We Have Ruined Childhood
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The biggest problem are people who can't mind their business and people who have been conditioned to fear the world. The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime.
Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone.
I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that abduct kids and street gangs that will sell your fifth grader fentanyl. There are also gangs of Satan worshippers that will sacrifice your kids to the devil or something. Then there are the sightings of pedestrians...
Then look up the actual crime statistics. With the exception of a few spots here and there this is "officer! Have you seen my cat?" territory. The stuff about gangs is the most laughable. The joke is "OC gangstaz be like 'it's not a phase mom!'"
As a general rule, the safer the area the crazier NextDoor becomes. Anaheim does have actual crime and the community boards are pretty sane. South County is almost zero crime and the paranoia on the neighborhood boards is off the charts.
Perhaps a manifestation of the broken windows theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
What are the externalities of services like NextDoor, local FB groups, etc keeping this in people's conscious all the time?
If I had to come up with a hypothesis and test it via the scientific method it would probably be: This is not good as it is a positive reinforcement loop that causes our lizard brains to see danger everywhere/all the time.
The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.
A as a side note, most kids wore shorts until roughly 13, the long trousers were reserved to "official" occasions, holiday visits to relatives, (rare) lunches at the restaurants, and similar.
And it was not common to see a kid with both knees not-bruised or non-orange, a much used item was, besides hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome.
For one, in Austria, kids have a legal right to go to school on their own, be it on foot or by public transport. A lot of parents do drive their kids to school, unfortunately even where it's really not necessary, but you do also see plenty of young kids walking there or home, or taking the bus or train. You definitely also see more kids "hanging out" in Austria - in the UK, everyone seems quick to jump to conclusions about gangs, so I guess "respectable" parents won't let their kids do that.
On the other hand, I felt I probably had even more freedom growing up in the 90s (in Austria) than many of today's kids. This is probably more of an individual choice of the parents (for some reason, people are afraid, despite this being one of the safest countries in the world) than direct societal pressure (being reported to the cops or social services, etc.) as it seems to be in the UK or US.
That actually started in the early 1980s, and kids roamed free well into the 1990s.
People generally have less and less time with kids due to work, and then overcompensate by being over-protective ("I suck at spending enough time with my kids, but look at how I protect them! I must still be a good parent then!").
There are much more cars everywhere, they drive faster too. Especially US problem from my experience, since whole infrastructure is designed around car usage. How are kids supposed to roam freely in urban areas then? I recall having to do 45 min walk to get to my work which was 1km away in LA, and this was including taking forbidden shortcut via highway road. Otherwise a solid 1h walk, to do frakin' 1km distance. Because nobody thought that there are pedestrians. Well kids are pedestrians, even on bikes.
The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online.
Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house.
The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.
American post-war car-centric urban design transformed public space from one accessible to, and commonly ranged by, all (including children), into one largely accessible by motorized transit.
Children without licenses and access to vehicles consequently lost direct autonomous access to the core locations in their lives (home - school - simple shopping - peers - common wild space), and have been discouraged from attempting to navigate these spaces on foot (for fear of injury or unrealistic transit distance/detours required).
The author does not state, but one may infer, that car-centric living is coupled to the overscheduling and helicopter parenting at issue in the original article; and that children raised in a car-centric environment experience something akin to learned helplessness.
These problems are further compounded by comparatively poor American public transit systems and a contemporary mindset in which fearful parents discourages free-range children from making use of what transit options are present before the last few years of childhood; and by safety concerns around biking and skating in environments which do privilege cars.
My own kids are in the top quintile of "most free range" in our cohort; that feels possible in San Francisco in some ways which do not appear as feasible in many other urban areas. That's one reason we continue to try to raise our kids here.
But they do not get anything like the benevolent neglect of my own latchkey neighborhood-wandering local-kid-pack-factions semi-rural/suburban childhood.
Kids are allowed a fair amount of freedom in Canada and Europe, where I still see a lot of kids around malls, or parks, playing basketball in courts (which still happens in NYC), or wooded areas. Sure, more are on their phones etc. But it’s really not that different from the 90s IMO, in many locations.
The biggest change is there aren’t so many clusters of “neighbourhood kids” as there used to be, as people are having fewer children later in life... unless you deliberately seek out a unicorn neighbourhood with similar aged kids. Playgroups and play dates need to be actively organized by parents due to distances between houses.
(I raise two children, and the 10 year old is free to ride his bike and wander, so long as he keeps a phone on for location - he’s taken plenty of bike camps to learn to be responsible).
What is happening in the US is quite depressing to me. Your kid can be shot for having a toy that the cop perceives to be a gun. It is crazy! Things like that never happen here, even if that toy is a toy gun.
We don't do this in every situation. Most American parents transport their kids by car without giving the risk much thought, though car crashes kill significantly more children than homicide in the US (source: CDC). I'm not sure there's a good solution to the cognitive bias of discounting relatively mundane risks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
That aside, I completely agree with your comment. Public spaces and well designed cities that allow for those clusters are very important to kids.
For whatever it's worth though, I don't think things were that much better in the US back in the 90s. In recent history the US has always been worse in this regard than Canada and Europe.
What is your point? Whether this is a US-centric or global issue seems like valuable information for the discussion. If it really is a US-centric problem, the solution, for the US, might be to look outward at other countries. If it were a global issue, we'd all have to look into our past to find a solution. It is important to know the scale of the problem don't you think?
Given the state of other US-specific problems like our dysfunctional healthcare system and mass-shootings, I think it’s pretty clear the US is rarely interested in learning from outside its borders.
Is it US-Centric or urban centric? My guess is most of this board falls on the Urban side (Me included). I am unable to apply many of my valuable unstructured rural experiences as a youth to how I want to raise a child in a city. I thing I'd have the same challenge with Rome, Dallas, Barcelona, or most other urban centers.
They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they saw.
Heck, my older son took his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant I haven't even been to yet. :)
Before high school, a big mile stone was when they were old enough to safely cross streets on their own to walk to the local pool and basketball courts in the summer.
So there are still plenty of unstructured, unsupervised experiences to be had, just different than the rural ones.
However, my bike gang was a bunch of little vandals. So we probably skewed the stats towards not letting kids outside.
Now I’m parenting in big city and I feel sad for how kids around here live. Trying to figure that one out before he gets older. He’s only 1 so I have time.
There are no kids outside, except on halloween. To be fair, there aren't many adults outside either which I think is a part of the problem.
I have a 4 year old nephew. Once I took him to a park near where he lives. There were only 4 other kids there. In the time we were there, the cops showed up to shoe away 2 boys who were 10-12 years old. All they had been doing was sitting there chatting. If you can't even use a public park for its intended purpose anymore, why would you even try going outside as a kid?
I think the iPad generation now live virtual lives with their friends. Kinda sad but that’s what fearmongering by media gets us.
A lot depends on parents to drive behaviour and introduce these days, again, due to lack of spontaneity / proximity that many grew up with.
When we turned around and came by them again I realised they were watching YouTube on a phone. But at least they were outside, sitting on a not unused car road on the edge of the village.
I've heard that in the states you can own a piece of property but have "no right" to get to it, as it's surrounded by other pieces of private property and, so, you're at the whims of those properties' owners. Is this true?
In Sweden, we have the concept of 'Allemansrätten'[0]; which is to say that 'private property' (in the absolute sense) doesn't exist and you have the freedom to roam, as long as you don't disturb or destroy anything.
Source: good buddy of mine is a real estate lawyer, and after a couple drinks he'll bitch and moan about it for hours
Two "neighbors" colluded to shut off all easements to the property, hoping that in 7 years (or whatever) they'd get the right to the property and could fix it and resell it. It was originally owned by investors, who wanted to offload it because they were fighting the same fight, and one of them had a heart attack and was dying, and they just wanted out. Along comes my BIL and he gets it for a song.
And the issues to boot.
The neighbors - one was a known "a-hole" in the neighborhood who would sue anyone and everyone; indeed, if you looked up his name in California, he had a record of using the courts almost as if it were his job. The other guy, he owned a large avocado orchard which bordered the property; he had fenced over one of the plat map easements. The other easement was a road which led to the property, which the first guy lived next to, just down below from the house. He blocked it off with a metal gate. He also owned another house he used as a rental, which was just immediately below the house. So he'd leave the gate open sometimes, and would give a key to the renters, but otherwise it was closed off. He'd also let people in for maintenance and inspection of a water tank which served for water in the neighborhood.
The story is wild and long - they didn't count on the tenacity of the family I married into. They didn't count on my brother-in-law, who works construction - being willing to run his dump truck for 48 hours straight with little-to-no sleep to make money in any way possible so he could pay his lawyer bill every single month (which ran to insane levels). He didn't count on my sister-in-law being willing to live in the house, to establish residency, while her husband worked a state away.
We had to hike up to the house one, using machetes to cut thru the undergrowth. My brother-in-law later ran a bulldozer to cut a path up the side of it, to get past the gate (he came from the avocado side - which the sheriff allowed him to cut past the fence, because of the plat map, and thus had to fight that neighbor in court too) - they then used 4wd vehicles to get up the side to the house.
He never counted on any of this and more. My brother-in-law flew a pirate flag from the flagpole, just to give the other guy the finger during all this.
Eventually, after several years, my brother-in-law won the lawsuit, and got access to the road. The gate was removed. The entire neighborhood rejoiced, and my BIL became the "hero" of their area, because they had long suffered various indignities by that guy.
A few months after my BIL won the case, the guy ended up having a heart attack, and died. The other guy lived a few years longer, but also ended up dying of natural causes.
My brother-in-law's house, now that it has access, instantly shot up in value several times over. He and his wife are now thinking of selling it, and moving on to other things.
But on the other hand, it really isn't "allmansrätten" either. (I am from the US and live in Norway - and norway has the same sort of laws). Here in Norway, you can simply camp for a night in some unused wooded area or a field that is obviously not used. In the US, you can get arrested for doing such a thing. Nature isn't something that is free for everyone to enjoy, but rather, it is the property of whoever owns the land even if there is no barrier or signs to alert you otherwise.
How often that is enforced varies. My parents owned land and generally didn't care, though they wanted hunters to alert them first so the could keep themselves safe. Many area residents didn't care if a couple people were walking in their woods - but don't get the idea that you could camp there without law enforcement being called unless you had express permission of the landowner.
This is not really true, there are thousands of forests and lands that are public spaces. Whatever the problem is, it's not this.
The land that is accessible by foot or bike is much more likely to be privately owned. And when it is public space, it's often a town or state park - which is quite likely to come with enough curfews, enforced bans on unaccompanied minors, and other child-unfriendliness that it's functionally private.
This may be a naive question but please bear with a non-US person - what would happen in the US if someone actually called police on you? Could you just say "these are my children and I think it is good for them to be unsupervised, good bye"?
http://www.freerangekids.com/category/child-protective-servi...
I'll add that your treatment would likely depend on the color of your skin, how well-to-do your neighborhood was, and how familiar the cop was with you and your family (small town vs large one, really). They may or may not call child services on your family.
We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities).
But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.
Given, these things probably get to be news because they're so extreme, but it pops up every few months. Look up the Maryland family that got in trouble for letting their kids walk to the park for the prototypical example.
