Why Children Aren't Behaving and What We Can Do About It
npr.org
npr.org
"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.
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.
still the case in my puertorican neighborhood in chicago.
How "old" are you talking about here?
This should be fun.
The deaths you're speaking of are also not accidental.
I did get all manner of small injuries from doing things that kids used to do, though.
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.
River is not in bottom or dangerous canyon and look like normal river. Which is dangerous in cold weather, despite not looking dangerous.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-kids-accidental-death-rates...
You can control for rising diagnosis all day, but find me anorexic people 100 years ago. They basically didn’t exist.
2.) Afaik, anorexiction rates are going down. It is less of problem then it used to be in previous generation.
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.
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.
https://www.additudemag.com/race-and-adhd-how-people-of-colo...
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 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.
I had my (then) 10 and 12yr olds go for it, because I had no idea where else they'd ever get the chance to try.
(OTOH, I tried the 1m springboard and got water in my ear that took days to get out. I'm not as young as I once was)
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.
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.
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...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
A significant proportion of people couldn't swim 250 m or tread water for 10 minutes.
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've known people who volunteered to go to various islands to teach basic swimming skills who also haven't been able to quite figure out why either.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2017/082...
https://alexischateau.com/2016/11/08/10-things-you-probably-...
It just seems bizarre to me.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To this day, I love swimming.
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.
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.
Learning to tumble made me laugh, but is a good idea :)
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 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.
Unless the thing is guns, then it doesn't matter how many children are killed.
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.
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?
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)
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.
But so goes anecdotal evidence. Anyone know if the book cites evidence supporting the premise that kids these days are "worse behaved"?
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
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.
And that meant that I had a lot of privacy. My behavior wasn't being monitored, 24/7.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
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.
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'm amazed we aren't all nervous wrecks.
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).
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.
It's obviously worse for people of color, but it happens to white people as well. Maybe most famously to Bob Dylan about a decade ago: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/jersey-h...
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.
Young HN readers, what do you think?
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. Sometimes I hear their TV plays but that's about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/28/589453431...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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?"
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.
How can this even be an argument.
>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...
> How can this even be an argument.
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).
Caveat that Hacker News readers, let alone Hacker News commenters, are not a representative sample of the population at large.
I was raised with my grandmother/mother combo.
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.
Just once.
"Today's teenagers are the best-behaved generation on record"
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/25/5748178/todays-teenagers-are-t...
"Today's Teens Better Behaved Than Their Parents"
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-...
"Wonkblog Today’s teens are way better behaved than you were"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/13/today...
But it's summer ( notoriously slow news season ) and what better to sell than fear to parents. The other parental fear piece within the last 24 hours.
You don't do drugs and have unprotected sex if you stay home all day. The lack of opportunity to misbehave doesn't make you more "behaved".
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.
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.
What evidence does the book cite to support this premise?
Also, a plea: let's please answer this question before everybody posts their personal hot takes on children and parenting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other states should follow suit.
https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/well/family/utah-passes-f...
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.
Adults have always romanticised their own childhood ‘it wasn’t like that in my day, I’d have never gotten away with that’ etc.
I just don’t buy it.
-Plato/Socrates (though incredibly likely this is apocryphal)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...
Everything is cyclical. Just because things happen repeatedly doesn’t mean they’re “invalid.”
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).
1. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/12/19/roads-i... 2. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6362/442
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.
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."
Edit: clarification
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.
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'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.
> My first kid turned super nasty as soon as she got a phone.
I think you might be on to something here...
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
“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
No, we haven't. That beautiful self serving quote is from a students dissertation from 1907 - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-childre...
Novel quotes which have a ring of truth don't get to invalidate peoples' opinions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
also direct feedback is important for young children as they won't know what they did wrong hours down the line.
"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.
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.
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.
Fear is definitely a solid deterrent though, no doubt.
> 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.
These fundamental changes in the average family have consequences.
Oy.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/09/30/pa...
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.
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.
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.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-d...
>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:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/making-time-for-kids-st...
https://qz.com/717960/the-toxic-myth-that-working-moms-fail-...
Lets not forget that children do better as adults when their moms work
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/kids-benefit-from-having-a-workin...
http://www.businessinsider.com/benefits-working-moms-2011-7
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.
...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.
That implies daycare and possession schedules.
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.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192...
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.
From my limited experience, home ownership is not a requirement for free-range children.
Our youngest neighbors had high-school aged kids when our oldest child started kindergarten.