pool or river, I want them to be able to tread water and get out without panicking.
* Despite everything I say and do, they're going to get on the roof. I know, I did. ;) So when they fall, I want them to fall the best way possible.
As a parent, I don't see my job to protect them from all consequences but to prevent and/or prepare them for the worst.
Both my kids have been sure that they know how to swim when too young to have even tried. We signed them up for swimming lessons to make them respect water a bit more, and of course learn how to swim. They don't need to figure out that they can't swim when they're unsupervised, as that's a bit too dangerous.
My oldest started in a school that used very traditional methods (first learn legs then add arms, start by dry swimming on land and move to water, and so on), and she took the course over and over without progressing. For unrelated reasons, we switched schools, and the new school focused on just spending time in water, running in shallow water, floating, dipping your head under water as part of games, and so on.
They had something they called "playing dolphins" where they would stand in waist-deep water, jump forward, and glide as far as they could before standing up again. She only needed one round of that course before she could advance to swimming for real. I suggest spending time just getting them used to water, getting splashed in the face, or playing with floating or sinking toys in waist-deep water, to quickly get over any blocking fear of water. I liked how the new school didn't even attempt to introduce real strokes at the beginner level, but instead gave the kids confidence in their own abilities to move in water.
That echoes my own upbringing. When I was very young, 4 or 5, my parents tried to get me to learn to swim using traditional methods and utterly failed and left me slightly terrified of water.
The summer when I was 5, my brother (an excellent competitive swimmer in his youth) brought me to a pool and we played a game called "jump and I'll try to catch you" and in the course of a couple hours of him moving to deeper and deeper water and farther away from the edge I basically figured out how to doggy paddle to him. By the end of that summer my brother had me fetching coins from the bottom of a 3 meter pool from a steady tread.
Only then did he start to teach me any formal strokes, but to be honest, because of how he taught me, I think of swimming as a perfectly natural activity like walking, where I decide where to go and at what depth and my body simply figures out how to get there. Specific strokes and techniques don't really play much part.
One thing I didn't mention was that when my daughter finally started swimming, she would swim underwater until she ran out of air and then stand up. The traditional school would never have allowed this, as you were supposed to breaststroke with your head above water at all times. Since she started to swim some distance underwater, it wasn't that much of a stretch for her to stay at the surface to swim longer distances.
The transition from dolphin to swimming underwater to swimming at the surface was very quick and seamless. Perhaps she was still helped by being drilled in the traditional school's proper technique, but I think we could have used the new school's methods from the start.
Yeah, that all sounds very similar. Once I figured out how to move in water, I tended to do what your daughter does, swim under the water and surface for air. I still like swimming that way.
It's interesting that people I know who went through a very formal swimming program as youths and then think of swimming as exercise and laps, tend to struggle with below-the-surface activities, like diving for items.
I remember my brother had a whole slew of underwater games we used to play like "tea time", "hold your breath at the bottom the longest", "headstand", "underwater flips", "drag your friend while they're underwater while you run in a race", "pull a gallon of dirt off the bottom", "upside-down Buddha" and so on including some pretty intense and dangerous-ish horseplay. There's probably a more comprehensive list somewhere as he didn't invent all of these but learned them elsewhere. Looking back I realize that we learned breath control, buoyancy control, how to handle strange orientations and direction underwater, diving, getting accustomed to handling stale air or out of air situations. But it all happened naturally through play.
Growing up, the only other kids I knew who could do the same kind of things also learned in similar informal ways built around play.
I'm from New Zealand, and I'm shocked at how bad some people are at swimming. I'd understand somebody in Kansas or the middle of Australia being bad at swimming, but New Zealand is an island nation, 75% of the population lives within 10 km (6 miles) of the sea.
A significant proportion of people couldn't swim 250 m or tread water for 10 minutes.
I'm always surprised to learn that learning to swim isn't the norm in other developed countries.
Unfortunately, ill-advised budget cuts mean that even here in the Netherlands (a country with a lot of surface water) swimming is no longer a standard part of the school curriculum in some municipalities (it used to be pretty much mandatory).
I have a friend who worked as a diving instructor on the Gili Islands in Indonesia for a few months. He said that a lot of the local guys who would drive the boats couldn't swim, they also obviously didn't wear life jackets.
Well, I'm always surprised at how people seem to assume that just living by the sea should somehow make people learn to swim?
I probably went to the sea (the Atlantic, in France) and played in water every other day or so during summer and autumn for most of my life until I had to move away as an adult, but that didn't magically teach my how to swim. I had to learn later. And I still hate swimming.
I don't think that living next to the sea would make you magically learn how to swim, but rather that everybody should be taught to swim to a competent level.
If you live next to the sea, you're going to be spending time around and on the water. It follows that you should learn how to survive in the water if something goes wrong. What if you get caught in a rip, or if someone else gets in trouble in the water and you have to help them? What if you're in a dingy and it capsizes?
The college I went to required students to demonstrate the ability to tread water for 5 minutes and do a few lengths of the pool (form didn't count). They strongly urged a remedial class in swimming for those who failed this test in freshman year.
It's amazing how quickly young children can learn to swim. My daughter went from disliking the water to swimming 200m with perfect technique within a couple years.
Learning to tumble made me laugh, but is a good idea :)
Learning to fall is a hugely beneficial asset. It's how skateboarders are able to get up, over and over. First thing you learn is how to fall properly, without seriously injuring yourself. It will happen, but being able to roll away, or bail correctly is essential.
Genuine question, is swimming not already taught in schools where you are? In the UK we take swimming lessons at primary school age, and usually this entails passing a Watership certification, which includes treading water for a minute with your clothes on etc.
That can't be all of it. The same change has been taking place in Germany (a country with quite comprehensive healthcare insurance), although probably not as pronounced as in the US.
The Germany attitude toward freedom for children is completely different then American one. In Germany, first graders are expected to walk to and from school by themselves. They play outside alone, and slide on giant slides while nobody cares about posted 10+ sign. They are not overprotective the way Americans are.
I began walking to school (about a mile) from first grade onward. I also studied in Germany as a college student.
I walk two of my kids to school daily.
Why? It isn't really the kids I worry about, it's the idiot adults. Around their school there are:
-- School zone signs, indicating the 20MPH speed reduction area.
-- Flashing yellow lights that only activate during school hours
-- Middle-of-the-road barriers that indicate there is a school zone ahead
-- Painted crosswalks
-- Adults with crossing flags to indicate the crosswalk. Sometimes they even wear orange safety vests.
-- The speed limit within a half-mile in all directions is 25MPH
Guess what? Cars still blow through in excess of 40MPH, even with kids present. I've been nearly run over on multiple occasions.
This is in a rural ("family values") community. It's pure anarchy, that's why I don't let my kids walk to school alone.
Germany also seems to make more of a thing out of forest kindergartens (Waldkindergarten), which sound amazing to me. Still supervised I suppose, but at least they’re outdoors.
Funny enough, just yesterday some German tourists watched my not-quite-2 year old slide down a giant slide in San Francisco and remarked that they don't have such big slides where they live in Germany.
There are some seriously cool and dangerous looking playgrounds in Berlin. Many of them have ziplines, trampolines, and other long-since banned playthings. And I see kids on them almost every day.
We vacationed in Berlin last summer with two kids, and that place is famous for its fantastic playgrounds. It was rare to see the same designs repeated over and over as you do in other cities, and each playground was more or less unique.
As you say, stuff where you balance quite high up, but usually with a softer material on the ground than asphalt so that a fall isn't lethal. I never saw kids fall and hurt themselves, so I don't know what would happen if they fell from the maximum height, but they wouldn't die.
At public pay-per-use pools we sometimes also have 7.5m and 10m platforms. As well as 5m springboards. They require deeper water, and are more expensive to build, but that's about it. E.g., near cologne there is an indoor pool with at least a 7.5m and 10m platform. I don't remember if the 5m one is a board or a concrete slab.
But from 5m upwards it hurts on your feet if you hit the water at the wrong angle, and it only get's worse from there.
It's not the building expense, it's the insurance.
I remember the 3m springboard taken out of my pool in the states in the 80's, and I can't remember ever seeing a diving board in use at a pool in Ireland.
Uh, no, this is the reason I assume for why only some pools in Germany have them. But I pity the american bubble wrap culture. It makes my dislike for visiting the states just stronger.
I don't see this in pools. 3m spring boards are still pretty common at pools in the US. My "nothing special" high school had 3m springs.
It's true that the 5m,7m,10m platforms are usually only found in sportsplex-type pools. They typically come as a package. But as you mentioned in an earlier comment, 5m+ starts the get actually dangerous. Flopping from 10m or even 7m without an agitator can do serious permanent damage. IMO a platform tower above 3m (or maybe 5m) is more "expensive sports equipment" than "general public recreational equipment".
I maybe could see a 5m platform as "general public recreational equipment", but 7 and 10 are definitely not. And there are just better ways to use time/money than building a 5m platform when you already have 3m spring boards.
American pools are moving away from exercise and toward recreation/amusement (i.e., switching out swimming lanes for "water playgrounds" and switching out diving boards for water slides). But that's a totally different phenomenon from "bubble wrap culture"; IMO those water playgrounds are way more dangerous than traditional pools (I've seen more than one kid injure themselves pretty seriously jumping off of the water playground into ~2ft water; that would never happen in a lane-swimming pool). And personally, I've had more injuries on water slides than on 1m or 3m spring boards.
So there's something annoying going on with American swimming pools, but it's not bubble wrap culture.
Agitator? Ugh... the 10m one where the 10yo kids were jumping had no waves. The water was perfectly flat. Or at least not deliberately agitated. There do seem to only be 3 of these in the local conurbation [0] (10 million population), giving 3.3 million inhabitants per tower, compared to 5.3 for the whole US. So yes, they might be more prevalent around here, but I don't know how open the facilities in the US are to the public/minors.