The other issue is a real concern: what are the prevailing traffic speeds in your neighborhood. I'm in Massachusetts, where roads are narrow and lined with all sorts of attitude adjusting devices for bad drivers. So people are driving at mostly under 40kmh. Other parts of suburban America, people will literally reach 80kmh as soon as they've left their driveway, in which case, sorry, you do have to keep your children prisoner in their own home until they can eyeball the speed of a moving car. That only kicks in at about age 9, and there is no known way to hasten that skill in children. So, TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free.
A lot of the decline in free-range childhood clicked into place once I realized just how terrible suburbs are for little kids.
The roads are the worst part - wide, empty streets that invite speeding, connectivity that make them short-cuts for outside drivers, lots of bends and bushes that obscure the view. But they're not the only major issue.
Suburbs are usually built for cars, meaning no sidewalks or bike lanes, just a choice between walking in the road and upsetting the neighbors with their manicured lawns. They're usually fully developed, meaning no woods or fields to play in. And they're privatized, meaning no sports fields, no open grass for games unless the neighbors approve, not even any parking lots for safer street ball. They're featureless, so littler kids can't find their street or house in a maze of HOA-mandated similarity. And while our fears of crime are exaggerated, they're perversely insecure, combining a rural lack of bystanders with urban anonymity.
My run-down, dead-end street growing up seems weirdly idyllic in hindsight. Speeding was impossible, no one but the residents had a reason to drive through, every house looked different, there were trees to climb and a bit of undeveloped land at the end of the road. Even the neighbors who hated kids and each other had to use spite fences and complaining, not impersonal HOA crackdowns. But of course, there have been plans to suburb-ify it for decades now...
Many a time in the 'burbs, were we playing a game in the street only to quickly scatter to the shout of "Car!", followed by a hasty resumption of whatever we were doing.
There was generally 1 or 2 streets of particular note that you just knew to avoid or not play in due to the fact that it was commonly used as a sacrificial throughway.
And homogeneity? That was half of what taught us how to navigate. You do it based off of street signs. The kids who can't read shouldn't be wandering the streets necessarily anyway, and there was generally enough web of trust in the immediate vicinity where even if you couldn't get home, you could find an adult or another kid to point you in the right direction.
None of what you brought up really strikes me as a problem. It was just normal life skills.
Cities that have the whole motor vehicle danger thing under control are safe for kids under 8 to wander around barely supervised. SRSLY.
If you stood up for yourself, then they'd take you to your parents.
But the mall/hangout issue still stands, and that's assuming the malls themselves are still standing. A lot of malls have shot themselves in the foot by banishing the kids; when they grow up, the last place they'll even think about shopping is at a mall.
There's many reasons we did. Chiefly, it's far far cheaper. But also, it's calmer and quieter and just a nicer way to live. What we didn't expect to see, which we are absolutely delighted about, is how different childhood seems to get lived in a much smaller city. There have been roving bands of children on bikes all summer getting into who knows what kind of awesome mischief.
We go on completely random drives 3 or 4 times a week, just wandering the city to get to know it better (and get the youngest to nap) and we see kids and young teens all over the place without parents.
Anecdotally of course, but I wonder if smaller cities/towns lend themselves to a far more trusting, free, safe environment to grow up. When I picture letting my boys, when older, go out on their own, I'm thinking about the difference between here and where I used to live. The scariest street has 4 lanes total and is a 50km/h. There's no rapid transit to smoosh them. There's a wonderful central park just one traffic light away. Literally everything in the city is a bike ride away.
Free time is amazing. Here is why.
- I get a break.
- My child gets to learn how to learn on his own.
- My child builds independence.
- My child learns to manage his time on his own.
Free time is a win win win.
I'm a Scoutmaster, and I have one parent who lashed out at me because I asked him not to interfere when the Scouts were trying to do something for themselves.
I didn't let that affect me, I just thanked him for his feedback. Thankfully, I have the support of everyone else in the troop.
What saddens me, is seeing first-hand how bad these parents are for their kids. I feel bad for them. Those kids are going to grow up broken.
This parent's kid only has fun when his parent isn't there. I've never seen him with a smile when his parent is around.
Don't write off that kid.
I teach part time and see this a lot. Especially from fellow teachers. Oh this kid has an alcoholic abusive dad, that kid has a mom with cancer, those 2 have family members in jail etc etc, followed by go easy on the struggling kid or this kid has no hope etc. If the kid flunks a test or skips class let it slide etc.
All this compounds the issue. What is required is the opposite of just sympathy.
Help them find their strengths and interests. Show them how to focus on positives and tune out negatives. Encourage whatever small steps you see them taking. Sensitize the other kids around them to be supportive. Show them examples of resilience and what it takes to be resilient. All these small things add up. Basically don't focus on the parent, focus on things you can do for the kid.
It's very hard to reprogram dysfunctional adults and get them to change, but kids are very different story. And there are few things more beautiful and satisfying, than watching a kid who has struggled for years and years, overcome and kick ass.
You can preach personal sacrifice until the cows come home - capitalist societies are incompatible with having or raising children - they get in the way of the one true God, quarterly profits.
When I was a kid, my situation was different, and it would have been easy for others to write-off me, but they didn't.
I agree with everything you're saying. I'm in Scouting for the kids, not for the adults. I don't know and will never know any of the kids' complete stories, so I hold them all equal and give them the same opportunities to become better people.
Today's kids are tomorrow's leaders.
My wife and my sister are both teachers (languages and physics respectively), and they often encounter parents like that, who insist that their kid can do no wrong, or cannot be allowed to fail (or that any failure is someone elses fault), and it breaks the kids. Some of the kids understand what's going on and do well in spite of their parents, but others become convinced that either they don't have to take responsibility for anything, or insist on doing courses they are simply not going to do well in (like if you have solid Ds in Maths and the sciences, don't insist on doing A-level Physics, and no you are not going to medical school).
My wife's school had a family where all the kids were hard-working, conciencious and all-round lovely, but everyone dreaded dealing with the parents. Any time a kid got a bad mark in anything they would be on the phone demanding an explanation. The kids were always fine about it and knew when they had not worked on something. They sounded permentantly embarressed by their parents.
One of the most popular arguments right now against grammar schools in my country is that the kids who don't pass the entrance test will experience failure.
Plain and clear, the parents do not want their 11 year old kids experiencing failure.
If an 11 year old cannot cope with failure, imagine what will happen when they are older and fail an exam at university, or are rejected when applying to jobs.
Anecdotally, there are entire Troops built around that type of parent. Tried BSA for a few years as a teenager, ended up in a group with a revolving door of Scoutmaster, as every time a child gained Eagle they and their parent would disappear. If you didn't have a parent actively pushing you through the badges and ranks, you were SOL.
My goal is to make the Troop self-reliant, not reliant on me. I need to protect it from the Bus Factor.
That said, I hear you on the 'paper eagles'. I saw a lot of kids with their mom just trying to get the rank for college applications and then get out. It was semi-effective. Strangely, the Mormon troops were eagle mills too, but the guys tended to stick around afterwards all the same.
As you're on HN, I'm sure you are aware of the importance of culture in a start-up. I'd say that a troop also has culture and it is very important too. Maybe read up on some of that stuff too.
Also, as I may have your ear, what's your take on girls being full integrated?
This was a troop that had a strong program and 30+ youth 15 years ago, chartered by a large-ish church.
I don't think the troop produced any paper-Eagles in those 15 years (I kept in touch), but when I took over, the head of the church asked for better Eagle Projects.
As for girls, I'm fine with that. Character-building isn't only for boys. There is Girl Scouts of the USA (GSA) troops that have good outdoor programs but they are very few and far in-between. They are more known for "glamping" and selling cookies. Gold Award doesn't have the same recognition as Eagle Scout. Something that I found out: GSA troops are not always sponsered by an organization, and those that are sponsered, are not owned by the sponsering organization. In contrast, all BSA troops have a sponsering(chartering) organization and the sponser owns the troop. So, GSA and BSA have different programs and fulfil different needs. It's good that more youth now have more options for personal growth.
If I had a daughter and BSA wasn't available, I would look into American Heritage Girls (a scout-like organization, sometimes called Heritage Scouts) or another program like that. The BSA has had co-ed programs for 14-21 year olds since the 1970s though: Venturing, Varsity, and Explorers. However I think it's just Venturing now, IDK.
FYI, in Cub Scouts, boys and girls are seperated by dens (patrols). In Scouts BSA (renamed from Boy Scouts where youth can earn Eagle), boys and girls are seperated by troops (but can have same number, same chartering org, etc... just separate youth structure).
Good God! Why even bother at that point? Camp is one of the highlights of the scouting year. It would be like skipping Christmas.
Glad to hear you are reviving things. It's a tough road and a lot of lonely work. That said, it'll be worth it a thousand times over for the kiddos.
A lot of older school BSA folks aren't that keen on the girls comming in, which is a bit funny. What with Venture Crews, girls have been a part of BSA Scouting in the US for a while now.
I remember the international jamboreesm and international troops during my time in the scouts. Nearly all other countries have just scouting and do not break it up by sex. As such, they kinda looked at us US scouts a bit askance. Everyone else was just fine with girls/boys around and had little problems (that we knew of at least). It was a new way to look at the world that we hadn't been exposed too. Neckerchief trading with the girls from other countries was a great icebreaker too :)
Think about you adult life: When are the moments you have some kind of epiphany about something that currently bothers you? For many people this happens when out for a walk, under the shower or a similar situation when the own mind is free to wander.
Cognitive development is important, but school, discourse with parents etc. is usually enough for the healthy development of most kids. For a successful life as an adult, the emotional development is just as important, though.
A parent's job is to give their kids opportunity to learn and grow. You can't always force it on them, and they won't always be interested.
You can give them them the opportunity to do something that will help them grow (learn, build character, etc) or they can be bored, but if they choose to be bored, they need to be told that they have options, and they are the ones choosing to be bored.
When I was a kid, I used to just watch TV and wait for friends to come at home to play.
In one particular afternoon, there was nothing good showing on TV and my friends are away. I complained to my mom that I was bored(implying that she should solve this "problem" for me).
My mom basically said just what you posted above. That it was my responsibility to find my own fun.
That was an epiphany that had a tremendous impact in my life.
I remember being at an NHL game where a kid was immersed in his device the entire night, despite being in a $148 seat to (IMHO) the most attention-maintaining of all sports. Having never been taken to a major league sporting event for my entire childhood, seeing this saddened me.
Having been taken to professional and high-level college sports many times in my childhood, starting with an NFL game as a toddler, I'm not saddened by it: until I was a teenager, most of the games were either overwhelmingly far out tediously slow, and in either case only weakly engaging. But my being there meant my parents could be there and I could be with them; I invariably had something else to engage me; I never regretted it and I don't think my parents did either.
I have nothing against people who enjoy watching sports, but it seems strange to me to consider sports viewing as inherently virtuous. You could be doing anything with a computer and a network connection. Even watching sports.
Try this simple modification to get them on your side of the argument:
> I remember being at a TED Talk where a kid was immersed in his device the entire night, despite being in a $148 seat to (IMHO) the most attention-maintaining of all events. Having never been taken to a major thought leader event for my entire childhood, seeing this saddened me.
