Reasons Today’s Kids Are Bored at School, Feel Entitled, Have Little Patience | Hacker News Reader

Reasons Today’s Kids Are Bored at School, Feel Entitled, Have Little Patience

deeprootsathome.com

15 pointsalphydan14 comments

Christ. I take a decent amount of pleasure in poking holes in topics here, and this is one of those "where do I even start", as well as continuing to lower my opinion of self-identified therapists.

(EDIT: To clarify: I don't mean to detract that the author is a Real(tm) therapist, but the "self identified" part is key to me as the author conveys that as their angle of expertise, as opposed to a physician who may also have a degree in therapy but tries to speak primarily as the former. I've found my Bayesian prior of agreement to correlate inversely when someone opens with "as a therapist...")

Let me pick a few points out. "ENDLESS FUN". Because that clearly defines the childhood of most of the people I grew up around in a Philadelphia public school. (My sarcasm should be VERY heavy right about here.) Quite to the opposite, children spend ~half (usually far more if you count transit, extracurriculars, and homework) of their waking hours in a situation one can honestly describe as "penitentiary-like". Yet the article NEVER touches on the far more likely hypothesis that children, like most semi-sentient creatures, don't want to do highly unpleasant things with no feeling of autonomy? We recognize this for our food animals but not our own children?

"KIDS RULE THE WORLD" This isn't even defended in their own paragraph, if I'm reading it right (it's a bit "fun" to dig through the spurious rhetoric and anti-youth slant); and in all of the quotes they give, I would argue as examples that they _don't_ rule the world, given that the response in most situations is "you don't get a choice, I'm your parent".

"TECHNOLOGY" This has been the mantra of parents as long as I've been watching news. It just used to be Phones, TV, Radio, Rock Music, Swing/dance halls, all the way back to the turn of the century. The statement about parental emotional availability may have some merit but is in no way supported, and seems distinct from the section header.

Now, I'd like to ask _why_ the author paints a slant that so entirely deprives children of means and mentality, so allow me to apply my typical cynicism with a quote from the author bio: " She is founder and director of a multidisciplinary clinic in Toronto, Canada, for children with behavioral, social, emotional and academic challenges."

If you convince parents their kids are broken, they'll pay you money to try and "fix" them. As a kid who had decades of adults trying to "fix" me, and has turned out "pretty damn OK" I still resent that; and find the article entirely lacking in substance or legitimacy.

You are right, what we do in school... and also in work... is typically as unnatural as "technology" and has to be drilled in. What fun? No puppy sits in a classroom all day long without being allowed to move. I find it amusing that on one side there is always this complaint about not enough playing outside, not enough social interaction blah blah, at the same time we force our kids to sit in a classroom 5-10h a day, quietly listening and writing.

When I was in school 30 years ago we spent hours just transcribing stuff from books to paper. Yanking that C64 joystick was more activity than that.

And the grown-ups? Sit in their offices and meeting rooms all day.

My daughter is extremely active, but in daycare the drill already starts. I already dread the time when this curious drive for exploration is more and more extinguished by this system.

Technology didn't hinder me - I learned programming at age 12 by this type of curious exploration of that thing on the table. By experimentation and breaking things. I was able to write my first game in QBasic after a few weeks. Yet I'm unable to read sheet music or play an instrument after more than 8 years of music in school, transcribing stuff from books.

Nowadays I got a PhD in CS and feel that I'm quite successful. Even with all that evil fun and technology... Mindless consumption can also happen in school with books, creativity also with fun and technology.

> self-identified therapists.

"Victoria holds a Master of Science in Occupational Therapy from the Medical School at University of Toronto " I believe that makes her an actual therapist, not a self-proclaimed one. :)

> Now, I'd like to ask _why_ the author paints a slant that so entirely deprives children of means and mentality, so allow me to apply my typical cynicism with a quote from the author bio

Obviously the article is partially a sales pitch. But so are all articles of these kinds. When Kaspersky Labs write something about the poor state of security in the government sector, you don't immediately assume ulterior motives.

You're right, I should have used more precise wording, I let my (personal) frustration leak.

That being said, to address your second point: With many kaspersky articles I'm not left making a very interesting face ~paragraph or two in. Massive gaps between the author's assertions and my own worldview lead me to ask "Why is there this gap, should I adjust my stance or are there other forces at play", and with as substantial a delta as I see here (alongside my personal "skin in the game") I feel it's a benefit to ensure an opposition viewpoint is expressed.

I agree with all your original points. Don't second guess yourself.. I'll continue to call them self identified therapists despite whatever degree they hold

Do you have children?

rolling eyes emoji

Go sit in time out.

As a 16 year old this article is pathetic. This refrain that the children are terrible has echoed down the centuries and repeating it does not make it any more true. “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” - Socrates

Nor does repetition make it any less true. Also, that's a misattributed quote [0].

[0] : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...

She has probably spent more time analysing children than you have been alive.

Just an interesting note, I'm not taking one side or the other.

I've just trained to be a teacher, so the behaviour of children in a classroom is of interest to me. I have noticed that children don't play outside as much as they used to, and of course tablets, phones, xboxs etc play a huge part in the changing behaviour -- we didn't have them when we were kids. TV used to switch off at 9pm (I think, or was it 10pm?)

Were kids ever not bored at school? This feels like yet another article about those gosh darned spoiled kids these days.

Students find it almost impossible to stop checking their phones.

If you take a phone from them you can see the anxiety rising, they are unable to work or concentrate. There is a real difference in how a classroom feels these days to how it was before every student had a mobile phone.

This is not a very rigorous article. It's a series of observations/opinions of one particular expert who's worked with one particular set of kids. Not useless anecdotes, but anecdotes nonetheless.

That being said, I think there's some truth in there. I'm very dubious of the endless technology moral panic that's cycled through parenting ever since the invention of the sharpened stick. ("In my day we just bashed the gazelles with a blunt stick. These kids today have no character") Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the human mind needs unstructured periods of boredom and social interaction to thrive, and that parents are too quick to mollify their kids with entertainments instead of helping them learn to occupy themselves. Also, kids should be able to play outside, away from parental supervision.

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