They seem to be used for the Olympics and the associated training though.
> the 10m one where the 10yo kids were jumping had no waves
I know many, many just-below-olympic level divers. Of those, one suffered "minor" injuries (deep bruising basically everywhere on their body and a burst ear drum) and one suffered major life-threatening internal injuries (collapsed lung) after landing on their belly/back from 10m.
The person with the less severe injuries flopped with the aerator on, which is probably the only reason the injuries weren't more serious.
Diving from 10m is absolutely dangerous, even for professionals, especially without an aerator.
> but I don't know how open the facilities in the US are to the public/minors.
In the USA, at the places I know of, untrained children are allowed to dive off of 10m platforms during "free swimming" times. But only straight dives, and only after they demonstrate straight dives off of 5m and 7m.
Which seems like a sensible compromise, given the risks.
(Exceptions are always possible. If you are training for platform diving, you can simply tell the life guard and they will let you do fancier dives from 10m.)
> giving 3.3 million inhabitants per tower, compared to 5.3 for the whole US
"conurbation vs. entire population" not a fair comparison -- a huge portion of the US population lives in rural areas that couldn't support a diving tower even if they wanted to.
All of the USA cities whose diving infrastructure I know about have between 1 million to 2 million inhabitants per tower. According to that metric, the USA is less risk averse about diving (but actually, it's really just a matter of wealth and interest, because diving is an expensive sport and platforms are actually specialized sports equipment).
Edit: Also, the wiki list of 10m platforms in the usa is out of date or just wrong. None of the 10m platforms I've used on a regular basis are on that list...
I think a lot of people have moved to cities from suburbs. With the amount of traffic nearby I can't leave my kids alone the way my parents did with me.
Last year there was a fatal car accident. The driver was going so fast down a narrow, one lane road that when he hit a car pulling out of the driveway, the car flipped over. Imagine how pedestrians feel about that or parents feel about that to their kids.
There were about 400k accidents, 20k serious injuries, 1,500 total traffic fatalities, and 250 pedestrian fatalities in my current state last year. Out of a population of 10.5 million.
Which puts the per capita likelihood at 3.8, 0.2, 0.015, 0.0024% respectively, per year.
Parents have a right to their own decisions, but retarding a child's growth because of a fear of something that's only 20x as likely as getting struck by lightning?
Personally, that seems literally insane.
If my child were to be killed by a driver, I would mourn for the rest of my life, but at least I'd know they lived in the time they had on this Earth.
I think that’s fair if personal action had no impact on the rates.
Consider the possibility that these numbers are in part born from our own protections to those events. For example, I’ve taught my kids to look before crossing the street, what’s out for cars speeding on side streets and don’t run after toys rolling into the street. Without those guidelines, I’m certain they would have come close to injury or death.
Being struck by lightening is a poor comparison since that is almost entirely avoidable with actions that most people follow subconsciously: they don’t want to walk through a field in the pooring rain. Chance of death from being run over by a cruise ship is also low. People generally don’t want to go swimming where they are transiting. Do you encourage your kids the jump of the pier when the ship is docking?
Chance of death from being hit by a TVG is pretty low. They only run on tracks with protected right of way, so it’s difficult to find oneself on their tracks. Do you encourage your kids to climb that fence and walk those tracks?
Death from traffic is not quite the same, but similar.
I think there is more concern about abductions than broken bones. I also used to roam free on my bike when I was a kid, but am guilty of airdropping my kid to activities.
I imagine the thinking is not that it's more or less likely, but just that it's possible. When you have something that is infinitely valuable to you, even slight risk is a factor.
Historically, someone might've had 5-10 children and it acted as a form of redundancy. I think that feeling has changed significantly!
Conversely, I think there is a greater emphasis on extra-curricular activities now. These days, there is a feeling that you're selling your kid short or failing to set them up well if you don't have them enrolled in swimming lessons from maybe two years of age, in dance or sports or kinder-gym classes around 3-5 years of age, and then in after-school sports programs once they start school.
I don't think that's fairly explained by more children -> fewer children.
Something else had to have happened.
I'd hazard that on the whole Americans are less tolerant of risk than they were 60 years ago.
As an explanation, I'd tenuously tie it to a decrease in "real world physics" employment (e.g. farming, manufacturing). When 50% of the population works in farming (circa 1870), they have one way of evaluating risk and human capabilities. When that number drops to 2%, it's easy to forget how robust humans are.
Obviously, we're increasingly aware of the risks (usually without any appreciation of the odds). Previously, you heard through close circles. Now, by the time you're a parent, you've heard of hundreds of ways your child might die through news, movies, etc.
I'm a parent of three, and I actively work to minimise risk amongst my kids where I think it's appropriate, but I'm always conscious of when I'm doing it and try to balance it.
Why we (as a whole) respond that way makes sense from what I know about experimental psych.
If news is optimized for clicks / views, negative stories are more engaging, and the availability heuristic is accurate (aka we assign greater importance to things we can immediately recall), then viewing profit-on-engagement news fundamentally reshapes our opinion of the world.
Abductors don't need to be everywhere. They just have to be a plausible threat to affect the thought process of a parent that's deciding whether or not they are going to leave their child completely unsupervised and unattended.
Maybe if the media didn't have a fetish for covering the incidents that do happen. Maybe if there wasn't a vocal subculture that crucifies parents for leaving their children to their own devices. Maybe if the thought of having the center of your world being beaten, violated and murdered at the hands of a stranger wasn't so mind-numbingly horrific. Maybe then this trend would start going the other way.
Or not? Sure parents used to let their kids roam free. They also let them ride in the back of pickup trucks and beat their asses when they did something wrong. There's probably a healthy middle ground.
I'm not concerned about abductions - no more than being struck by lightning. I am concerned about traffic, which is far heavier than it was 30 years ago and much more likely (than abduction/lightning) to end in serious injury or death.
There was an article in the newspaper a week or two ago about an attempted abduction 1/2 mile from my house. Kid was walking home from elementary school and they tried to entice her into a van.
This has occurred to me too. I am not sure (as I am not up to date with the stats) if abductions are up or down as a %, but if you think of it like supply and demand, the supply of easily abductable children is way down.
What I would suggest then is that, those that are left to roam are in more danger than those who aren't, because there aren't as many alternate targets. There are also fewer witnesses now too. So even if you think it is a big scare, there is less, to use a vaccination analogue (incorrectly I know), herd immunity.
Oh, right. Yeah, that would make sense. I think it's largely due to the ever increasing range and sensationalism of reporting - 50 years ago you'd only hear about the rare incident in your own hometown, and maybe particularly lurid events nationwide. Now a kid comes to grief on the other side of the world and you hear about it, leading to a grossly inflated perception of the risks.
Not all. I don't think parents worry about mild injuries to their children (many are learning experiences, after all) as much as they worry about the death of something that, to them, is priceless.
My 7y kid has ASD, and managing his behaviour is a constant battle. I'm by no means a perfect dad (when exhausted, I'll give in to his requests for screen time just to get some peace and quiet..) but at least I am able to take him mountain bike riding on a semi regular basis - since a very early age (2 .. on balance bike)
Learning to fall off the bike, get hurt a bit but then to brush it off and get back on has been f*g invaluable. He's able to make judgments on physical risks at a very impressive level. His skill levels are steadily increasing, which is great for his confidence.
And he's also learnt to push past comfort points sometimes, when those legs are dead tired. There's obviously a balance here, but I certainly think a little bit of hardening up can't hurt.
I am genuinely upset at the thought of a university telling adults what they can or can't do with their own time. Yes, they are young adults, but they are adults nonetheless. Or is America treating its university students as children still?
All of the activities that Penn State's Outing Club used to organize are still available to students through the university-run Outdoor Adventure program [1].
The only difference is that now instead of a student club (cost center), the activities are organized by a university-run office (revenue generator).
So it's not about coddling. It's about money (and not even insurance)
To be fair, it's a New York Times story because it's so unusual and bizarre. (And the fact that it's happening at a school known for its Big Ten football team makes it even more so.) I can pretty much guarantee that this would be pretty much unheard of with the outing clubs where I attended school. One of those schools even has a freshman (outdoor) trip enshrined in its freshman orientation before classes.
I mean death from accidents may have declined, but childhood (and adult) mental illness is prevalent at heretofore unknown levels, and not just because of an awakening to diagnosis. So 10 children are alive but 100,000 are anxious, depressed, etc. Was it worth it?
One other theory put forward by Tim Noakes is that the US dietary guidelines that was introduced in 1977 which recommended to eat lots of carbohydrates is responsible for the huge increase in obesity and mental illnesses that exploded in the 80s.
A high carbohydrate diet was never scientifically proven or tested. One guy (Ancel Keys) had a theory, cherry picked some countries that showed a very small correlation. But political things were afoot in America and Nixon went with his plan and enacted the US diet regulations in 1977 that promoted grains which helped US farmers especially the corn industry. The other countries soon adopted it since US leads the way.
But if you look at the graph of when diseases like obesity, mental illness, depression, heart disease really explodes from 1980s, right when the dietary guidelines are taken up.
Of course correlation doesn't equal causation (which is one of the flaws in the Ancel study). But it's definitely something we should do studies on.
As someone with an Adult ADHD diagnosis, this has definitely been my experience. Adults weren't even being diagnosed with ADHD when I was a child and it was never brought up when I showed the signs in school. Now I'm receiving treatment and thankful for it, and my kids will be screened.
That's not to say the rate of mental illness is going up or down or staying the same. But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.
> As someone with an Adult ADHD diagnosis, this has definitely been my experience. Adults weren't even being diagnosed with ADHD when I was a child and it was never brought up when I showed the signs in school. Now I'm receiving treatment and thankful for it, and my kids will be screened.