Maybe not intrinsically, but what I see kids doing handheld computers at restaurants (and sitting in a cart at the grocery store, and getting pushed around town in a stroller, and on public transit, and sitting in their car seats, and at the playground, and at the airport, and on the plane, and at the doctor’s office, and waiting at government offices, ... and I can only assume at home too, though I have a smaller sample of kids I can see at their homes) is playing computer games or watching videos.
I don’t think computer games and videos are inherently evil or anything, but they can be extremely distracting and addictive, and some very small kids are dramatically overexposed to them. For many kids these have crowded out a great deal of social interaction, reading, self-directed free play, ...
Paper and crayons have none of the problems of videos or computer games, in my opinion. Especially if they are being used in a social way with multiple people interacting.
I have found that usually my 3-year-old doesn’t have any problem at restaurants unless the adults are talking to each-other and ignoring him, in which case he gets bored and starts running all around, etc. If we are talking to him, playing little games, drawing with crayons together, reading a book aloud, etc. then he is just fine. YMMV.
This is the whole thing. Don't assume that. When my kids are at home they're inventing elaborate games to play with eachother. When we're in public somewhere where they don't want to be, they're doing whatever gets us through peacefully.
I don’t mean that every kid who is sitting on the subway with an iPad also spends every moment at home doing the same.
But some of them unfortunately do spend lots of time at home glued to screens. I have multiple friends whose older kids have serious problems with TV, video game, social media, etc. habits, which start crowding out many other activities, with the parents not really knowing what to do about it because they don’t want to have a fight every day.
And some young kids who might not be on their video / game machine at home are doing it a lot in contexts where kids would have in the past either been engaged with the world or entertaining themselves. There is a vast difference between a 3-year-old riding around in a stroller looking at a smartphone vs. a 3-year-old walking around on their own feet looking at the world and talking to the adults walking with them.
These devices seem fine to break out occasionally when the parent desperately needs a break from demands on their attention. But there are kids using these devices for extended periods every day.
P.S. The same goes for adults: people should trade their smartphones for a book or a conversation with the person next to them or just some daydreaming from time to time.
Putting his headphones on with his Fire tablet helps keep him calm so we can enjoy our food (and so can everyone else). And we get plenty of sideways glances, like we're doing parenting wrong.
People don't see how many hours he spends running around the park, drawing, reading books, playing with toys etc.
Also, don't think to do anything when there are fewer crowds, because this is when these types of people tend to congregate the most - they like their empty, quiet, orderly spaces and your kids' presence is most definitely not welcome at this time.
I mean, as a child in the 80's and 90's when we went out to eat my first question was "can I have crayons and a maze" and once I had a Gameboy...
For me, this journey with my kids has been about a massive slew of things, among the most important:
- extending their childhood where possible: encouraging actual play (and discouraging the pseudo-play of screens) - letting them out: outside play when they’re younger (my kids dicked about in streams and woods from about 5/6 years old); now they’re older (14/12) they take themselves off swimming, into town, to the shops, on the bus to the nearest city 2 hours away, etc - reading, reading, reading. Always. - talking and appreciating them as adults and not as kids. This means trying not to patronise, being adult when talking about politics, religion, sex - being more present: for example, I’ve had a Nokia 3310 rather than a smartphone for more than a year now, and a large part of this has been about not being constantly distracted when I’m with other people, particularly my kids - be there: work less, hangout more. I work for myself, but never evenings or weekends, these are family time. I’m gonna be poor and will probably never retire but these years with my kids are as important as it gets. I’d rather be poor forever and have had this time with them. It’s all too short.
Kids need all the love, but too often this becomes smothering.
I do not understand this, why would a smartphone distract you if you do not set it up to distract you? Can't you just not install all the distracting software and turn all notifications off? This is how i have my phone (i do not have any "social" app installed, do not allow any notifications and have it in almost constant silent mode - though that last bit is to avoid telemarketers who are an annoyance around here) and sometimes i even forget it exists to the point where the battery runs out :-P
And I can always pick up my phone to actually show something I recently liked in the gallery or as a product.
Also a phone is a great way to tell a story when you also have pictures of something you’d like to share in person.
I still do have a SIM-less smartphone at home for banking / 2FA / etc but the winner for me has been not having it when out and about. I don't want to be taking a photo, I want to be looking at the actual view. I don't want to be looking things up, I want to be chewing through what we think.
It's incredibly easy to think your phone is there as a positive reinforcement but in my personal experience, life is better without, especially when it comes down to giving kids your full attention.
I keep running across this sentiment, and although I don't have kids yet, is one I intend to take to heart.
"Quality time" is largely BS - making time for a piano recital is pointless and can barely make up for the time if you miss the fun and general bonding the rest of the time.
I remember the times sat eating dinner on the sofa in front the TV having a laugh with my parents more than the "hero" events like sports days or plays.
If you care about your kids and you're pretty stable (obviously, if you don't have money for clothes and food things will be different), just be there.
Where quality time implies some kind of performance or role, which is stressful, hanging out with one's children is wonderful. I find that the compensations more than make up for the difficulties.
I enjoy the company of people who are totally open and forgiving. I get the profound satisfaction of watching them learn. I re-experience and understand anew certain aspects of my own childhood.
Yes, there's work involved, but children like helping too, and can actually help significantly as they get older.
Yet society seems to have things the wrong way around. The zeitgeist has it that marriage and children are something to be put off until one is ready to 'settle down'. Children are an inconvenience and a financial burden which interfere with socialising and career advancement. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cs072c/having_kids...
I'm old enough to confirm that the etymology of the phrase comes from the divorce generation.
Now my wife uses the phrase as a code for diaper change.
Then drugs, many area's parents won't allow their children out to play due to fear of drug addicts (heroin/crack abusers) and paraphernalia they litter about. This with the whole social housing mess of almost litterly allocating one hard core addict per 10 normal people often see's those 10 peoples live and associated offspring blighted by some "but there a victim" mentality played out by those obfuscated from the reality of the impact such abusers bring to the area. You read about county lines and how `vulnerable addicts` are victims, yet you never hear about the impact they have upon all the other neibours. I know this, I've suffered this and more so, still suffer from this and the police etc are beyond useless. Seen parents take the law into their own hands with one case of some addicts doing crack cocaine in a car in his driveway - police called and effectively unwilling to do anything beyond take license plate so they could flag upon their `intelligence` system. SO the parent baseball batted their car, junkies called police who responded instantly and he ended up in jail. So when you have that kind of environment, kinda hard upon the children to actually go out and play when it's not safe.
But many activities kids enjoyed as social freedoms out playing yesterday are not their today and makes you ponder what they will have tomorrow.
Hence many kids embrace the internet as it is the wild west of freedom for them to explore, a freedom that the real World outside has lost due to all the warning and keep out signs placed due to `smothering`.
Of course, this is all because of lies and locked-in unintended consequences. The schools have no practical reason to be on their knees financially, they are that way because of the politics of employing teachers.
There are school districts in the U.S. where it costs in excess of half a million dollars to successfully fire a provably-incompetent teacher or administrator. It is so expensive that many schools continue to pay full salary to teachers and administrators who only come in to work to prevent their firing. Some of these teachers and administrators are so useless or counter-productive that they are physically separated from the productive parts of the school.
The fact is that school funding has increased dramatically, considerably faster than the real costs of running a school; and the schools which receive the most funding are often near the bottom in performance.
Every time we see a school that actually works, people instantly jump to find some moralistic or social justice narrative to explain why we shouldn't make more schools like that. When charter schools do well, the public school unions and other fearmongers come out to complain that the executives live well, or that the students are cherry-picked (even when admissions are done by raffle!). They often do not qualify for the same compensation, and yet tend to greatly outperform public schools in the same jurisdictions.
A major problem in U.S. schools seems to be a lack of standards. They allow troublemakers to drag down entire classes, for fear that they may be seen as "excluding" that student. Meanwhile, a whole generation of otherwise-promising youth are increasingly illiterate, unfamiliar with civics, and generally incapable of living life in any productive capacity. Here in Canada, there's been a similar depressing turn for the worse, though in slower motion (as is often the case with things like this).
I personally think the U.S. and Canada have altogether too much childhood. Dating girls my age or younger (being in my early twenties), I often find myself cringing when I realize that the person I'm meeting has never done anything productive before, often never even one household chore, aside from their own laundry. I've been paying net taxes since the age of 17.
It is fine and in fact good to be attached to your family; but by the time you're free to agree to contracts, vote, and make other unilateral decisions for yourself, you should have had the experience of needing to do something productive, to take care of yourself or someone you love, or to make a decision with real consequences.
This is not a convincing counterargument, even though sometimes it's a convincing original argument.
Public schools are like they cable company. They claim they can only compete if they have an absolute monopoly.
Public schools are dying because public schools are trash. Time to stop throwing our money at that cesspool.
That's not what I mean by standards. I mean standards in the sense of "No, I wouldn't date her, I have standards." not as in International Organization for Standardization.
I don't see why you have to be a jerk about this, just present your opinion and we can have a civil conversation.
My 2.5 year old in daycare has lots of play time (at least 3 hours a day), plus at an hour at home in the morning and evening. Usually about 1 hour is on the iPad (Toca Blocks is her free play game), the rest with books, blocks, in the garden with flowers, on her tricycle...
The 9 year old’s “before and after school” program is all about free play time, plus two hours max screen time at home, though in summer this is usually replaced by bike rides and/or play dates or day camps, with ... lots of free time to balance out any structured activities. Other than studying for spelling quizzes, there has been no homework from Kindergarten through grade 3.
I regularly see kids at the mall or hanging out in parks. Free time abounds in our world... the biggest issue is there are fewer clusters of neighbourhood kids, friends are more geographically dispersed over a wider area, so play date coordination by parents is a must.
I also find this article strange, from where I live 12-15 year olds have plenty of free time and time to play. And after 16, well, it is to be expected to have less free time. You are about to become an adult.
> I can't really tell what's true anymore
This is by design, and politics is just stagecraft meant to hypnotize the masses, distract and confuse them.
What's that?
America’s true success was in having a large contingent of people trustworthy enough to cultivate a society that didn’t get bogged down in small transaction costs like needing to bribe town officials or worry about deliveries or food/vehicle/road/etc safety and quality. If we lose that trust in America for each other overall, then we will unravel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_Unite...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2018/11/16/alcohol...
I'm 34, in the past month or so 2 people I went to high school with have died via overdose. It's ridiculous.
The motivation for my comment is we see similar trends in all developed countries and the symptoms are identical so calling out this issue as being USA is a missed opportunity to focus on the problem.
My follow up would be which people and communities are most affected ?
It's like instead of education the society revolves around babysitting.
For ex. we played cooking on my grandmothers house on a small toy kitchen where you have to use "META Tabletten" to make a fire. On my parents house we coocked with small children electric plates (10cm or less diameter). The panes where just large enough for an egg or so.
Today it is possible to buy large toy kitchen, but on no of them you really can cook. There are just no real children kitchen anymore .. to dangerous.
What happens in the USA frequently happens in western countries a bit later.
I actually live in Ireland and I’m so surprised everytime I see parents giving their todlers a smartphone with a cartoon on it to keep them quiet.
And the same with kids. There even are tablets in mc donald’s !
