Reaction: Who's this magical "we", who's supposed to teach parenting? Is it related to the magical "them" who run the world, from a child's PoV?
Schools? The same "magical" we who teach math, for example.
I haven't been in school for a long time, but back in the day we had home ec and shop classes. I even took a typing class in high school, which turned out to be quite useful. We can teach kids practical life skills.
That's an overgeneralization. Schools vary widely in quality. Some schools have excellent results.
Should we shut down all the schools? I don't really understand how the nihilism in these replies makes any sense.
I don't you understand just how bad things are. Nationally 29% of 8th graders score "proficient or higher" in reading, 26% in math. The median American student is doing far worse than you think.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-test-everyone-will-fail_b_4...
Tell me how the US students compare to all of the other industrialized nations.
And again, I ask, what would you suggest? You seem to be suggesting we shouldn't be teaching parents skills in schools, because schools are allegedly no good, but isn't that also an (absurd) argument that we shouldn't be teaching anything in schools?
I don't accept the "failing" narrative. I think it's bogus.
You still haven't said what you'd do, though. Wouldn't you fire a failing employee? By analogy, wouldn't you shut down all schools?
However, it is the outsourcing of looking after children to professionals that causes the problem in the first place.
Otherwise people would learn from their "village" as the author puts it from when they were kids themselves.
You also learn to parent if you spend lots of time with your children. I worked from home from when my oldest was about an year old and it made a huge difference. I admit I cannot reconcile this with the increased amount of time the article says parents spend on caring for children, but I wonder exactly what those numbers are recording as they are hard to reconcile with the article it ultimately links to which comments on the shift from male breadwinner plus housewife households of the past..
The "steeper expectations" are the other big problem. You do a better job if you relax and enjoy it.
Now, take the source with a grain of salt, but in the Ramona series one of the characters has swimming lessons at the YMCA, and they get on the bus by themselves and go to the Y, swim and come home. Zero time spent on the parent's part. These days that'd probably be 60 minutes of childcare
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/the-at-...
Here's the problem with that. A few years ago the FBI announced that they had liberated 42 children from sex trafficking. What they neglected to mention: "the professionals who look after children" had lost ALL 42 children in 4 days.
Which of course means that in about 4 days every last of those children decided anything was better than "the professionals who look after children", and had run away. The idiots among those children who ran away to their home were ... well, idiots (for a child, that's a crime, ironically called "depriving a child of parental rights", yes, running away FROM youth services TO parents is called that). In other words they got arrested, and put in juvenile detention.
(this is a crime also somewhat famous because the police, on a regular basis, refuses orders from a judge to arrest)
The real change is elsewhere: in 1970, having child allowance for 3 children was essentially a living wage. In 1980s, it was over 5. Today ... 15? We effectively had professionals who look after children (almost exclusively mothers), paid but not employed by the state. Today we seem to have lots of professionals who don't seem to do half of what those mothers do, but spend more on them. We exchanged child allowance for a huge expansion of government. It didn't work, to put it mildly.
Of course, these days such a policy would tilt greatly towards immigrants, and it's probably a non-starter especially with Trump's numbers where they sadly are.
And the joke is: look at the population pyramid. Even if we decided to reinstitute that policy and it actually got fertility back up to 3 ... it's too late. I don't know how we're going to keep population, even in the US, at the level it currently is. In Europe ... "will the last person please turn out the lights?". Ironically China is actually the country arguably worst off. Hell, in 20 years we'll need a version of youth services that actually breeds children or something.
Of course, nobody is arguing that this needs to start happening, well, 20 years ago. "Too many people" you hear everywhere. But look at the numbers: there's WAY too few people.
And using immigration to fix the population pyramid in the USA would probably not work due to housing and politics?
New Zealand fixes its birth rate imbalance somewhat by immigration. About 30% of our population was born in another country (i.e our population is 50% higher than it would be without immigrants).
Note that NZ is managing to make more houses "Auckland increased housing supply by 4% from 2016 to 2021"[1]. Interestingly increases in house supply don't decrease prices (presumably house demand is still outstripping house supply in New Zealand, unlike some other aging population countries with declining house prices in locations). Auckland is highly unaffordable (about as relatively unaffordable as San Francisco: wages to prices).
Immigration drives house prices up, simplistically +10% immigrants doubles or triples house prices: "We suspect these two features largely underpin Coleman and Landon-Lane's (2007) and McDonald's (2013)| macro estimates that a 1 percent population increase from migration is associated with about a 10 percent increase in house prices nationally"[2].
Whether or not we want it, institutions do teach parenting. I, for one, took the parenting course when I was in high school. I also took another parenting course offered by the local health authority just before I was about to have my first child.
Perhaps what is really going on is that parents/would-be parents don't want to be taught?
That is certainly a theme seen outside of the topic of parenting. High school graduates in particular, who have spent 12+ years of their life in the education system, are oft considered 'uneducated'. Not because they actually are uneducated, just that they haven't received an education from a particular school.
I don't know where this general idea that we don't teach parenting comes from. Even ignoring said classes, once I had children the teachers will still lining up around the block to help me through the process. There is no subject I know of that has more teaching resources directed to it.
Kids that finish high school are considered uneducated either because contextually we are talking about specialized skills and secondary education, or because school does a terrible job at actually educating.
Right, and still do. That never went anywhere. That is still how it is done.
Since the dawn of man a small group of, predominantly young, people have set out into the world and left their families behind, but we saw a temporary aberration where that rate rose as people left for college, often to never return. While that trend started seeing a meaningful reversal by the late 2010s, those of average child rearing age today would have been the young adults most likely to leave around the peak migration.
We're still not talking huge numbers. The large majority of people have always stayed close to their parents, but enough people separated from their families that you can write an article about it. Particularly The Atlantic, which caters to the type of people most likely to leave their family behind.
Clearly we do teach parenting, from families, to the community, to even under the direction of formal institutions – so perhaps the takeaway is that the Atlantic's primary audience thought they knew better when they were 18 when they left their families behind, never befriended anyone older with children where they ended up, and now are feeling the consequences of their actions as they have children of their own?
> People want to be taught how to parent, just not by the government.
Keep in mind that the article is focused on America. Government is the community. Understandably, things are different in China (or whatever overlord it is you live under).