Same here in all respects.
> But measuring the per capita diagnosis rate won't tell you anything about that.
I believe that some of the increase in diagnosis rates is because of increasing diagnosis in historically under-diagnosed groups, especially in the US where access to healthcare hasn't been available to everyone.
When I was 9, parents moved from a suburb to the country. There was a large dangerous canyon not 4 minutes walk from my house. At the bottom was a fast, dangerous river. I never tempted fate.
I did get all manner of small injuries from doing things that kids used to do, though.
When I was 10 (decades ago), a classmate drowned in our neighborhood park (he was playing in a drainage ditch after a rainstorm and the flow of water trapped him against an intake screen covering a pipe).
The park wasn't closed, no one was banned from the park, us kids were all strongly warned by our parents from playing near the ditch in the rain.
Problem solved, no one died there in the remaining decade we lived near the park. They did put up bigger warning signs, but other than that, no changes were made until quite recently when the park was redeveloped and the drainage was moved completely underground.
Though I guess this is an argument both for and against "free range parenting" -- kids will do stupid stuff when they are not supervised and sometimes that stuff can get them killed or injured, but also they are able to look after themselves if they know the dangers out there. I only remember 2 other deaths in my school classmates - one died in a traffic accident on vacation with his parents, the other died after complications during wisdom tooth extraction (that one happened 2 weeks before my own wisdom tooth extraction, I was pretty worried).
In contrast to today's risk adverse society, a couple years ago a child injured himself on a wooden play structure (cut his arm on some split wood badly enough to need stitches). The city fenced off the structure for a year until they replaced it with a "safe" plastic structure.
Few months ago two boys playing alone outside drowned in cold river (in my locality). Nobody knows what happened, their bikes were found near river and bodies downstream.
River is not in bottom or dangerous canyon and look like normal river. Which is dangerous in cold weather, despite not looking dangerous.
Yes, accidents happen. But this is precisely the type of thinking that got us where we are today. Millions of kids playing in the forest and a few get hurt so we keep them inside now.
Survival rates are higher now. Rates of serious injuries and deaths due to accident are lower now. Much lower. Not saying that right now is necessary the ideal equilibrum, but kids in past died of accidents and it was not unusual event. It was not mere theoretical construction that might happen to someone else.
probably. Note that my laugh goes bothways. I'm annoyed by the over paranoid life of today, but I realize that we were too candid back in the days. Society oscillates/
I wouldn't even go that far. We are a fear based society. Anything that could cause harm is bad. This is as far removed from being natural as one can get, imho.
I assume we are speaking about the US. Only immediate physical harm is considered bad. On the other hand long term harmful conditions like the oversupply of junk food, overworking, lack of vacation or the health care situation are considered normal.
You can't even leave your elementary school aged kids in the car while you run into a convenience store for 90 seconds without risking being arrested for child endangerment.
According to BLS [0], "more students graduate from law school each year than there are jobs available." Sure, part of this is a scam by law schools, who have convinced young people to take big student loans with unrealistic ideas about a career in law. New law schools open all the time, and it's not in order to address a shortage. Mostly, however, lawyers are like the apocryphal firefighters who light their own fires. They need business, and they run the system that determines how much business they get. All of the following questions have only one answer: should such-and-such activity be regulated more closely? does such-and-such crime warrant a more severe punishment? should such-and-such prosecution not involve a jury of peers? should such-and-such type of legal process take longer and be more complicated? Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Who decides these questions? Mostly, judges and lobbyists.
Also, using words like "conspire" or "conspiracy" is a total straw man. When lots of people have the same interests, e.g. increasing the number of times an average citizen must hire a lawyer, they will act in similar ways without needing to communicate. Seeing conspiracy where no one suggested one is a way of ignoring the point.
It's a terrible idea either way. People usually vote for local judges knowing only the candidate's occupation (since it's indicated below their name). Doing research on candidates is hard work, especially local ones you can't find on YouTube, and few will consider leaving a choice blank if they don't know who to pick.
Supreme Court justices are appointed to lifetime positions specifically to give them the freedom to ignore politics and use their literal best judgment (if they can make it through congressional approval). What kind of supreme judge gets subjected to judgment every few years?
Supreme Court judges are not elected because they’re federal judges, and no federal judges are elected. It has nothing to do with how “supreme” they are.
The US has fifty different independent justice systems run by sovereign, independent States. Each of those States has the power to appoint judges in whatever manner it wants, so of course you get some variety. It’s not like “America decided” to have local judges be elected.
Back when this was originally decided, most Americans did not have the right to vote. It would be nice if we could reconsider decisions like this now that we do have that right, but not only because we could come up with a different way to hire judges...
> School playgrounds are empty and stay empty unless school is in session.
The kids at my local school used to play for hours after classes but last week were told they have to leave within 10 minutes of the bell for 'liability reasons'
Combined with the volume of traffic nowadays and the conversion of local parks to pay-per-use 'sportplexes', most parents unfortunately just decide to coop their children in their gardens.
Kids don't want AstroTurf pitches and climbing walls, they just need quiet residentual streets or a brownfield site with sticks and ponds. But they're gone.
This is a great point that kids don't want AstroTurf and climbing walls -- ultimately they just want to play.
Its the same in the UK. Schools close within 15 minutes unless you pay extra to stay.
On the plus side: the over population and diversity in London specifically means that kids here are actually quite good at behaving / communicating as they tend to be in transitional groups.
"This is a great point that kids don't want AstroTurf and climbing walls -- ultimately they just want to play."
My son's school goes daily to an amazing playground with a 20ft high climbing structure, swings, rock wall, zip line, and other school stuff. He and his friends usually end up playing with sticks in the dirt in the one part of the playground not covered in wood chips or a rubberized ground.
I think a lot of this comes from the general movement of America towards a police state. I have heard several stories of people having the cops called on them for allowing their children to play unsupervised. Some places consider it neglect to do so.
Pair that with the fact that we're giving kids hyper-addictive computer terminals with access to games and the internet and an endless landscape of different things to explore with an understanding of anonymity/privacy that they can't get anywhere else and no judgement because all the other kids are doing the same thing and you've created an environment where parents are more likely to try to keep their kids inside, and the kids distracted enough to accept their imprisonment.
I think this and what the article discusses are symptoms of the same thing: constant fear of everything. I'm not sure if it's that Americans scare easily, or they are constantly barraged by hyperbolic worst case scenarios everyday by the news (current business model), or a mixture of both.
When FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he was keenly aware of this fear. Americans are easy to manipulate through this, there are many examples both current and historic.
I'm not a big worrier about the boogieman; I realize chicken little when I hear him. The main thing I'm scared of with the kids is internet weirdos, so I tell kids never to put their real information online other than an email.
I'd guess that the 'Foxification' of news definitely plays a role, or even just the deluge of clickbaity news stories that pour into our minds via social media (and especially the easy that smartphones offer in its consumption).
Another thing that I think plays a big role, and is probably related to the smartphone/social media age, is the decreasing amount of interaction with 'others', which increases the fear you describe.
I grew up in various multi-ethnic environments, sometimes even as a white minority. It's fascinating (and saddening) to notice to what degree people around me immediately distrust non-whites (other than the ones that for various reasons are non-threatening subgroups).
Most of these people try their best not to be racist, and probably think they have little to no prejudice, but it's apparent in all sorts of ways, however small.
Sure, Fox is a huge fear monger, but the local news is too. "If it bleeds, it leads," is a common phrase to describe what stations use to determine what to present.
It's all over, local news, national news, newspapers, news websites, political speeches. Step back and observe this stuff as a scientist analyzing propaganda and you'll be shocked at how many news stories are ultimately trying to scare the reader.
And it's not just news. I have a strong suspicion that the 'weaponization'/professionalization of marketing/PR/propaganda is at the root of a lot of our problems, whether social self-marketing leading to depression and anxiety, spin-doctors in politics, 'organic' corporate marketing, and the massive amount of self-expression directly linked to the latter.
I am uncomfortable with these kinds of statements, because they feel too vague and a bit too Adam Curtis/Gladwellian, and it's extremely frustrating to feel that there's some 'root cause' that I can't quite put my finger on, but I truly believe that David Foster Wallace managed to get closest to the root of the issue, as I see it, in his essay on television (E Unibus Pluram[1]).
Despite my discomfort at being able to properly argue for a 'root cause', and my discomfort with the idea of root causes, I can't help but feel we've just gotten too far up our own collective asses when it comes to how we look at the world and interpret it. We have the Petersons of the world blaming 'cultural marxism', the Wallaces blaming irony, and large swathes of otherwise intelligent people wasting their time and creativity on reddit memes that mostly just refer other memes. Maybe this has been what young people have done throughout the ages, and I'm just getting old, but I strongly doubt that.
EDIT: mostly I find myself often surprised at how irony, or perhaps some kind of 'recursive perspective' has infused so much of my surroundings. Everyone is skeptical of everything, and yet seems so susceptible to the media-induced panic of the moment. I really don't mean to sound arrogant, but I expect a certain degree of referential humor/perspective from my more academic or pretentious friends, but nowadays it's a central part of even the 'working class' in a way that I feel it wasn't before, or in a way that it isn't in many other cultures I've experienced. Apologies for being a bit ranty. It's been a long day, and recent personal developments have made me yearn for a kind of directness and honesty and non-irony I just don't seem to find in my surroundings.
Oh you're absolutely right on about the constant marketing; that didn't even occur to me. Think of all the products that try to scare you into buying them. Security systems, Life Lock, Life Alert, car alarms, reverse mortgages, car insurance, life insurance, lawyer's offices, pharmaceuticals, local news commercials, it's everywhere, and that's just the TV.
Of course politicians make their living selling fear too, and we have extra long campaign seasons, so that's a good year out of every four of constant fear mongering, over and over.