And recently, Gardia (the police) stated that they gonna start alerting childcare if they find kids playing outside with no adult watching !
That’s not the way I raise my kids at all. Luckily we are in a house with a big garden and trees.
But, at least in Western Europe, we are sadly following this path..
I regularly avoided doing homework throughout my school life. The only thing I think that suffered was my understanding of physics & chemistry. I doubt I would have better understanding now in any other subject area if I had done more homework, including maths and the foreign language I studied. Maths because we were given enough time in classes to do exercises in which to learn the concepts; foreign language study because it just wasn't taught terribly well and the homework was in the same vein.
Same here. School hours were (something like) 9am to 3:30pm. They have no authority to allocate time after that, no matter how much they'd like to.
If they had a problem with it, that was their problem. Not mine.
And yep, that seemed to fit well with my later career as a professional (IT) contractor. ;)
The only bad effect is that homework got associated with bad feelings (anxiety, stress), because I had to find ways to still get them done without doing them at home. Going into university this was hard to undo.
We also had the rule of one hour per class per day. The funny thing is that this scales up the more time you spend in school, instead of scaling down. In 10th grade, our school days were longer than my parents' workdays and of course every teacher likes to assign homework on top of that, so you can imagine what the expected load was.
In my opinion, homework should be abolished completely. Work should not be taken home. If you want kids to do extra work, have "schoolwork" classes after regular classes, where they can do exercises that teachers provided them that day. At the very least this provides a direct measurement of hours spent on school, provides a clear expectation and forces a cap on how many hours kids spend on school per day. Of course no school would do that because it would be a nightmare.
What do you mean by this?
In France if you are a dorm resident in high school you do have such mandatory "schoolwork" classes. You start with a mandatory 10 hours (IIRC) of classes of study that you have to do each week. These are done in specific rooms at specific times, but you can choose when to go (usually there is one hour open during lunch period and 2 to 3 hours in the evenings).
Depending on your grades the amount of mandatory hours goes up or down. If you are good enough it can go down to zero. When I was in high school these hours were largely enough to finish all homework, including the mandatory reading assignments.
Unlike me, she'd do the homework. On time, even! The teachers could verbally ask her anything on the test and she'd reply with the answer. Yet once the test came, she'd do poorly nearly every time. A few teachers were able to work with her, but otherwise she'd simply do poorly in a class if it was weighted for the test instead of other things.
I was more like you and nearly failed due to homework not being done. I got better when I got older, but I also weirdly had less homework the last 2 years of high school than I did in middle school.
Of course, both situations really are illustrative that education is mostly punitive and it doesn't really matter if you can prove you know things.
I did well in school regardless, because school is about surviving without becoming dumb. The more the effort put into a program that's designed for the stupidest kid, the dumber you become. It was about efficiency, better results than most with minimum effort.
Refer to Taylor Gatto's The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher[0].
We were probably years behind other schools by the time we left, but that meant from 2:30 every day we had free reign. Obviously some kids went down the dealing/thieving route, but I learnt a lot about finding my own entertainment. I honestly think homework is the scourge of childhood, even more so than testing and exams.
and his book Freed to Learn https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R....
He writes about how kids learn on their own if we don't straightjacket them too much and how we're straightjacketing them.
Also Lenore Skenazy's Let Grow: https://letgrow.org, a program to help restore childhood. She was called the worst mom in America after she wrote how she let her 9-year-old take the subway home, embraced the title, and started the free range kid movement.
What a marvelous start, good luck looking trustworthy. It's straight up the same as it was generations and generations before. I also love the emphasis on video games imposed in this article, from the very beginning.
I have a different opinion on this. While I can confirm that some team-based games can tilt someone, it's unlikely that it contributes to mentioned suicide rates in any meaningful way. It's just the same kind of "youngsters these days" activity as it was before. The actual reason may lie deeper in the current state of human society. Fearmongering by the crackpot young adults who still didn't grow up themselves is but one manifestation of what's happening in the bigger picture.
I'm ashamed to admit, being the part of this "young adult" generation myself, that we're a laughable bunch of irresponsible wimps, relying on everything but ourselves to relieve the stress posed onto us by the ordinary "adult" problems. As the result, some of us easily fall the cult-like mobs, failing to recognize the stupidity of our derived positions and causing problems to people around us while hypocritically stating that we just want to make the world better. Our generation isn't strong enough. We ruin each other and the majority of us is too immature to take care of our "youngsters", which is the real reason behind them going rabid or just straight out killing themselves.
We are the ruined generation and we ruin our societies, and what's more important, our kids, the ones who are supposed to be the next building blocks for it. And it's most probably our fault. Or wait, do the games cause that? It's always someone else's fault, it's the guns who kill people, not the other people, it definitely must be the case this time, isn't it? What a mess.
They're fortunately aging out of power right now too.
1. Increasingly, both parents work full time and don't/can't rely on family for child care. The "and" is critical here, because in the past you might have had a single parent or dual income parents, but also had grandmothers and aunties as support. An increasingly mobile workforce, and smaller families mean that familial support structures are dwindling.
2. "Being a kid" is illegal. If you're under 12 in most of Virginia, you can't be unsupervised by an adult for more than three hours and can't be unsupervised overnight until you're 16. States have been turning schools into prison-lite since at least the 90s [1]
2.a. Other parents are your worst enemy in this case. I can't tell you how many times a "concerned" parent has approached one of my kids - while I could see them - about if they were lost, because there wasn't a parent literally hovering over them.
That doesn't even get to all the insane competitiveness of everything that keeps everyone on edge.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/how-ame...
Also, please elaborate on the insane competitiveness. This entire subject fascinates me (and others?) greatly, as I really want to have the best grasp I can of what I'm in for.
Treat them like you would treat a beggar or salesperson you don't want to interact with, say "No thanks" with minimal eye contact and keep moving (or if stationary, ignore them).
I put up with it because my kid has gotten lost before, and other parents have been very helpful at that point (unfortunately giving lots of space can backfire at the store when he just runs off and gets lost).
There is a TV show in Japan (sure you can find it on YouTube) where parents send their 3 or 4 year old kid to the store by themselves for the first time and then have them followed by a film crew (this right of passage is typically unfilmed and unsupervised of course). I know that can’t happen in the states, but I can dream!
At first it was: "oh, thanks for the concern but she/he's fine"
Then it was: "What exactly are you afraid of, this is the safest time in history"
Then it evolved to: "Why don't you mind your own business"
Finally, I just moved to an area where people aren't like that, aka a rural/farm/country area.
When my boys get home, we get outside and do sports. We’re in the middle of (tackle) football season right now and that’s what my 7 year-old does five days a week for two hours every evening. It’s exercise, fun, camaraderie, and lessons for life, all rolled together. My four year-old spends the practices on the sidelines, digging in the dirt with other little brothers and sisters and chasing the bigger kids around the track when they run laps.
When football season is over, we move on to other team sports. When those are over, we ride our bikes around the neighborhood and play pick-up football games in the front yard.
What we don’t do: iPads, TVs, or smart phones. It’s not that came into parenthood with some anti-technology mindset. Rather, we let our kids have these devices and we saw immediately the negative effects on their behavior, attitude, and motivation, and so we took them away. They get to use them on the rarest of circumstances: during airplane rides or as a brief reward for a week of good behavior.
Adam Carolla once said that the problem with kids isn’t all of the things that we’ve added to childhood, it’s all the things we’ve taken away. Sports, free time, boredom, tree forts, and neighborhood exploration have all been curtailed. For much of this, we have over-involved, over-concerned mothers to thank (and a bunch of dads that think like moms).
It doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody is forcing us to raise our kids in the post-millennium style. You can raise tough, resourceful, happy, outdoors-loving kids if you want to.
If you are a parent of little ones, have a look at this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/magazine/the-anti-helicop...
On the topic of iPads, I went to a combined middle/high school, and one year, they moved to require the whole middle school to have an ipad, making the argument that they were being 'technologically advanced' and adapting to the 21st century 'digital society'. It had exactly the effect you might think. You cant type on ipads, so the school still needed to have laptops for kids to use. And at lunch or after school, all you would see is kids playing games or watching youtube on their devices. The school administrators knew what was happening, but didnt want to do anything and admit they were wrong. iPads are a truly net negative for young kids, and I hope that more people will realize this.
> Technology has a time and place, but it should never
> replace human interaction.
"The areas where children once congregated for unstructured, unsupervised play are now often off limits. And so those who can afford it drive their children from one structured activity to another."
edit: formatting
For screen time I found that YouTube gave my kids the worst attitude, so even when we go on vacation all they get is Netflix.
What a hateful, sexist notion to put in the middle of an otherwise articulate comment.
Or what kids actually are able to.
That experience effect is likely much larger then whatever general risk-taking attitude by gender is.
And yet completely true. I've seen it personally in my parents, in all kids around me growing up, and I can see it among friends/family raising kids these days. Guys are simply much more relaxed, sometimes a bit too much for my taste. Not a single case of opposite situation (this might be extreme experience for whatever reason, but that's my reality)
Just wondering if you have time for them to be bored and having to dibs their own entertainment?
Seriously, when did we come to the belief that children need structured activities all the time. Easy answer, when government employees stepped in. When politicians and government employees decided they knew better than parents or children what children needed. After all parents might not impart values that politicians decided are correct!
Then comes DFACS and the police state to bully parents into complying because the power of state arrayed against them is so one sided that the only chance you have is to surrender your parental rights or be stupid rich enough to fight back.
What does DFAC mean in this case? I assume it isn't "Dining Facilities."
The scope of schools, social services, police, etc. in the US are all perfect examples of this. We are now at the point where children from ages 6 and up are doing more work than full-time office workers. My nephew (4th grade in Missouri) leaves for school at 7:45 AM, comes home at 4:00 PM, usually with 2-3 hours of homework a day. And when he does happen to get free-time? Oh, better carry his phone and be with an adult. Frankly, it's total madness, and I'm glad that I am not a child in today's world.
I can't help but feel that this is the result of decades of grand-standing. Every single person wants brownie points for being seen as someone who "supports school". Of course, supporting school never means improving current paradigms, it always translates to "more school days, more supervision, more money, more teachers, more subjects, more more more". New idea, next time someone suggests adding more to a school curriculum, ask them to project the increase in teen suicides. That's a low-blow and an emotional appeal, but that's where things are at right now.
If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened.
If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous.
Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate?
Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.
As a poor white kid when I grew up my parents didn't have the luxury to let me do my own thing because they were often out fishing for a week+ at a time out in the bay area. So I was either waiting in the dock house playing video games for shorter fishing trips or out there on the boat with them for longer excursions.
In other words, whites in that era who practiced 'free range parenting' presumably lived in mostly white communities. If the communities were more mixed at the time, would 'free range parenting' have been as common, even if the affluence and social status of whites was the same?
Another question - what were the parenting techniques like from other races at the time in America? I'm thinking Chinese/Japanese immigrants, Hispanics, Jews, etc. Were well-to-do whites the only ones who largely practiced this style of parenting or were there others?
It wasn't a luxury to be unsupervised... the black people I knew growing up didn't really have a culture of oversupervision to rebel against. We were expected to be able to handle ourselves.
The raising incarceration rates are mostly on black men being arrested more. So obviously, there are less black men available to form families.