I don't think you understand the problem here. Kids neglect effectively means that if your kids get "caught" unsupervised by the police/state/child services N times (N is not big, but hopefully still > 1) they will be taken from their parents and inserted into child services, with zero recourse and zero contact allowed.
So no, fear is absolutely not what's causing this. It is a very conscious choice on the part of the state/people to cause this problem to happen.
Fear is when an accident might lead to serious harm. The accident part is absolutely not the case.
This is a police state. If you expose yourself to the state, even accidentally, the state will brutally rip your family apart, with zero explanation or recourse, never to be reunited. So no, this is not fear. This is a deliberate policy imposed by the "grow our organization or face the blame" pressure on our politicians by state child services departments.
Calling this fear is like calling not stealing policemen's firearms "fear". It's absurd.
And why ? Because if children are "neglected" clearly that's bad for children. By the way, what outcomes for children do child services give ? [1]. Torn apart (it is general policy in child services to tear up families because leaving them together makes "integration in their new life more difficult"). Absuse, beatings, sometimes outright rape, total and complete uncertainty of the future (ie. when your future is uncertain to the point of you don't know if you'll be sleeping in a cell NEXT WEEK due to lack of capacity, I assure you, it will affect everything you think about). Few finish any education at all (high school). VERY few finish even a bachelor degree. The problem is that this organization is part of the state.
Needless to say, if you look at outcomes for children that were abused at home, the picture looks very different. In order to truly create an outcome as bad as the child services outcome one has to look at VERY serious cases of abuse indeed before they become as bad as the standard child services outcomes. People who are beat regularly by their parents, as cruel as it sounds, generally finish their education, and do in fact become independent adults (but one might say that's because everybody in that abuse relationship, the child and the parent, is incentivized to produce that outcome. In the child services case however, they only get subsidies as long as the patient is not an independent adult)
These organizations are horrible for the children in all but the very worst of cases, but the way they justify their existence is by doing more, in other words by throwing the maximum number of children into this treatment, which is of course not something accomplished by being slow and deliberate. Nor is it something that is accomplished by only intervening in extreme cases.
The issue is the incentives these organizations exist under. But once they've grown for a few decades (ie. at this point), one can say with certainty that less harm would be created by just destroying them entirely than by letting them continue.
And of course I'm ignoring the real conspiracy theories, where these services and rules are just another way to use the state power to inflict terrible suffering on the poor and immigrants and undesirables or opponents in general (thanks, by the way, Obama and Trump, for introducing a "families get separated" rule on immigrants. You guys should both get shot just for that alone. You deserve it. The misery imposed on these people is incredible, and for no reason other than punishing innocent people. Obama for introducing it, and Trump for not expanding it).
>It is a very conscious choice on the part of the state/people to cause this problem to happen.
I agree with everything you said, but it was fear of children being abused by heroin addicted parents, or sold into child prostitution (for example) that gave this the support that it needed to happen from the populace.
Allowing the state (any state) to just take people's children away doesn't just happen on it's own. You need to roll out a pretty serious fear campaign to get people to actually support something like this. Fear campaigns can be observed by watching the local or national news or reading any paper, or listening to a politician's platform; it's pervasive and constant.
What's sad is that the focus of the article is how a young person didn't recognise Bob Dylan, and there's an implication that if the police don't know you're a famous musician, it's no OK to walk in the rain.
We are pretty lucky to live in a neighborhood with kinds in the same age range as ours. All the parents know each other and the kids know where they're allowed to go. This includes a few acres of forest. Our kids are allowed to go out and roam, they just have to give us a general idea of where they're going to be playing (or they just bring a cheap walkie-talkie and check in occasionally). It's exactly how I grew up and I'm grateful for it. It makes me sad to see how many kids are growing up without the autonomy they need.
For my birthday one year (in the spring) I got a set of walkie talkies. The neighborhood kids across the street had got the same set for Christmas that year (our parents probably coordinated it). The next two summers (age 11-12) were probably the most fun I’d have as a kid. Climbing up trees to “spy” on the neighborhood and calling in “intelligence reports” to “home base”. Just being a young boy in a neighborhood with lots of kids. Incredible fun.
I got a set of walkie talkies at about age 10 but one broke.
So one night I was trying to fix it (testing it with the good one) when I heard a foreign voice crackling through.
After getting over the initial surprise I talked to the person and found out it was the neighbor kid playing with his. I didn't even know he had walkie talkies. We were both quite excited. Such a rare and magical event at that age.
There is another change too. Houses used to have porches, elderly people sat on them. They knew every kid and who they belong to. Now they don't, everyone is inside on their electronics. People don't even know their neighbors names. Today's kids are not encouraged to be kids. They are playing "travel" soccer at age 6, 5 nights a week and traveling on the weekends. I not claiming one or the other is a panacea but there are lots of factors and even more we can't even truly know.
That and there were a lot more moms at home. Fall off your bike and gash open your arm and some adult would probably see you pretty quickly and come to help if you needed it. And likely know or be able to locate your parents.
Eyes on the streets is a Jane Jacobs concept that applies here.
> I don't know even my next door neighbours in my building. Have never seen them.
That's a regret that I have from my youth. I lived in several apartments and didn't really make much of an effort to get to know any of the neighbours. At one place, only after having lived there for 9 months, did I discover that my next door neighbour was someone I went to high school with! It's really nice to be able to just walk over and knock on the door (at reasonable times, of course) to have a chat with someone or borrow a cup of sugar or whatever.
We've been really making a conscious effort at our recently bought house to get to know all of the neighbours. It's really awesome! We're not close with anyone yet, we're going to have a BBQ together in a couple of weeks and get to know each other better. It's a really great feeling knowing that, even if you're not close, the people around you have got your back.
My parents have five siblings each, but I only have a sister. I know it sounds bad, but I wonder if having less kids makes you worry more about keeping them safe. Perhaps my parents just sort of continued with how they grew up, but limited me and my sister a bit more, and I'm limiting my kids even more? Or it could have to do with media, where my grandparents wouldn't get news about abductions in the US and walk around worrying about that in their small Scandinavian village. Or it could be a time thing, where my grandparents just didn't have time to supervise the kids full time, so the older siblings had to guard the younger. Now, me and my wife will take turns to bring them to the park, and if we don't have time, the kids (at least the 5-year old) will have to stay indoors.
I try to give my kids more freedom than I'm comfortable with, but I just know that if something happens, people around me will think I'm a neglectful parent if I let my 9-year old stay out until 8 PM on her own. I want to give her the opportunity to explore the neighborhood on her own, and learn how to navigate the world. I mostly worry about cars hitting her, because I've almost been run over a couple of times where cars should have stopped, but she has to learn to look out for herself.
I absolutely think this is at least one factor. Just look at how parents treat their first baby. Myself and all of my friends obsessed over the sleeping schedule and eating and fear of every little illness. Then child #2 comes along and you're less worried about everything.
One of my friends has 3 children and we were just talking yesterday about how he manages, and he and his wife basically laughed and said that they try their best and just make sure the children are fed and clothed. There's only so much time available, you can't micromanage every detail and still have a healthy marriage and personal life.
Since we're doing anecdotes I have exactly the opposite experience. Nearby parks are full of kids, mixed ages, playing lightly supervised, making up their own games.
But so goes anecdotal evidence. Anyone know if the book cites evidence supporting the premise that kids these days are "worse behaved"?
There was a great radio program a few years ago - which I cannot find at the moment - about a sociology study that focused on a small town in Vermont or New Hampshire in the 1970s where kids essentially ran free and just came home to eat.
The program went back to the same town and interviewed the same kids, now parents, to find out how they were raising their own children. Fascinatingly, they had all become strict parents who never let their kids out of their sight.
> The program went back to the same town and interviewed the same kids, now parents, to find out how they were raising their own children. Fascinatingly, they had all become strict parents who never let their kids out of their sight.
Just some kind of hypothesis based on personal observation: The children who were really untamed have a tendency not to become parents later on when grown up (I really don't want to try a shot in the dark for the reasons). Those who were "tamer among the wild" as children were tamed even more by society, procreated and are now strict parents.
"Neighborhoods used to be packed with kids running around all the time."
Exactly how my childhood was, too. "Be back by dinner, call if you'll be late" were my instructions as a kid. My wife and I are about to buy a house and we drove all over our target town, and eventually settled on the neighborhood where we saw the most kids outside playing and/or roaming around in a group.
In my area, school playgrounds are usually locked up during non-school hours, but there's been a recent movement to change that. Soon the elementary school near my house will be open for general use on weekends, which seems like such an easy and obvious win. I can't believe it took them so long to do it.
Here in Poland, explicit public spaces are excluded from this specific hazard unless they install really dangerous implements.
Instances where operators of such spaces were sued over some kid climbing on a basketball hoop or soccer goal and the thing breaking have been dismissed summarily because there was no negligence involved - the warnings were there, the items in question in good shape. Oversight is not strictly required in a public space either.
This is a simple difference in law.
Inviting hazard would be if you installed for instance a tall climbing wall, where the primary use is dangerous. This is also a reason that anything walkable higher than a certain height needs guardrails.
Cities are remarkably old-school. It's the suburbs that are the scourge on childhood development. Which is ironic because the whole reason people moved to the suburbs was that they were "safer for children".
I had the same feeling in my area, until I came out of the house myself, just to see a lot of youngsters in parks, chilling on the bench, playing on the playground.
But it's just in the summer.
I think back when I was a kid we didn't have anything better to do on colder, moody days.
Heck, I myself preferred to stay home and play video games.
This is a steady trend that is down to numerous factors the least of which I’d ascribe to overprotective parents.
I saw a map a while ago showing the reducing radius from the home children could range over the last 100 years. And a lot of it boils down to overpopulation.
1. Cars. There are significantly more and faster cars on the roads. As a child I could play on my street without a car passing in a couple of hours. Now a car passes down our street every few minutes. And there are more congested intersections for kids to cross these days.
2. Green spaces. We used to have multiple green spaces to roam and cross through. Nowadays those are all built up with property developments.
3. Crazy people. The amount of violent crime against children has increased.
I am struggling to find a place to live where I'd let my kid ride a bicycle. It may mean moving to the Netherlands or Denmark.
When I lived in San Diego, a driver killed a child who was _in the bike lane_ and people were blaming the dead kid (or, if they fancied themselves classy, their parents). We left San Diego shortly after. Worth remembering the US has a 9/11 per month on the roads but the will to fix this seems lacking.
Not sure about 3 to be honest; do you have a source?
1. Despite a massive increase in traffic, deaths have stayed flat. So whatever you are interpreting here, it’s not based on the reality you claim it is.
2. This will be highly variable depending on area, but, nearby us where it looks from the door to be devoid of green/open space, are 3 parks within short walking distance, a nature preserve, and 100 miles of interconnected isolated paths for cycling which then connect to many, many other greenspaces. And that happened largely by accident (and partly by occasional spikes of local effort to fill in the gaps.) Maybe you need to look more closely to see just how much opportunity there is for play.
And 3. That can’t possibly be true, given the MASSIVE decrease in all crime and especially violent crime in the last 30 years. Please back up your claims with citations or you just contribute to the same hysteria that is ruining future generations.
1. Maybe, but we used to play in the street all sorts of ball sports as kids. All the cars were in their garages/car ports, and when a car, roughly every 10minutes came by, we'd yell, 'Car' and step aside. Now, my parent's same house has tons of extra cars on the streets (more affluent families?) and the street has become a thoroughfare as people try to avoid traffic on the main roads. It would be impossible to play on the street today.
As a youth I definitely had the experience of going off on my bike and being home by dinner. The difference though now is there is a lot more for kids to do inside the house. Video games, netflix, smart phones and the like are heavily influencing behavior.
A lot of kid grew up playing at home and reading books it’s not just a technology problem even if for sure it’s not making thing better
Introvert kids still had to socialize and learn to cope in school. Now that any negatove expression is heavily suppressed and everyone is interacting on social trough technology with a moltitude of aliases there’s little feedback a kid gets to correct his behaviour
The key and accurate part of that is this: “Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised or lightly supervised.” The rest is pretty dubious differences, but this is key because kids were misbehaving all the time then, too, they just had lots of opportunity to do it without adult supervision. Which made it easier to conform to restrictive rules when they were supervised, because the opportunity to act without constraints was usually right around the corner.
The children I know are now playing online games with their friends. Instead of going to the park and still playing, they're at home talking on mic/chat and doing things online. Are things like 'resolve disputes' and 'planning time' still possible? Seems like it'd be even easier to communicate and discuss with the added benefit of less violent/aggressive confrontation.
It's been like this since early 2000s, meaning that the generation of overly protected, caged and "play-dating" children are now adults and entering the workforce. Sadly, we don't have anyone in their 20s in our small company, but I'm wondering what kind of consequences this upbringing style has inflicted on people.
I know it's trite, but I blame computers. I have an 8 year old and getting her out of the house is often a struggle. I'd love of her to head out into the woods behind our house with her friends have adventures, but the truth is that there is nothing in those woods that can compete with Minecraft of Fornite or whatever.
Until recently we had a few families in my neighborhood that had kids that played outside just like my brothers and I did as kids. They all recently upgraded their homes and moved out of the neighborhood though. Those kids were my dog's best buddies.
And the bad thing is that now people are getting used to the empty streets, driving faster, paying less attention, assuming the streets will be empty. It will be very hard to go back.
You know the weird thing about CPS is that well they won't arrest the people who are going to kill their kids by running them off a cliff but they'll sure as hell bug you if you leave your kids in the backyard without watching.
As a father of three elementary school kiddos, here's my anecdotal-evidenced perspective:
I see a lot of other children who are experiencing a simultaneous excess and deficit of parental authority. Their parents rarely or never correct behavior that is disrespectful, self centered, or too demanding. From my point of view, they should be saying "No" much more often - firmly and respectfully.
At the same time, the kids are forced into endless regulated, supervised activities and given little or no free time. Or what free time they have is spent on YouTube. Seems to result in kids who are rude, fragile, and ignorant of normal human interaction.
I am the father of 4 kids with the youngest starting kindergarten in the fall. My anecdotal evidence is exactly the same. I'd like to add though that many parents I've seen say "No" but then completely fail to follow through; either giving in after repeated requests or failing to provide any consequence for disobedience[1]
If a few more HNers can chime in, we'll have enough anecdotes to call it "data!"
1: This is not new with the current generation either. My sister and I used to complain to our parents that they were too strict, so they talked to my friends parents and told us "Your friends' families have almost exactly the same rules as us!" And our response was "But they don't get into trouble when they break the rules!"
In my opinion, schools have a discipline problem in that schools (teachers) tolerate/ignore disrespect from students toward their teachers and the learning environment yet at the same time except discipline outside of school hours, in the form of excessive homework. The net effect is that schools are a poor environment for learning or constructive socializing, and time at home is spent on homework which severely cuts into social activities and free-play.
This is definitely a problem; after observing several classrooms in a few schools I noticed a few things:
1. Some schools have a systematic problem of this; if the administration is not willing to back up the teachers, the teachers have limited options.
2. Some teachers have difficulty maintaining discipline even when the administration is supportive.
3. I do my best to avoid schools like #1, and with #2 usually means that there will be approximately zero consequence to the child not doing homework. With 4 kids I have better things to do with my time than policing homework, so I set aside an hour a night as "study time." when my kids have figured out they have a #2 teacher, they spend the time reading a book. The lack of homework is not reflected in their grades, and the only consequence is I get called a bad parent 4 times at the parent/teacher conference, which hurts my feelings not at all.
Finally a funny little anecdote involving one of my kids and a teacher who had zero control of the classroom:
My daughter came home from school on Friday and was obviously upset. After a bit of cajoling she said she was sad because "My teacher said that if I kept on doing [Obnoxious Behavior] I would get detention, but I've been doing it all week and I still haven't gotten detention. What do I have to do to get detention?"
This feels weird. Why don't you as a parent enforce homework (or decent behavior) ? There's nothing to be proud of in my opinion; and maybe it's not reflected in grades yet but learning comes through repetition, without exception. Missing out on practice is a big deal for proficiency (and it's not a bad habit to pick up either). Honestly I have very little sympathy for parents that thinks its ok to disrespect teachers because they didn't earn it themselves (or so it sounds).
I will help the teacher enforce homework, but I'm not going to do it alone. If a kid doesn't want to do it, and the person assigning it doesn't care if they do it, my options are limited.
I don't think it's okay to disrespect teachers, but if the teacher's approach to getting respect is by making threats that they never intend to follow through on, then they are undermining themselves. There are limits on what I can do at 3pm if the majority of my child's peers are openly disrespecting the teacher for the previous 7 hours straight with zero consequence.
I will absolutely support the teacher in any efforts they make, but when the teacher makes no effort, there is nothing for me to support.
>and the person assigning it doesn't care if they do it
They do obviously since you have negative feedback from the teachers about undone homework. Also as a parent shouldn't you care if they do it ?
>I don't think it's okay to disrespect teachers
Then why can she be obnoxious in class, complain about it at home and still nothing happens ?
Do you meet regularily with the teachers ? Or communicate with them about how you wished they would enforce punitions ? Or at the very least tell them how you learned about how your child is doing X (why do you even learn it from her, isn't there supposed to be feedback every trimester or such ?) which sucks, is unappropriate and which you've discussed with her, etc...
I mentioned it because if my child wants to do their homework then all problems go away. The ultimate goal is that my child will want to do their homework; I'm obviously not going to monitor their homework once they are in college.
>> and the person assigning it doesn't care if they do it
> They do obviously since you have negative feedback from the teachers about undone homework.
Let me tell you an analogous story from my work: Another engineer tells me they have an urgent problem they need solved. Every time they ask me about it they stress how urgent it is. However, when I ask for clarification or more information, it takes them several work days, and sometimes several reminders for them to get back to me. I ran into them a few weeks after the issue was resolved and asked them how it went. They respond that they haven't done any testing of it yet.
Was the problem really urgent for them? After all, they did tell me many times how urgent it was.
> Also as a parent shouldn't you care if they do it?
I want my child to be successful. Doing homework is a very important part of that. However, as I said earlier the goal is that when they are older they will choose to do that. I do not believe that standing behind my child for 3 hours a night 5 days a week making sure they stay on-task is an effective way of achieving that goal (not to mention that with 4 children it would take up 6 hours each of my time and my wife's time).
My parents were incredibly strict about homework. The day I left the house I stopped doing homework and I nearly flunked out of college. My wife's parents were far less strict about homework and she graduated college in 3 years.
It seems to be working with my kids too. My oldest is a 5th grader and recently had a research paper due. She gathered her materials and then procrastinated. She was obviously embarrassed when she asked to stay up late to work on it, which to me is a sign that she understands it's her responsibility to get it done.
>> I don't think it's okay to disrespect teachers
> Then why can she be obnoxious in class, complain about it at home and still nothing happens?
I never said nothing happens. In this specific case I had her collate worksheets for the teacher before school one morning. I find it absurd that I had to be the one to correct a behavior that had been going on in the classroom for 5 days.
> Do you meet regularily with the teachers?
In general 4 times a year (there's a quarter system here). For this specific case, I volunteered in the classroom for an hour a week, so I saw the teacher a lot (it's also how I know that she had zero control over the classroom). The teacher never informed me of my daughter's behavior, nor the threat of detention.
> Or communicate with them about how you wished they would enforce punitions?