All of us neighborhood kids ran around in semi-feral packs and played together, being home before night, and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, there was a lot of work to be done. But kids got to be kids, too, and suffered none of the overscheduled insanity I see around me nowadays.
Slight aside- I honestly think that being able to contribute to the household from a young age was good for our mental health, too. Even if (as an example) hunting grasshoppers for a snack was silly fun together, we were proud to hand over our catch, and it felt good to be appreciated by the adults.
If you want a vivid picture of just how free-range life was in 19th century America, I recommend "Two Little Savages" by Ernest Thompson Seton, a fictionalized autobiography of the author's childhood published in 1903. While it's certainly a romanticized picture, and the events in the book represent an unusual amount of freedom for the protagonists, it still documents fantastically a variety of 19th century parenting styles and the nature of the society that has been lost.
Things are different, but that does not always mean they are worse.
I remember in my football team's locker room, one guy ended up with an erection and beat up, spit on. I got to deal with hearing "faggot" for years just for being the one person saying to stop. I can't imagine that kind of thing happening today as often. There are good and bad changes.
Looking at statistics and research here in Sweden where gun ownership by families with children is rather low, the explanation is more focused on difference in how depression express itself different in boys compared to girls and how adults in the near environment respond to that, difference in the rate that boys reach out to adults for help, and alcohol as self-medication.
So now it takes both parents to pay the same rent that one breadwinner could pay before. Now that both parents are trading a large part of their time to work for corporations instead of taking care of kids, most of the kids are being put in a public school - it has become essentially a glorified daycare center to watch the kids while the parents work. So the work is outsourced to professionals in the school zoned for their residence (nevermind failing schools). They are told to sit down and shut up for 8-10 hours a day. The teachers are told not to do anything rash if the kids act out. There is not much they can do to stop it. The kids that are too troublesome are put in special ed and/or medicated with ADD medications that are chemically similar to methamphetamines.
Working adults also do this to their parents sometimes, putting them in nursing homes which keep them medicated if they are too anxious.
Sadly, it gets worse. There is an opioid epidemic among men and a quarter of middle aged women are taking antidepressants. People are lonely, often living alone without family or village, getting amazon or food deliveries, speaking for 5 seconds with the delivery person, and no one knows most of their neighbors.
We in the US need to have a hard look at our society instead of medicating everyone.
A major step forward would be a UBI and a 30 hour workweek. Men AND women can be amazing parents to their children and caretakers to their own parents if given the chance economically.
PS: And the animals too, we need to end factory farming and overuse of antibiotics and thinking it’s ok. This is a sick society.
As a child, I was used to going out each evening in the neighbourhood to play with other kids. All the kids gathered in the nearest park/playground/court, and we played for hours each day, especially the spring/summer months.
Today, as a parent of 3 (8, 4 and 1 year old), I have noticed other parents don't let their kids out in the playgrounds any more. Playgrounds have few kids, and most children are very young, below 4 years old. Apparently, older children are occupied daily with structured activities, i.e. sports, foreign languages, swimming, music and other hobbies.
My 8 year old daughter really struggled to get new friendships the last two years, since we moved to the appartment we are currently in. None of her classmates are to be found anywhere in the neighbourhood after school.
Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
Note that three of these are in the top 10 (and 2 in the top 5) if you rank them by deaths.
You may debate how useful they are, or if the frequency of school shootings is sufficient to justify them, but I will point out that the number of times I have had to evacuate a school (admittedly, due to a bomb threat) is equal to the number of times we had to "assume the position" for a tornado threat (exactly once).
https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...
I would guess the trend is not so bad in Queensland. One thing that is very impressive here is the number of pools in schools, including public schools, and the very, very active swim programs that go with them. Brisbane probably has one of the best swimming cultures in the world (backed up by the number of swimmming champions that have come from here).
Watching my nephews that nature of their swimming seems to be a bit different, for me we were riding or bikes to pools/beaches by ourselves from the age of about 9, they live in Brisbanes suburbia and have to be driven to a pool/beach and then supervised. They're largely left to their own merits once they get there, but it's more of a family thing than a friends thing and they don't have to learn there own dispute resolution and the like, nor do they get to decide when to go and when to leave.
Although, props to the CDC. That is some serious data gathering, cleaning etc. Most countries don't have that level of detail. At least not publically available.
I'm not trying to be a snide jackass here - I suspect it had real deleterious effects but they were normalized and went uncommented upon. The Black Death appeared to have some similar precedent as western culture became utterly desensitized to skeletons and 'the end is nigh' beliefs became a sizeable reoccurring minority to majority. I believe Rome had similar beliefs as some saw the writing on the wall of their decline. I'm not an expert but I wouldn't be surprised it died out in the dark ages as people were in the actual 'post apocalypse' and doing things like former Roman seamen founding Venice.
Oh that’s right, people can’t cause earthquakes and nuclear bombs are a bit tricky to make. Whereas there are millions of guns circulating right now and even toddlers manage to off themselves with them at a nonzero rate.
I’m a gun supporting liberal, and I say something is wrong with our culture.
It's based on when we start teaching children to heal through trauma, as well as take responsibility for and learn to release their emotions.
These drills are simply trauma fuel. They're irresponsible actions taken by irresponsible, fear-driven adults who think they know what kids need when they themselves don't know how to be ok in an horrific situation or how to heal from it without developing toxic behaviors...
Toxic behaviors like the kind that traumatize children further.
1. There were children born before you with frightened helicopter parents and there will be children born tomorrow who grow up with more freedom than you did. Generational experience is not homogenous.
2. Current trends do not set our future paths into stone, and it is possible that we will be able to plant seeds to move things in freer, saner directions going forward.
That's what I'm trying to do: give the kids the same opportunity we had - freedom to explore the outdoors. Confidence to take care of themselves and not need an adult to do everything for them. To give them opportunites to build character.
The strongest memories I have of Scouts were of the older boys teaching us things, and of myself doing the same for younger boys. These “things” ranged from profound reflections on life to very practical skills. We ran our own fundraisers, planned our own trips and periodic events, and staged our own elections for very meaningful leadership positions.
“The Adults” were always in the background, jumping in to support and advise when asked for. I always thought that they had chosen the easy path, because they didn’t have to work too hard! In retrospect, I realize this was actually the hardest path – to trust that your kids and their insane friends are actually capable of intelligible self government etc.
And this didn’t come at the expense of excellence, but quite the contrary! Our troop had a proud legacy of winning the various prestigious awards at summer camp year-after-year, and the boys were very good at passing down this expectation of integrity and success to successive generations of kids.
That’s something that is hard to maintain in troops with very hands-on adult leaders - once a Scoutmaster’s kids age out, the culture of the troop can change dramatically. On the flip side, troop culture seems to be more resilient when it’s boy-led.
Anyways, I wish you the best of luck! Thank you for bringing these pleasant memories into my head to reflect on. Your kids will thank you for your restraint :)
We also sent them out sailing by themselves all day across the lake. They have to navigate and set up their tent on the sailboat themselves. We only check up on them once before nighttime and then sail back to our own campsite, which may be an hour or more by boat. The next morning they pack up their stuff, prepare the boat and set sail to travel back to the campsite (half-day sailing depending on the wind conditions). The oldest boy (14-15 years old) is in charge and has to bring everyone back safe. Some of my best memories are surviving and being responsible for the other kids. You have to take care of them, teach them and protect them.
These days they have a mobile phone, so in case of an emergency, they can contact the grown-up leaders. But in my time we got a couple of coins for a payphone and we were also fine.
My grandfather collected bells - the ones they had in the old schoolhouses 100 years ago (he'd get them when the schools closed). I grew up in the suburbs but we had a steel bell about 1m diameter on our front porch. For grins mom would ring it occasionally at dinner time. You could hear it 3 streets over. She didn't always know where we were. Sometimes other kids would ring it at night and run away - if you thought ringing doorbells was annoying....
Don't take candy from a stranger. Razor blades in apples…
Unless it's a difference in degree, that alone is not what has changed.
To be sure we seem to be a more fearful society then we were then.
Let your kids play outside by themselves or walk to school, and get reported to Child Protective Services. It is very much a different world these days.
On the other hand, there are plenty of parents who completely neglect their kids. We don't want that either.
I'm just trying to process the irony of this entire discussion. American kids are over-protected because the media has created a culture of fear that terrible things are constantly happening to kids. Now you're going to flip that hysteria around and apply it to the parents.
I don't think childhood in the US is quite as bleak as these articles make it out to be. Probably has something to do with where your area is on the income scale. Upper-middle class kids are coddled and probably always have been. Working class kids can't be coddled because their parents are busy putting food on the table.
It's just that the media focuses pretty exclusively on the well-off, because that is the world journalists live in.
Completely agree with your comment, but "sadly last" here is not accurate unless you're talking about North America and maybe Europe.
I live in Japan and it's quite normal, even in a big city like Tokyo, to let kids play on their own until it gets dark. I feel quite lucky to be in a country not yet afflicted by this disease that has hit all of North America and (I hear) Europe as well - a disease of over-protecting kids to the point of suffocation.
People need to call this trend for what it is. They're not doing the next generation any good, and probably lots of harm.
Which I think is more of a problem than helicopter parenting in America and is what I think our school system is turning into. We're already working longer hours for less pay and increasing pressure on children to perform well even in Kindergarten.
Sorry, as a parent in Japan, I beg to disagree. The system here has lots of problems, don't get me wrong - and I really don't like the "juku" (cram-school) model at all. But particularly at younger ages (which in many ways are the most important ones), there is still that fundamental freedom to be on your own with your friends.
Kids age as young as 5 are often out on their own with their friends outside, or walking to school, etc. That's something you would be arrested for in the U.S.
I see the North American situation as much more scary, TBH.
Do you mean "until age 5"? All of the kids I knew from that area of the world, as young as elementary school, spent every second either studying for school or practicing piano/violin.
> All of the kids I knew from that area of the world, as young as elementary school, spent every second either studying for school or practicing piano/violin.
Sorry, but "that area of the world" is way too broad. Korea, for example, is quite different from Japan. And in any case, it's dependent on the cross-section of society you're talking about.
Elementary school itself, for example, is not suffocating at all, from my experience. Too much homework, yes, but not to the point that kids have no free time.
But again, my point is not about the amount of work. It's about the freedom to be on their own.
So I don't think Asian cities fair better than North America or Europe. It's a global problem. Two kids seating in front of reach other talking via instant messanger or in-game chat.
Of course this happens, but let me return to my point: it's perfectly normal to see a 5-year-old in the park on their own (here in Japan). In the U.S., the parent would be arrested.
Don't try to convince me that those are the same, they clearly are not. Pressure on kids, etc. varies by social strata, city/country, etc. But the degree to which it has been institutionalized, accepted, etc in North America is very different, and I would argue pathological.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
https://geekdad.com/2015/01/kids-play-arrested/
https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...
I didn't even have to dig to find these, they're from the first page of results of a single Google search.
Counterpointing myself though, in the third link you can see reference to active pushback against this whole thing: http://www.freerangekids.com/
I speak from experience having had people (including family) be shocked at how free our kids are here in Japan versus the experience in North America. Whether the media are making things worse (probably) is besides the point: you can get arrested for this as a parent. That's completely absurd and would not even be understood (let alone accepted) in many other countries, including Japan.