Yes. Some listen, others ignore me (My wife has been told she's wrong, perhaps a bit of casual sexism there, but I never been contradicted, just ignored by the teachers that tell my wife she's wrong).
> Or at the very least tell them how you learned about how your child is doing X (why do you even learn it from her, isn't there supposed to be feedback every trimester or such ?) which sucks, is unappropriate and which you've discussed with her, etc...
Yes, I've done all these things (and it's quarters rather than trimesters where I live).
Totally. The kids I see these days are obnoxious, arrogant and irritating compared to kids of my generation, and I’m born in 1985. It’s disturing to see how some of these kids behave and how their parents exercise zero authority as adults. Adults, it seems, exist to serve them. Kids with no humility will grow up to be terrifying adults.
In the case of the grandmother (and is a consistent theme back in the time as I know from others grandmothers of the same generation), when she say "do something" and we say "meh", she only need to LOOK INTENSE at us.
I'm a parent of two, and step-parent to two, between the ages 5 -11. I think a lot about this, and one of the biggest issues I see (besides the many valid points I feel the article raised) is that with the rise of Internet video, we are showing kids to kids more often, if that makes sense.
I grew up in the 80's, and cartoons were most of the media I consumed. You usually saw anthropomorphical characters depicting behaviors. When you did see live action, it was usually centered more around adults teaching or mentoring the kids (or Muppets), and when kids did appear, they were polite unless being used to illustrate bad behavior.
Today, with so much self-published content, kids are seeing other kids, often acting in outrageous ways to get views, likes, followers, and fans. When media became decentralized, I think we lost a powerful cultural platform for shared experience and norms, and it is starting to show.
As a parent of a two year-old, one thing I will not allow (for as long as possible) is unrestricted YouTube. I've seen my nieces watch unboxing videos and videos of kids acting like babies. It seems addictive and utterly devoid of any value.
I will disagree with the TV thing, but I think isolation and very strict control over their schedule isn't helping. For example my 3.5 year old wanted to play in our backyard, I said no because we have no fence and he could wander away plus I found some garden snakes last week and didn't want him alone down there. However part of me felt bad for him because he wanted to be outside in the grass and I was too worried to let him do it.
Do you not trust your child to not wander away if you said something like, "Yes, go play, but be careful, and remember not to go past the tree (or whatever)"?
Do you let your son ride in cars? That seems way more dangerous than letting him play in his backyard.
I don't know you, and there's all kinds of ways to parent, but it feels like you may have some unhealthy anxiety surrounding your child's safety if this is your standard reaction.
There doesn't seem to be any legitimacy to that claim. Meaning there are places that claim they can certify you, but they themselves have no real legitimacy (e.g. no specific educational track, just a broad philosophy you agree to adhere to).
The article is worth reading, but it is more accurate to describe the author as a journalist with three kids, they have no specific qualifications.
Bingo! This is hocus pocus lifestyle bullshit. I live with a psychologist and child behavior is something that has been studied extensively. There are well researched techniques to help a child behave and nothing in that article made me believe the author had a clue about them.
I'm so glad you asked this question. I rarely see people question assertions like this with regards to parenting or children's behavior.
Alfie Kohn's book, "The myth of the spoiled child", spends a lot of time pointing out that evidence behind claims like this are not only deficient of data, but are claims that seem to be made continuously throughout history of the latest generation of children.
This is what I was looking for. Lots of "I think" and "I believe" in the article, but very little in the way of organized study. The interviewee might be right on every point, but on the surface, this piece is no different from the 100s of mommy blogs who claim to have the secrets to good sleepers, good eaters, and well-behaved children.
I was hoping to find some credibility through the interviewee's name, but her own bio states she "is an award-winning independent journalist, author and speaker". Again, this isn't inherently bad, but it boils down to her making a bunch of observations that juxtaposes her children to others.
I'm never going to read the book, so here is my personal hot take :)
I don't know any child that struggles to manage their behavior. Adults that I have heard complain about this seem to be experiencing some panic over not being able to control children's behavior (i.e. less screen time). And it is worth noting that perhaps they are being over-protective.
As a father of three here is what keeps me from just sending my kids out to play:
Other parents.
Other parents see your kids alone and freak the fuck out. Some will call the police, and then threaten you that they will call CPS/DPS if they need to and report neglect.
In fact I was out with the kids on their bikes the other day and they were a bit ahead of me when they stopped safely at a crosswalk to wait for me. A woman pulled up and started chastising them for being unsafe because they weren't with a parent, when I walked up. She said "You're lucky I came along because some other people around here would run them over or call the police."
So yea, I'm not sure what's wrong with these other parents, but I'd love to send my kids to play outside all day without me worrying that I'm gonna get a cop on my doorstep.
Utah has recently passed explicit amendments to their child neglect statutes to clarify that otherwise well cared for children allowed to play unsupervised is not child neglect.
I absolutely think you're on to something here. I as well as other people I know in my circle have observed the same thing. In the past 20 years or so it seems like people have gotten angrier and angrier. It feels like no one minds their own business anymore and constantly assumes the worst about any given situation when they do not know the circumstances or intentions of the occurrence.
One of my friends got CPS called on her because her kids were playing in their own yard barefoot. Yes. It happened more than once too. It was surreal. What is wrong with people today?
I wonder if this is related to changing expectations about how and by who they expect their kids to be disciplined. This used to be a matter for the greater community and kids could be told off, other parents had free reign to give you a clip around the ears when needed but now only the parents themselves expect to be able to discipline (even completely non-violently) their children.
So maybe because they know they can't discipline the kids when they do something wrong is becomes necessary to have them watched by someone that can? As to why the community can longer discipline children I'd point the finger at the spanking debate. Rightly or wrongly what was allowed to do to a child became more complicated so the wider community now avoid it all together.
I think it’s Adults who are supposed to manage their own behaviour. Children? Not so much. This sounds like a rehash of the ‘Kids today’ perspective. Children have always been children and Adults have always struggled with their behaviour.
Adults have always romanticised their own childhood ‘it wasn’t like that in my day, I’d have never gotten away with that’ etc.
This is a terrible article that just uncritically assumes the worst of the 'kids today!' stereotype (which has been around since Plato's time) as a starting premise. I know it's Sunday but I'm surprised to see such fluff high up on HN.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
-Plato/Socrates (though incredibly likely this is apocryphal)
I mean, if we attribute this to the period during the Peloponnesian wars, the kids were definitely not alright. The generation of Athenians after Alcibiades definitely didn't do anything good, and Athens ultimately lost the war.
People cite the case of Socrates in this way and in my opinion therein lies the fluff. I suspect Socrates was, in fact, corrupting the youth, and the desire to execute him was probably well justified by the norms of that society.
Everything is cyclical. Just because things happen repeatedly doesn’t mean they’re “invalid.”
It's all down to cars. In two ways, one of them less facetious than the other:
1) Automobiles have a vast amount of land space dedicated to them. And the land that is not physically occupied by parking lots and roads is subdivided, separated and made inaccessible[1]. And this trend is continuing[2]. It's why other large mammals (bears, moose, wolves) face significant problems in reproduction. Add to this the noise and the light pollution and even if you did not fear that your neighbor, reaching back to pass an organic fruit-leather to the fruit of his loins, would mow down your child, the available outdoors is just not what it was.
2) Paedophiles and rapists are greatly facilitated by the availability of fast, relatively anonymous, convenient transport. The same characteristics that make said automobiles attractive to terrorists (when they're not actually directly driving them into people as a weapon that no one acknowledges).
I agree the automobile is at the heart of it. Everything from land use and distance, as you mentioned, to the danger of roads for kids. Children these days are driven everywhere, even to the local park or for soccer on the weekends.
The part about being “unemployed” to me immediately made me think about the prevalence of future tense pressures for modern kids. I’m in my mid 20s and I went through it.
While my parents had good intentions and many others I’m sure did too. You start building this monster of future pressures about colleges, social media emphasizing what you should like, and lots of other pressures you can’t actually resolve in Elementary or Jr. High but you are made aware of them and focused on them by your surroundings.
The reason children aren't behaving (at least in the U.S.) is because a large number of parents never practice parenting and never seek out advice from reliable resources.
For example-- I've heard numerous vacuous rationalizations from parents young and old for spanking their children. What's the research say on spanking? The vast majority over decades says that it doesn't improve behavior and in fact increases the likelihood of aggression in children.
So why would parents continue doing it? It's the same reason an ineffectual guitarist keeps starting over on Stairway to Heaven. Because, "Gosh, I had it perfect once out of 200 failures in my bedroom by myself last week."
So it is with parents: "Gosh, I don't get why they're acting out, they were so good that one time out of 200 outbursts while I was paying a moderate amount of attention to them last week."
What reliable resources would those be? Poorly defined, crap studies done by people who've never had children and the study was never independantly reproduced by anyone?
In the beginning, pain is the only means of communication (although we didn't actually spank, a little tug on the side burns did the trick). In my experience, once a child is old enough to understand time-based punishment (e.g. you don't get to watch TV tomorrow) a little and what it will mean, that becomes more effective.
Agreed. Obviously you are being voted down by people who are spankers, but just can't reach you through the intertubes, no matter how hard they try. We have never had to spank. Maybe we'll regret it when they turn into heroin addicts in their 20s, but right now they are decent, loveable people.
There is a general belief that parents inherently know best for their own children and to hell with any experts or professionals who might experience from more than their own children.
Having seen a whole tide of articles like this recently, I wonder how long it will be before popular opinion and parenting practices trend back toward giving children appropriate amounts of autonomy.
I hesitate at the thought of raising children here (or at all) for a variety-pack of reasons, one of which is that I was rather over-protected as a child, and I'd rather not pass the results of that that on to my kids.