The pressure in Asia builds even before pre-school where toddlers have lessons to attend, to get into a decent pre-school.
Anecdotal evidence to see some 5 year kids playing in playground alone in Asia doesn't prove the point that parents in Asia are not robbing their kids of their childhood.
USA is big multi-cultural place with many different parenting styles. Painting all of them with broad brush without statistical significant studies is not ok.
One might not get arrested in Japan, does not prove anything. I might not agree completely with USA system, but it must have a reason to exist.
But I completely disagree with your statements about "Asia", as if all countries are the same. Let's at least be specific about which countries you're talking about, and what direct experience you have with those countries.
I make no claims beyond my local context, and North America (with which I have contact through family/friends).
Also you must be aware that USA laws are quite complex with different state and federal laws. Moreover it's a constantly evolving common law jurisdiction. So the rules related to parenting have a clear reason for existence and might change in future. It does not make the kids worse off than other countries as each has their own problems.
Also in Asia I am talking about cities mentioned in my earlier post. Country or region is just too broad a brush to stereotype, even in Japan Sapporo is very different from Tokyo.
> Country or region is just too broad a brush to stereotype, even in Japan Sapporo is very different from Tokyo.
I agree about stereotyping. But seriously: even Sapporo (which as a rare relatively new Japanese city has similarities to modern western cities) is much more similar to Tokyo than it is to, say, any North American city.
My point is not about whether laws are what where, but that attitudes are in line with those laws (and are what gave rise to them).
Read other comments in response to the post, and you see many other people referencing experiences similar to what I'm talking about.
I'm not trying to say Japan doesn't have problems (it does). Just that on this specific point, Western countries are heading in a very bad direction IMHO.
The same applies to "Asia"
Some students hate club and we had clubs for students that hated club (unfortunately the English club was one of them). They show up for an hour a week and go home. It depends on the principal, though. Some principals are very much opposed to that idea, so if you don't want your kids to spend a lot of time at school it pays to investigate schools that will accomodate you. I will admit that I like Japanese schools and find them dramatically better than anything else I've experienced, so I'm biased.
I remember, discussing with the head of the kendo club why she was into kendo, she said she was not really into it. She could not answer why she chose it or spends so much time there. I think acceptance and resignation are things that are taught very early in the Japanese education system. And don't get me started on the sempai/kohai system that just normalizes peer pressure and a generational hierarchy. I have seen people in their 60s still obeying their one year older sempai!
I did not like the school system I went through in France, but almost every thing I disliked is magnified in Japan. Yeah, the students clean up their classrooms and the admins do their paperwork correctly that's about all I see as advantages. All the rest is about formatting perfect wage slaves with no room fro creativity or self-search.
I do like Japanese education in primary school from what I've seen so far and I will probably enrol my kids in a Japanese primary school instead of an international French school when the time comes
I think I dislike school in general as I think many of the concepts it is based on are outdated and should be improved. Fixed, imposed curriculum over the year with fixed, determined schedule on subjects. No collaboration between students, just competition. Arbitrary rules and authority bestowed upon random adults. Grades that are geared towards establishing a hierarchy rather than helping progress. Lack of interactivity and experimentation, etc...
Since I read more about it, I see France is pretty correct in comparison, with Japan being a conceptual opposite of what I think ideal.
I'll probably leave my son in primary in Japan, but I don't think it is a good idea after that.
I can read your message and understand how you feel. Japan is a hard place to live in as a foreigner. The culture is not like a buffet. You can't take the bits you like and leave the other bits aside. This is especially challenging if you are raising kids, since the school system is going to instill Japanese values in your kids whether you like it or not. A few people have asked me if they should raise kids here and I think it's totally great, but only if you are ready to buy into the Japanese culture completely. If not, it's going to be -- as you put it: appalling.
Indeed, you need to get the Japanese culture completely and uncompromisingly to see what the schools here "teach" in a positive way. However the Japanese culture is about more than just submission and obedience, the other parts, I am fine with, but I am not going to leave my son in a system that considers imagination and critical thinking like deviance.
My parents lived in France for a while and still revere parts of French culture, so I'm familiar with it. Honestly I can't imagine having to reconcile that with Japanese culture. I'm often surprised, though, because French people in general seem to do well in Japan -- especially compared to Americans or British people. Anyway, I feel for your situation. It can't be easy. I hope you find a path that works out for you!
It is ridiculously easy to be a French in Japan. A lot of people immediately become very friendly to me when they learn where I am from.
Also, there's one thing I'll concede to Japanese culture: they do take food seriously here! That's also a strong shared point.
Lately it's gotten even a bit more difficult because you are allowed to apply for only 1 public high school and one private high school (unlike the UK, "public" and "private" refers to what you would normally think -- public is publicly funded and private is privately funded). You can always pay your way into a top school if you have enough money, but generally if you want to get in you need a good result on your entrance exam.
Here's the thing most people don't understand: most students don't care. And by most, I mean about 80%. Only 1/4 of high schools are high performing high schools where students are expected to go on to university. Even with that, most students will prefer to go to a high school that is close to them or where their friends are going. Only a few students choose (or are pushed by their parents) to go to the really top schools.
Even with low level schools, you can still make it to a respectable university. The school I taught in is one of the lowest public schools in the prefecture (one year, due to lack of enrollment, we accepted students who scored 0 on the entrance exam! Seriously, you have to be trying to get zero!) However, we usually sent 4 or 5 students to Nagoya university, which is a decent university. Several of my students when to Shizuoka university too -- which is not a great university, but definitely good enough to get a good job in Shizuoka prefecture.
At low level school, students do not study. I mean, a few study because they like studying, but never once did my students do their homework! Students are carefree, happy and energetic. Compared to the highschools I went to in Canada (I moved around a bit), it is absolutely night and day. It's like comparing prison to a holiday camp.
At high level schools, it's really, really hard work and students stay late to study every day (usually coming home around 8 pm). However, the vast majority of the students like studying! And even if you somehow get pushed into a top level school, every school has a kind of "escape hatch" where you basically decide "academics are not for me -- I'm going to become a factory worker".
This is not to say that there isn't pressure to succeed, but the reputation Japanese schools have is completely undeserved.
And to get to the normal argument: what about suicide rates. We can compare suicide rates by age group in Japan [1] and the US [2]. For Japan under 24 (2014) the number is 1814 (0.0000143 per capita) and for the US (2016) it is 6159 (0.0000190). In other words the US youth suicide rate is about 25% higher than Japan's (Why does Japan have a reputation for high suicide rate? Because older people commit suicide -- it is very rare for young people to do so).
[1] (pdf) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
[2] (scroll down to table) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
Let's say it how it is: this is a gift to private schools at the expense of the poors' education. Private schools are expensive but always have some room left.
Here is how it works: you can only register at ONE public school (that is, a school that will not have prohibitive costs). You can play safe by choosing a low tier one or take a risk at choosing a high ranking one. Thing is, if you fail, you only have very expensive schools left, so most poor families will just skip that part of education or only register their kids to a "safe" high school with low scores. There is not a single good reason to not allow two or three fallback choices.
> never once did my students do their homework!
I am assuming you were teaching in a juku or another kind of additional education. If so, it could be because your homeworks were not mandatory and the school already had given them enough to fill 4 hours of work.
"the reputation Japanese schools have is completely undeserved."
I am not sure the reputation they have in US. French tend to think Japanese schools are good, I was appalled at what I discovered.
Essentially you are allowed to apply for 1 public and 1 private high school. Unlike most places in the west, public high schools still cost money in Japan. It's quite expensive: something like $1000 per student per month. However, the government helps you out if you are low income, or if you have multiple children -- so essentially it's affordable, though expensive for everyone. Private high schools can have higher prices, but not always. So it's not necessarily the case that a private high school is much more expensive than a public high school, especially if you are middle class and only have 1 child.
I think the main reason for the 1 choice only was that it used to be that students would write many exams and then pick the best high school they qualified for. What the new system does is make it so you have to strategise a bit: you can apply for a higher level private school (maybe aiming for a scholarship) while applying for a lower level public school. The main result is that students tend to lower their sights to ensure that they get in.
However, there are caveats: What happens if a student doesn't pass either of their exams? What happens if the student doesn't pass their public exam, but can't afford the private school? So there are extra exams. Essentially, the schools pick the students that they want, but leave some spaces open. Then they do another exam and fill up the remaining spaces. So there is always a possibility that you will get accepted in the second round. Access to education at the high school level is assured, so if you totally screw things up, you will still go to school -- but you may go to some random school.
Anyway, it really is the case that students as low level high schools don't study, generally! I don't know how old your child is. You said teenager and given your story about required sports club, that's almost certainly junior high school. Sometimes if you live in a very rural area with only a small school, then you can also be stuck with what you are stuck with. But if your child enrolls in a school that is aiming the students towards trades, or factory work, the academic expectations are practically zero. If you enroll in a school with the goal of going to university, then the expectations a very high. Keep in mind that the vast majority of Japanese students do not go to university -- it's very different than the west. Usually they will go to a kind of junior college (like 2 year dental assistant program), or a trade school, or they will go straight to work.
In my school (which had about 750 students when I taught there), 50% went straight on to work. Normally the number of students going on to university I could count on my fingers (and sometimes only on one hand). In my area there are 4 high schools. 3 of them are similar to the one I taught in. Only 1 has students who are expected to go on to university. This is totally normal here.
The vast majority of high school students in Japan have an easy time of it. You child may not, especially if you expect them to go on to further education.
Japan is a country with the highest amount of bullshit jobs I have seen. I will agree happily that it is better than the homelessness that seems rampant in countries with high inequalities, but that's still a failure of the educative system.
"I think the main reason for the 1 choice only was that it used to be that students would write many exams and then pick the best high school they qualified for." Yes, and what is wrong with that?
"The main result is that students tend to lower their sights to ensure that they get in." Especially if their parents can't afford a good private school as a backup plan. It may be different where you are, but when we explored the options around Tokyo, private schools were more expensive.
Indeed, you can go after to one of the public school that still has slots left, but that is not your choice, that's a situation where you go "ok, I guess I'll learn bakery then" because you did not score well at one miserable test in your life. That's a ridiculous system.
"something like $1000 per student per month" The one we found, which is apparently one of the best public school in Tokyo is closer to $1000 to $3000 a year: http://www.kokusai-h.metro.tokyo.jp/en/school/expenses.html and I heard similar prices in other public schools.
There are no fairly reliable, widely known alternative routes to the top jobs? In the US you can go to Directional State U and top jobs are mostly not barred to you. It’ll be very, very hard to get a job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs but it’s possible. Even if you went to the University of Northwest Texas grad school washes you clean of all plebeian stain. Harvard Business School or Yale Law School opens the same doors whether you went to a good university or not.
More generally who the hell do Google, Siemens or LVMH hire in Japan if all the good jobs go to graduates of Todai who expect to work at the same Japanese company for life?
I good example of a shokunin is a friend of mine who works for a fibre optics company. The company hires x number of people from her university every year. She started there wrapping cables (even though she's an electrical engineer with a very impressive academic record). Eventually after she learned about the company and worked in various departments, she was given managerial role and she will work as one of the elite people in the company for the rest of her career. After she retires, the company will look out for her. For example, my wife's uncle was a manager at Suzuki and they gave him some land near the factory so that he could build a house and retire. That kind of thing is pretty common.
If you miss the boat, your chances at being a shokunin at a large company are pretty much zero. I mean, it still happens if you have good contacts, but it's essentially impossible. Your best bet is to find a small company and get a yearly contract and just be the best employee ever. Then if the company grows, you might become a shokunin.
But you can still have a good career without being one of the elites. Hell, it's the same for me working for western companies. I'm never going to be CTO of some company or VP of software. I don't care. It limits my ability to make money, but I like being on the ground writing software. I don't think I could even be principle architect somewhere because I just don't want to think about the big picture. I like details.
So even if you go to a lower level school and get a lower level position somewhere, it's completely fine. I think that's the thing that people miss -- you can still have a good career and make a reasonable living. It's just that you are very unlikely to be on the elevator to being VP at Honda without coming from a big name university. Again, it happens from time to time, but it's just super unlikely.
In my experience the same's true for upper-middle class Americans.
This word is becoming way over-used (and thus losing its meaning).
There are real misogynists and real misogynistic behaviour; I can think of a prominent media identity in my own country who is definitely a misogynist. But misogyny is not simple sexism; it is active hating and dislike of women, and words and actions that show you hold them in complete contempt. I don't think that word can be applied across any society; it's an individual pathology, not a cultural pattern.
I think that time of Japanese kids' life is actually when they are the most free, they can goof off and do pretty much whatever they want as long inside and outside of school and no one will bother them (parents and teachers likewise), as long as their test scores are OK, that's one of the reasons that 15 is considered the start of the "best years of your life" (seishun).
Once they are in college, they've made it. It's over. And college in general is not as vital as in the usa, because the Japanese hire the person not the projects or the knowledge. College is a breather between cram hell and salaried life.
The only thing that really scares me here are cars. People tend to drive a little too fast in residential areas IMO. Especially delivery trucks... although at least you can hear them coming from far away.
In my home city in the US, you couldn't even walk in downtown after dark.
Memphis, Houston, NO, St Louis, Baltimore etc have some crazy high crime neighborhoods, and it used to be worse. Murder rates higher than the worst places in the world. Not even places like Afghanistan come close.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
[1] https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/focused...
You weren't a teen in [0] 1978 NYC... specifically the south Bronx. I was (though not from there although I lived just a short drive away) and street raced a bit in that area (you were Not ever going to get pulled over for speeding).. dude that was a fkin dangerous place back then; literally-- packs of wild dogs roamed the streets, and people who wanted to rob you and maybe worse didn't bother to hide. No way in hell you could walk through there and not get messed up, even if you were armed. Seriously.
[0] https://www.villagevoice.com/2014/08/07/the-rise-and-fall-of...
Ironically safety of children seems to be the complete opposite of the direction of the 'increased safety boosts risk taking'. When children have a higher rate of mortality they tolerate risks more but when there is a lower one they become more paranoid. I suspect the reason why is that most people have a terrible innate sense of statistics and probability - as shown by the success of gambling institutions like Las Vegas and the lotto.
-
Murder rate (per year per 100,000 inhabitants)
Japan: 0.20
USA: 5.30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
-
Rape rate (number of rape incidents per 100,000 citizens)
Japan: 1.0
[0] murder: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf (page 16)
[1] rape: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violenc...
Stats-wise, it would be best for the kids to stay clear of their family ;)
In England police recorded numbers for crime are not seen as statistically sound.
> In January 2014 the UK Statistics Authority published an assessment of ONS crime statistics. It found that statistics based on police recorded crime data, having been assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, were found not to meet the required standard for designation as National Statistics.
We can't compare the numbers between Japan and the US because we don't know what definition of rape is being used in each country (and for the US that definition is different for every state).
We don't know if there are cultural things that change how many people report a rape to police. We don't know if police record every report.
Here's a Human Rights Watch article about problems with the Japanese justice system's approach to rape and sexual violence: https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/07/29/japans-not-so-secret-sha...
And seriously, it is causing lots and lots of pain now in my adult life.
From what I’ve seen in Germany, not much seems to have changed since I was a kid.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/26/anette-soren...
> The suicide rate for children is twice what it is for children during months when school is in session than when it’s not in session,” according to Dr. Gray. “That’s true for suicide completion, suicide attempts and suicidal ideation, whereas for adults, it’s higher in the summer.
It seems that families are particularly under stress if such observances can be made. As a single white guy, I find this a bit alarming because I've always had this notion that a family unit would be an easier way to ride out deep depression, rather than not. It just goes to show.
One of the comments I sometimes make to others when this topic comes up is that I'm glad that cell phones and the Internet didn't exist when I was a kid. Why? Because I likely would have missed out on the best parts of being a kid. Boredom was great. We would then find something non-boring to do, such as: ride bikes, play basketball/football/baseball, swim, listen to music, ride go carts, and so on.
Freedom comes from being free. Not from being surveilled.
Keeping an eye on where your kids are is vastly different than commercial entities doing it.
It's a US newspaper talking about a particular US pathology. China manifests this in a different way (heavy tracking of kids) but I think most countries are perfectly ok with kids being kids.
The numbers quoted in this article look ridiculously high to me: https://abcnews.go.com/US/missing-children-america-unsolved-...
But even at a tenth of that, making your kids harder to abduct may be the main driving factor in lowering kids abductions.
https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/assets/4315981/DeathsOverTime.png
Remember, the correct way to look at this data is per person. The US has 30% more people now than it did in 1990. So, even though there were similar number of deaths, you're children are still safer than you were in 1990.
A not-so-fun fact most people don't know:
> One in every three of fatal pedestrian crashes involved a pedestrian with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of at least 0.08 grams per deciliter (g/dL)
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/pedestrian_safety/ind...
Your graph stopped at year 2012 with a rate of 15.1 pedestrian fatalities. The latest report on the CDC website has the following text under "key findings": "In 2016 there were 5,987 pedestrians killed in traffic crashes, a 9-percent increase from the 5,495 pedestrian fatalities in 2015. This is the highest number of pedestrians killed in one year since 1990."
Unless I'm mistaken, this give a rate of 18.1 in 2016. It is a large increase from 15.1 in 2012, though the discrepancy in sources may invalidate the comparison. Anyway, this 2016 report points to a increased fatality rate.
From the same source, it seems the problem is that accidents have not much increased in frequency, but they are more fatal. The fatality rate went from 11% to 15% in 10 years.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
1) the 20' dome monkey bars I played on as a youth got tore down and replaced with a molded plastic installation to play on.
Aside from school demands, there is this whole helicopter parenting phenomenon
At work as a programmer, you’re “supposed” to spend some free time doing projects and have “hobby development”, so you can reach the next career echelon. Even not in a programming career, everything is rushed, it must happen now. People are either on or off, and off is a dissociative activity, desperately trying to save our sanity so that we can be on the next day. We’re rich, but it doesn’t feel like it. I think we need a way for the culture to emphasize “slow down”. If you travel to other countries, you’ll find a much slower pace of life - there needs to be a better way to opt into something like that without giving up basic security. If I quit my job to pursue a slower pace of life, it’s almost a guarantee that I will lose my health insurance. I probably would have to move to another area, but the “slow” areas are either riddled with their own problems or are the playgrounds of the super rich. Where’s the calm, collected, slow middle? I’d like to find it. My job is even very good about work life balance and I struggle with this.
Then the market will sort it out.
True, a lot of the economy wouldn't work without some sort of advertising, but I've felt that they almost always incentivize people to act against their own interests, and companies to stop treating the end users as a customer.
My Facebook feed is almost constantly full of friends (and even my nephew in his mid 20's) posting cosplay photos at cons, photographs meeting artists/actors at cons, showing the comic book-related material they bought at cons, talking about comic book movies, talking about comic book movie panels at cons. Same in my IG feed.
Then, uh, look at Mixer, Twitch... lots of 20-40 year old people playing video games and D&D with small to massive followings.
Society looks down on such women without considering how important constant attention is to children in their formative years.
Working households also have more stress and more bills (two cars, childcare, etc).
Why these points weren't considered for the article is beyond me.
But most importantly, there's no "P" in hexidecimal.
[0] https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nonma...
Hey I'm old too. We played Lawn Jarts--the ones with the points on them. We rode in cars without seatbelts. We bike rode without helmets. Played tackle football without equipment on the frozen ground. We played Hardball at 6. And we Fought with each other.
When I was 7 some older kid took my ball; my mom said "You gotta learn to fight your own battles", that was my first black eye, and it hurt like hell. My dad did go to his house to speak with his dad, since the kid was about 13 years old. But that lesson about standing up for yourself was the most invaluable lesson I ever received.. I grew up in the World of Men where at times might does right, and tbh it still sorta does.
Playground equipment today is very different. No merry-go-round, see-saws, monkey bars, etc. Even the swing sets are not always there.
I'm over my free NYT limit, but the lead caught my eye. Is this a by-product of raising kids in the city, or just a symptom of a tightly wound parent?
I have three kids and their free play was never restricted. I work out of a home office in a kid-packed neighborhood. I hear kids of all ages playing outside after school, on weekends, and all day long in the summer. Not seeing the desert.
...what?!
Unsupervised in a house or on a property in a good area is fine too. I just can't agree with letting small kids wander into cities or roads or forests on their own.
On the other hand I feel like open-ended and/or educational video games like Minecraft fill a similar need for self determination/experimentation/exploration just fine to a degree.
This happens to adults too (especially sheltered ones). It’s a part of life. Wouldn’t you say it’s important for kids to make those kinds of mistakes and learn some important lessons about the real world while the consequences are still relatively small?
Consider too that many of these children's parents also don't have good relationship skills. It doesn't really bode well for our communities.
Kids running free from house to house and playing on their own. Is that really so rare outside of some of the big cities?
Same story when I visited family in Colorado. Just kids playing outside like kids. Coming over unsupervised to play with the kids.
Seems like I might not live in the areas where the sky is falling, but I see kids reading outside, playing outside, and generally being away from their parents all the time in my own neighborhood
This has all kinds of consequences:
- day cares and babysitters are tending kids but aren't really raising them (instilling the parent's values, etc.)
- families eat out more because neither parent feels like cooking after working all day.
- no family time at night because of all the homework being assigned. I never had any homework until high school, but now kids have it in elementary school. Seems nuts.
Screens are a problem, but not just with the kids. I have seen a family of 4 waiting for their table at a restaurant, and both the parents have their face in their phone even when their kids don't have phones. The kids are just looking around, bored and lost, with no one paying attention to them.
I've seen mothers pushing grocery carts, tapping on their phone, and completely ignoring their kid sitting in the grocery cart.
Instead of kids playing with trucks, kids watch other kids play with trucks - on their phone! Weirdest thing I ever heard of...
Isn't this structured in itself? So odd.
And most axioms of Waldorf pedagogics have been been empirically falsified in the past decades.
Luckily the parental household still is the strongest indicator for intellectual outcome of the kids. And as the kids in Waldorf schools are usually self-selected from middle and upper class households, one usually hasn't many dire social or economic problems in a class. So all in all the negative effect of Waldorf schools isn't big.