Any current American-kid-havers care to comment on how difficult it actually is to raise non-sheltered kids in the modern age? Is it a big problem or perhaps overblown for the NPR crowd?
I am wary of joining this conversation in general. But I have kids, and I have lived both in big cities where stuff was stolen from our porch on a regular basis (we needed a neighborhood watch) and in small towns where we never had to lock our doors.
I've lived in incredibly liberal and conservative areas as well. Some places were very religious with a church for every few hundred in the populace, and where you couldn't even find a church.
Across the board, the liberal, non-religious, high-populace areas had the worst behaved children in public. But religious groups control public perceptions better (my opinion) so privately they could be just as bad or worse off, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article.
But what I found as a parent, was that children mimic their parents. Period.
Even if you have vacant parents, the kids will still have enough time around them to copy their beliefs and act on them.
I taught in college for 12 years, and the kids that came into my class room changed dramatically from early 2000s till I was done. Something changed in society the past 20 years in a way I can't understand.
One thing is for certain though, you can take a nice decent kid, and give them everything they want, and they can turn into brats when you try and take anything back.
I learned this the hard way with cellphones. My first kid turned super nasty as soon as she got a phone. Partly because all her friends ignored her, she was the only one without a phone in the group settings, so she sat by herself with no one to play with. So we got her an ipod touch, and we instantly had behavior problems.
In retrospect, she was copying my problems as a person, so it's not her fault. But any discussion where the blame isn't placed squarely on the parents first and foremost, is in my opinion, either deceitful with a motive or simply ignorant and possibly a parent in denial.
A parent can raise decent children in almost any environment as long as they are willing to stand up against the negative influences around them.
>In retrospect, she was copying my problems as a person, so it's not her fault.
Care to elaborate ? And what could she do anyways ? Launch a discussion that friends would be too absorbed to follow ?
Although I hope there might be a small minority of parents who don't buy their children phones (because of conviction or lack of money) and that eventually they could end up befriending each other, far from instagram and snapchat. But maybe thats wishful thinking.
>Care to elaborate? And what could she do anyways?
I found that adults can have "mental challenges" that if a child has the same thing, acts differently. For example, I was quite sarcastic as a parent, and having a child be sarcastic to other kids and adults is often disrespectful because they don't know how to "be sarcastic" correctly, or know when it's not appropriate.
When I told my daughter to put her phone down at dinner, or play a game with her siblings, something she had no issue doing before, she reacted harshly in response. I was a very stressed out and tense parent and reacted harshly, and not patiently. So she was mimicing my behavior when she also got stressed and didn't know how to deal with the emotions.
Contrast this with her younger siblings, who I was much more patient with, and when I asked them to put their devices down,if they didn't want to, I was more patient with them. I didn't give up on the request, but I also gave them a little time to put the things down. Which they always do.
>Although I hope there might be a small minority of parents who don't buy their children phones...
A very small minority in my experience. Some parents give their kids high-end iphones when they are in grade school.
My rules are simple. They got a "device" (could be phone without a cell account) when there were 13-14. Limited screen time "asked of them" (I really want them to learn to be responsible, so I don't set hard limits, I taught them to notice how tiring and wastful the time is, and they monitor themselves well), no screen locks, no social media, etc... When they are 16, they can drive and if they want cell connection, they pay for it themselves. (inexpensive extra line on family plan) Garners responsibility, and the expectations are "people over devices". And then also "people next to you over people online".
But I've seen a backlash in kids that are now older, becoming adults, they are working and don't have time for social media like they used to. Maybe a good trend coming?
It definitely depends on where you live, but it's gotten easier in the 8 years I've been raising kids as the pendulum seems to be swinging back.
Also, get to know your neighbors really well as soon as possible. There's a huge difference between "Oh look, some random kids are playing alone, how can their mom neglect them like that!" and "Oh look Suzy is letting her kids play outside, isn't that nice." (and yes it's nearly always the mom who gets judged for all parenting decisions; if you're male you will be praised for every tiny thing you do for or with the kids because expectations are so low for dads).
I do wonder how much of the issue stems from lack of engagement with the surrounding community.
Anecdote: when I was 7 or 8 I rode my bicycle down the block and came upon a middle aged man who was working on some part of a plane in his driveway. I was then fascinated with everything aeroplane, and hung out a second to pester him with questions. He sent me home with a small chunk of foam he'd cut away from some structure inside it.
I showed my parents my score and they immediately freaked out on me for having talked to a stranger at all, and told me never to go to that house again. Of course if they knew that that was Mr. Donahue working on his homebuilt, it probably would have been a different story.
I don't think it's hard at all. My kids go to daycare, and they really aren't supervised that much. A class for older, pre k kids will have one or two teachers and 30 kids. They do activities and stuff, but the kids area on their own to a surprising degree. I was surprised at least. The adults basically just keep them from hurting each other (mostly).
At home we don't get involved much with discipline except to enforce no hitting, no name calling, and sharing. Otherwise we let them play on their own. We don't allow much screen time, usually 20 minutes before bed on week nights, and about an hour total on the weekend days. At 5 and 3.5 they're not quite old enough to roam by themselves, and I am very self conscious about letting them out in the yard unsupervised.
My wifes upbringing was a lot more strict/structured than mine, I get the feeling I'm a lot more permissive than she would be with language and manners. I grew up in a rural area (farm kid) and my parents were very hands off.
I'm not sure what are the root causes of the kids' behavioural crisis (I'm not even sure there is one), but let me tell you with 100% confidence what will not solve them: Yet another parenting book.
We've been reading and seeing this shit since Socrates.
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Lets frame this a different way.
1. Crime has gone down in all measurements. (Theories state its likely lack of lead pollution.)
2. More people renting, and less engagement in the community.
3. People whining about kids these days
4. Older adults realizing they dont younger generation doing what they did
5. Kids now have more inhouse distraction (computers, games, etc) that their friends are on
6. Parent(s) working long hours and cant take kids to friends houses
7. Scare articles like this one whipping parents into a frightful frenzy
20 years ago, my father attributed the general "change in children" to the widespread availability & use of household air-conditioning.
Granted this won't be true throughout all climates, but I recall thinking it had a lot of merit at the time and I continue to think so today. My father would tell me that, when he was a kid, they'd either sit at home in a 90F+ house on Long Island with the windows open -- miserable, as I can attest from living it when we'd visit as a kid -- or they'd go outside and play "stick ball" in the same weather with their friends. For them, it was an easy choice.
Today, children either play on their devices at home (often interacting with 'friends' online) or they go to the home of their friend and, likewise, they often play indoors.
I truly believe that the climate-controlled dwellings of today are a large part of the reason; I know that personally I'd generally far prefer to be indoors in my climate-controlled 72F dwelling versus outdoors riding a bike or similar and I'd imagine the same, unfortunately but not surprisingly, holds true for children as well.
As a fairly new parent with another on the way, I'm not sure to what extent we'll try to combat this; as a child myself "screen time" was often a point of contention though in my case it was also the early start of my career.
Spanking. No kiddin. You don't need to put your children in a hospital. But a little slap in the buns never killed nobody, and as a last resort toll. can be really effective. Of course, go for ligth mesures before, and then scalate.
Take the things the kid like first, for a while, like no videogames fo a week, or two. If the nocive behavour dosen't go away, increase the time.
There's probably something to this. I don't have kids so luckily I don't have to think much about it (yet, at least). While there are plenty of studies about psychological issues from spanking, but I've always been uncomfortable about the definitions. There is a fair difference between a single sharp smack on the butt (clothed, not bare) like I and my siblings, friends etc. used to get (and deserve) as kids, and actual abuse (i.e. beatings, using implements, hits to the face, arms, torso, etc.), but I feel like most of the studies lump them in together.
It's also hard to control for whether it's a single spank for discipline used only when the situation warrants it or routine, arbitrary or random spanking. There's probably going to be psychological abuse or neglect coming along with it if it's the latter but far less likely for the former.
I have children (too young for this to matter yet) and I have the same discomfort. I was 'smacked' on the bottom sometimes as a child - no real idea about the frequency as this would now be a long time ago. Small children don't have the same sense of reasoning / looking forward as e.g. teenagers or adults, so I appreciate something more primeval should work better (and I'm not going to take away their food). But while all the data suggests hitting or spanking a child is bad, there seems to be no mentions of discriminating between genuinely physically harming the child (e.g. lasting damage like a bruise) and something which hurts but has zero long or medium-term physical effect - just a temporary stinging of the skin over a heavily muscled or fatty area like the bottom.
My personal feeling is that if researched well, the data would probably show that in small children, some form of physical punishment would be shown to be effective and leave no lasting psycological issues. I just don't think there's any good evidence either way.
I promise there not only has been research on small children and corporal punishment and that it's not at all effective and that it is damaging. Above I linked to an article on the subject by the APA. Here's a link to the meta-analysis referenced in the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-005-2340-z
"The results indicated that effect sizes significantly favored conditional spanking over 10 of 13 alternative disciplinary tactics for reducing child noncompliance or antisocial behavior. Customary physical punishment yielded effect sizes equal to alternative tactics, except for one large study favoring physical punishment. Only overly severe or predominant use of physical punishment compared unfavorably with alternative disciplinary tactics."
In short:
conditional spanking - more effective that 10/13 other disciplining methods
customary spanking - no more or less effective than other disciplining methods
severe / predominant use of spanking - worse than other methods
The rest of the material available without access to the full paper just seems to back the assertion that data is poor on this topic, and there are methodological issues that make it hard to assess different levels of physical punishment seperately.
My bad. I usually try not to do _exactly the thing I did_, rage-pasting a link without reading it fully.
I'm not going to get into a deep back and forth over this, but nothing I am aware of shows spanking of any sort has good long term effects on behavior and pretty much every piece of literature out there points to corporal punishment being effective for getting a kid to cease acting out, but either ineffective or worse for long term behavior changes.
And sure, maybe being super calm and measured with your application of corporal punishment will prevent it from doing damage. Just seems like a strange path to take when there are effective ones out there that don't require violence or the threat of violence against children.
My mom and dad use to hit me in the bottons witha flip flop as a last resort.
Usually the first measure would she put me staring the wall for a few minutes. To a children that was horrible since I was really bored with the punishment.
In more than one occasion she forget that I was in the "thinking corner" and found me sleeping on my feed, suported by my face in the wall.
I have kids and don't smack them. I don't really feel like I am lacking a tool in my arsenal of discipline. Usually time out, withholding things like TV or treats is enough.
I know that spanking is intuitive. It sure feels like it does something. The research, however, is unambiguous about this: spanking causes more misbehavior.
> In a meta-analysis of 26 studies, Larzelere and a colleague found that an approach they described as “conditional spanking” led to greater reductions in child defiance or anti-social behavior than 10 of 13 alternative discipline techniques, including reasoning, removal of privileges and time out (Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 2005). Larzelere defines conditional spanking as a disciplinary technique for 2- to 6-year-old children in which parents use two open-handed swats on the buttocks only after the child has defied milder discipline such as time out.[0]
There are ways to change behavior, and striking a child is one of them, but you are not going to get the behavior changes you are after.
On Gershoff's meta-analysis, from your meta-analysis link:
"...most of the research on physical punishment “lumps” together nonabusive and customary punishment with overly severe forms of physical punishment. For example, 65% of the studies in Gershoff’s (2002) meta-analysis included overly severe physical punishment in their measure, according to Baumrind et al. (2002). Examples ranged from vaguely defined “punitive discipline” (6% of the studies), composite measures of the frequency and severity of physical punishment (29%), and the inclusion of extreme violence (31%), such as slapping in the face (seven studies), beating up (three studies), or hitting with a fist and causing bruises and cuts (one study)".
The parent comment specifically mentions punishment at the very bottom of the scale and guradualy escalating from non-physical punishment.
I agree. Spare the rod, spoil the child. It works.
Parents need to get off their phones, computers, TV's and spend time with their kids. I live on a street of maybe 30 or so houses. And I have two small children. I know there are other families with small children and I have never once in the 4 years I've lived on this street seen them outside playing with their kids. I play with my kids outside everyday, when weather permits. It is sad. Technology, especially TV and computers, and cars have destroyed community. Not totally, but almost.
Don't even get me started on teenagers with phones. My children will be getting flip phones for calls only and very limited texting.
I was a full-time mom for a lot of years. I say such things to my adult sons. Trying to say it on HN tends to go bad places. It isn't politically correct to observe that the lack of time to parent could negatively impact parenting. No matter how neutrally I say it or how carefully I word it, I am inevitably accused of sexism, as if my position is "Women should all be barefoot and pregnant."
I hardly ever spent any time with my parents growing up, I spent the vast majority of the time playing either alone or with friends or siblings either outside or in another room. Same with my peers, I never even met half my friend's parents, ever. Parents today seem absolutely obsessed with spending massive amounts of time with their children, something I simply cannot understand. Just doesn't seem healthy to me.
Even if as a child, neither of your parents are actively engaged with you throughout the day - if they have created a healthy and controlled, calm and constructive environment with positive influences in the parts of the home accessible to you, and leave you to explore that environment, they are performing an important parental duty.
What your article focuses on is time actively spent engaged with the child. I would argue that there is a pressure for today's working parents to concentrate their parental influence in what little window of time their conscious children are actually in their vicinity. This results in what ostensibly appears to be more time spent parenting, viewed through the lens of the article.
Active engagement with children is a small fraction of the role a parent plays. If you focus on measuring this as some kind of metric representing quantity of parenting, you're missing the majority of what actually matters.
What I often see is parents these days trying to be pals with their kids. That's not parenting, and frequently they are at a total loss of how to actually discipline their children when things go awry because they've positioned themselves so poorly as some kind of peer.
When your kids spend most of their time in environments outside of your control, then the little time you all share together is spent with a strong bias towards being fun and happy together like buddies because the window of opportunity to actively maintain that relationship is so abbreviated, you're not doing much parenting.
>What I often see is parents these days trying to be pals with their kids. That's not parenting, and frequently they are at a total loss of how to actually discipline their children when things go awry because they've positioned themselves so poorly as some kind of peer.
I agree, and I agree that's a huge issue, but it has absolutely ZERO to do with "mom and dad, if they're even in the same household, often both work full-time jobs." Trying to be buddies/peers with your kids is a generational thing, not a working parent thing.
The rate of stay at home mothers has been on the rise since the 90s anyway.
>When your kids spend most of their time in environments outside of your control, then the little time you all share together is spent with a strong bias towards being fun and happy together like buddies because the window of opportunity to actively maintain that relationship is so abbreviated, you're not doing much parenting.
Oh, come on, that's total and complete nonsense. The people I know who try to be buddies with their kids the most are stay at home parents. Most of the stay at home parents I know become obsessed with pleasing their children. Then the working parent comes home to bratty children and it destroys the marriage. That's just my experience, but its true that parents whose household duties are performed by only one person are much more likely to divorce.
Of course, it should be no surprise that the sheer quantity of time you spend with your children doesn't matter, quality trumps quantity:
Not only that, but its extremely disingenuous to say that environments that are physically away from you "out of your control." Of course that isn't true, you have a huge amount of control over the places you bring your children. You can't control 100% of what happens when you are physically present with your children anyways. If you're going around trying to micromanage your kids lives you've already failed.
interesting viewpoint, hadn’t thought much about it but hits a big issue. So, now instead of mom or grandma watching and teaching the kid(s), it’s youtube and its infinite content
more thoughts: tv is pretty different from youtube-instagram-facebook-etc in the sense that tv (for our generation) we could only watch was on on one tv, or find something else to do. now kids can watch anything anywhere! tvs, tablets and phones make it possible to visit
youtube and facebook for hours and hours
with no end...
> asks why so many kids today are having trouble managing their behavior and emotions.
...For starters, is there evidence that this is actually a thing?
Once it gets down to the details it sounds like Generic Parenting Advice From Any Point In The Last 50 Years: don't use bribes, make consequences clear, give kids some control but not too much, when you're overwhelmed walk away... but the initial premise is a pretty big one to just throw out there unsupported.
Both have the potential to drastically screw up a kid. (Imagine being bounced back and forth between two homes throughout the month. It would drive you mad.)
Strange that he article doesn't mention it. The utter lack of stable and consistent housing for children (due to possession schedules) is perhaps the biggest societal 'experiment' ever run.
I think this has a lot to do with the housing crisis.
Hear me out...
When I was a kid I was lucky enough to be raised in a new development community packed with YOUNG families. Imagine this. These were 1st, or maybe 2nd home buyers (age 23-32) who were STARTING their families there. It was a time when young people could afford a nice home in a safe neighborhood, AND support kids.
The result was amazing. Kids. Lots of kids. Kids roamed the streets. The sense of community was abundant. Halloween and Christmas were a BLAST as all the families went to great lengths to dress up their home.
Nowadays? I live in a different neighborhood. People are RENTING. There's no safe, nice, affordable neighborhood for new families to settle. Sense of community as a result is diminished. People don't feel planted and invested in the home so they're less likely to be invested in the community. I don't see any kids these days. Halloween, could be any other day.
As a counterpoint, I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood, in a rented home. Was part of a huge community of kids who all played together unsupervised, especially all summer long. In the school yard, downtown, down by the river, in the park, we ranged pretty far as we got older. Once you had a bike there were unsupervised day trips to wooded areas where we played a poor-man's predecessor to paintball using slingshots and pilfered grapes.
From my limited experience, home ownership is not a requirement for free-range children.
Yeah, no kidding!! Literally every single person I know rented growing up and the streets were filled with kids. In fact, since apartments are smaller, it's more incentive to get outside.
My wife and I were fortunate enough to have saved up for a down-payment just as the housing-crash occurred. We were able to afford a much better house than planned because prices were so depressed. However there were no kids as young as ours because everyone with young kids was still renting or in less expensive parts of town. There was a very steep hill between us and our kids' friends making bike-riding a no-go until they were strong enough to bike up it.
Our youngest neighbors had high-school aged kids when our oldest child started kindergarten.
I agree that the housing crisis is part of it, but from my experience, the major cause is digital technology. First, overwhelming amounts of information scare parents from allowing their kids to be so free. People get a false idea of how frequent predators or hit and runs happen, and over adjust. Second, children themselves are spending a large part of their lives in the digital realm, whether it be games or social media.
You raise a good point, but it's important to note that many families, especially working class families, will continue renting in cities. Many do not even have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense yet alone a down payment on a condo. This is exactly why you'll find that working class communities want affordable housing built but also strongly defend rent control.
Because the generation that gets all high and mighty about their childhood being more fun and outside (i.e. Gen Xers) are now the ones that are raising the next generation of children to be safe and are also complaining about it.
You know who are terrible models for learning human behavior? Children. Why do we expect our children to learn good models of human behavior by interacting with other children?
"Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised or lightly supervised. They were able to resolve disputes, which they had a strong motivation to because they wanted to keep playing. They also planned their time and managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds self-esteem and mental health."
Neighborhoods used to be packed with kids running around all the time. Now they are empty. There are quite a few kids in my neighborhood, but the only time you see them is when they get off the school bus. None of them roam the neighborhood or anywhere. There is a huge park in my neighborhood, too. It's always empty. I never see packs of kids walking on the sidewalks going to the theater or to corner stores. School playgrounds are empty and stay empty unless school is in session.
When I was growing up from age 6, my mom would tell me to be home by dinner, and I'd spend all day running around with friends or adventuring by myself. This was the norm for every kid I grew up with.