This has proven to be the common pattern. Everything is event driven -- kids go to practice, they leave. They go to a friend's house at a certain time, then leave. Play dates are scheduled. There is no just meet outside.
We've even ruined adulthood. My parents and their friends would drop in on each other without calling ahead first. I was shocked to discover this wasn't normal when I grew up. Who puts the unprepared house ahead of seeing a friend?
It feels to me, though this could well be a socio-economic bubble thing, that people are just scrambling everywhere. Hyperfocused on something; anything.
Maybe it's their career; maybe it's their cause; whatever. But the innocence of just living, existing; hanging out in this beautiful world we call home; seems to be fading for many.
Happiness must be now, not future, otherwise future it will always be.
Society is a greedy bastard. It gets a pound of flesh in the long run, no matter what.
Still, start with the subtitle - I'd be surprised if you don't relate to it:
"[A]an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable."
With just those sentences, there's nothing to indicate that the author is talking about children, and the article continues as it started. It says that children are more depressed than before, but who isn't? It says that suicidal ideation and attempts have increased among children since 2007, but that also sounds like something that adults have shared.
It points to the lack of a safety net and a lack of help for parents, but is that lack of stability really unique to parenting? Doesn't it suffuse every part of our lives, including our families?
I'm curious - does anyone here feel like you could actually rely on communal structures for anything in a time of need? Anyone in the States?
On a personal note, this sort of lack of a shared community is why I'm moving soon, although I don't seriously expect anything to be better in a different location. People are people everywhere, and maybe that's our problem - when our reward systems get hijacked to divert more and more of our time to the highest bidder, we end up collectively helpless and anesthetized.
Didn't Marx once say that "religion is the opium of the people"? Well, religious participation has been dropping like a stone lately - maybe twitter has supplanted that role. And to think that we used to use the term 'holy war' as an ironic way to talk about how people wasted their time with ideological internet arguments - it's not so funny now, is it?
Reminds me of Chesterton's quote.
> For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
It applies to most of the world
Notable quotes such as:
> It is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. In olden times it was different.
-- The Medical Record, 1884
> If we teach the children how to play and encourage them in their sports ... instead of shutting them in badly ventilated school rooms, the next generation will be more joyous and will be healthier than the present one.
-- Public Opinion: A comprehensive summary of the press throughout the world, Volume 18, 1985
> Our modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favourite magazine, is the somewhat natural outcome of the banishment of colloquy from the school
-- The Journal of Education, Volume 29, 1907
> There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.
cracked me up
I recommend reading "Breaking Clean" by Judy Blunt. Therein, she talks about her trek from growing up on a family farm, raising kids, then escaping to a university town. The problem for her boys was that in the city, they were just boys, but on the farm, they were men-in-training.
other than that, it's worry-free for parents, everyone knows everyone, there is no abduction, no gun violence, etc. it's just kids outside to enjoy and explore the true nature.
I consider the traffic, the cars on the street in particular, is the No.1 obstacles for kids playing outside in US. My kids' childhood freedom is taken away by cars in the neighborhood 95% of the time, the rest is still concerning, but not a big deal.
It's actually a quiet neighborhood but still, hit by a car on the street for young kids is too concerning, so we have kids at home most of the time, where they started killing time with TV, computer, social network, until their childhood is long gone.
It's the same issue here: interesting opportunities have a limited number of slots. My benchmark for getting in is not an "A" or a "B+", it's whatever my classmates have and then some. We all study more, but are not any better for it.
There doesn't seem to be a solution that has been devised for this sort of issue in this sort of a case, as it's tremendously difficult to find any viable means of regulating how much free time a child receives (leaving aside the ethical/moral questions about such a practice).
It's not just childhood, though. Higher education [0] has experienced it. Indeed, any "positional good" which has a limited number which go to the "best" is likely already experiencing this or will soon.
Again, no one has yet found a perfect solution for such an application as this. We've tinkered with the positioning in certain cases (e.g. higher education and affirmative action), but it often doesn't work (in the instance of higher education, while all kids' childhoods may be screwed up, certain groups have theirs screwed up in the "right ways") [1].
I believe another example is the rise among millennials of "experience" vacations. Increased social media usage fuels envy and a perception of being lesser, meaning john doe now feels he needs to take a more exotic vacation and get more pictures with more retouching.
I see no easy solution to this. The normal mitigation is government regulation, but I see no "arms control" type solution for number of math problems done. Ideas, any one?
[0]: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED474473
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
I think it's down to many factors that makes society less competitive:
- I know that if my kid screws up, they'll still be comfortable (have healthcare, pension,...)
- Higher education is free so It's not an "investment" or a "risk" that needs to pay off for me or them. I hope they'll study because they find it interesting. If they do, they won't need a great career to pay of student debt.
- Admission to higher education is never made on soft or arbitrary values such as past participation in extra curricular activities. If my kid scores better on the standardized tests, they'll snag a position at the best school over any a kid that is the child of a billionaire who was always president of all clubs and plays 24 musical instruments.
- Education isn't very competitive. In 20 years of school I never saw a "ranking" where anyones results or grades were published, e.g. where someone was declared "top of class" or similar.
There are a few issues with this, the most glaring that people live longer. You can't live till 80 and expect to stop working at 65; pensions are supposed to pay for the last year or two if you live longer than usual.
> Higher education is free so It's not an "investment" or a "risk" that needs to pay off for me or them. I hope they'll study because they find it interesting. If they do, they won't need a great career to pay of student debt.
It is an investment by some one. If free, it's an investment by society. If suddenly I'm paying for Joey's college, I'd feel I get to tell him to study engineering (or some other high-paying field) rather than poetry, as it's my nickel on which he's going. That's society's right when it pays, because the return would be payed later on in taxes to fund my retirement, in your vision of how this works. In any case, this is always an investment. Putting in years of a life is investment for the student; tuition is an investment for whoever pays. How else do you justify spending many thousands of my tax dollars to let some kid study what's "interesting" and go to parties? Why ought I to pay for that?
> Admission to higher education is never made on soft or arbitrary values such as past participation in extra curricular activities. If my kid scores better on the standardized test, they'll snag a position at the best school over any a kid that is the child of a billionaire who was always president of all clubs and plays 24 musical instruments.
How do you propose to force this? The best schools are private. Also, standardized tests are a poor predictor of future success [0] [1] [2] [3]. Finally, the idea of one "all-or-nothing" test for which you can just cram for a few months (while slacking off for the rest of high school) is silly.
> Education isn't very competitive. In 20 years of school I never saw a "ranking" where anyones results or grades were published, e.g. where someone was declared "top of class" or similar.
Depends which part you're in. The best is always competitive. Also, I thought many teachers (and definitely profs) posted grade lists publicly?
Here's the core problem: every one keeps demanding an economic system that provides not liberty but essentially "freedom from hardship". Every one just wants to eat, and have health care, and a house, and vacation, and retirement, and a stable, comfortable, life. No economic system can guarantee you that. We have limited wants and unlimited needs. Population is growing, and may well out-pace economic growth. Many issues simply cannot be directly controlled by governments. Voting for utopia usually leads to disaster.
[0]: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-31-what-happens-when-st...
[1]: https://news.psu.edu/story/165456/2010/08/23/standardized-te...
[2]: https://qz.com/853128/grades-not-iq-or-standardized-test-sco...
[3]: https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2016/03/test_scores_arent_a...
We didn’t ruin childhood, we took it back to how it used to be.
That was also mostly an aberration (for non-slaves) and mostly during the industrial revolution. Peaceful childhoods certainly existed before then if you look at tribal societies and the way they gradually give kids more and more real responsibility.
That aside, the weight of this sits on the parents, not society. Parents dump their children into scholastic programs and extra curriculars not because of the results, they do so because they’re lazy and refuse to do the tasks themselves. They think it’s difficult to discipline children and would rather pay someone to watch their child scribble with crayons while they sip a latte then spend an hour actually reading to them.
This also leads to them feeling like the time a child spends “doing nothing” is a bad thing. Far from it. That’s when a child learns to be bored. Show me a child that’s never been bored and I’ll show you one that’s never going to be independent. The first step of independence is occupying the space between your ears.
A handful of worms, a skinned knee, and arms covered in poison ivy they’ll remember. The perfect sunset shot they won’t.
This is what happens when the economic / political barriers to competition are pulled out, and you find out that the rest of the world is ready to outcompete your kids, and the cushion you had being the largest, fastest growing, most resourceful country, no longer holds as much as it did in the past.
Sometimes life makes you work hard. And if you give in too much to nostalgia and think that kids' lives ought to be lived in a blissful world free of stress, you're going to be eaten alive by kids whose parents (and who themselves) want better for themselves and are willing to sacrifice a little play time in exchange.
1. We purposely build addiction into social media which leads to more screen time. Anecdotally, there are so many examples of people quitting social media and feeling much better. Screen time is a huge factor for sure.
2. We put undo stress on our kids with all of the testing requirements.I remember how much anxiety and stress I got in school just thinking about the upcoming test. Now test frequency is completely insane when compared to when I was in school. I can only imagine how much stress this is adding to a kid's day. So yeah, I think testing plays a big role in this too.
3. Kids (teens), are constantly exposed to the fear-mongering headlines bombarding them day in day out. Since we set up our media to profit from pageviews, we've created a situation where it pays to play up to people's fears. Kids read these things too and in many cases do not have the mental models or capacity to differentiate clickbait bs. vs substantive information. Hell, even adults (as witnessed by at least 50% of US population) can't differentiate between fact and fiction.
4. Lack of play time. OF COURSE kids are not going to develop properly if they can't learn to socialize and participate in society. OF COURSE they'll distance themselves back into the screen where, OOPS, they'll read more of those nasty headlines and while at it think about the upcoming test. It doesn't help that we now have (billion?)-dollar gaming companies pulling every trick in the book to build addiction into every interaction. What better way to escape the problems of the real world than to retrieve into the virtual one? I can't blame them... this is what I personally did as a teen.
5. Climate change - probably one of the most understated reasons that leaves children hopeless. While we keep debating on the best ways to solve our climate problems, kids are left hopeless about their futures. We have grown ass adults taking to Twitter to insult teens for trying to take some sort of action while those same grown ass adults are sitting on their hands or swiping their facebook feeds.
6. Increased hopelessness, depression and isolation among adults - how are kids supposed to learn to explore on their own and that there is more to life than your screen when their parents are increasingly isolating themselves from the world. When you have a government that is hellbent on making your life more difficult by fueling inequality, what possible hope do you have as a child when you see how your parents struggle to make ends meet? "oh so this is what I have to look forward to..."
You could pick apart any one of those points to trace the origins and have enough to write a Times essay. The point being, it's one massive clusterfuck with multiple points of failure. If we want our kids to have any sort of a decent and bright future full of joy, we should start looking at how to fix our own problems. Start looking at reducing inequality, proactive automation readiness, better social systems, fewer guns, policies to reduce consumption, subsidies for alternative energies and de-carbonization, complete education reform to do away with insane testing, strict laws on what can and cannot make it into consumer apps in terms of addiction building, and so on and so on.
> Well it's not like that in {{small, rich, socialist European country du jour}}
Again, scale. Only Japan and China have really had to deal with this, and their children are likely as stressed and free of free time as those in the US.
Large scale means strict standards with zero room for deviation.