I'd accept "Republicans continue crusade against childhood innocence"
Kids need chores, responsibilities, struggles etc. Coddling kids until they are 18 and then throwing them into the world with 0 life experience is just setting them up for failure. I had a paper route for a couple years when I was 12 and got a job at McDonalds when I was 14.
A lot of this can be learned in extracurricular sports as well, but that's obviously not for everyone. Two a day football practices in summer were harder than any job I've ever had but no one says sports are bad for kids. I don't really see the difference, plus, you don't get paid for sports.
Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines, but I don't see anything wrong with summer or weekend jobs, working on the family farm, etc. It's good for them and a part of learning how to be an independent adult. Kids shouldn't be infantalized and sheltered through college.
That said, lets not lose sight of what's going on here, the DoL has been trying to crack down on 13yo kids in meat packing plants. If this is the line that we're trying to push the overton window past, I want no part of it.
> Dreier estimates that some 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and that the majority of them wind up working full-time jobs.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-la...
> Republicans seek to weaken laws against child labor
> Republicans continue crusade against childhood innocence
There's a lot of bias there. And if those claims were true (spoiler: they aren't, for counterexample, according to the article, Republican legislatures in Texas and Montana have strengthened laws, the Democrat legislature in New Jersey weakened them, and the Virginia state legislature unanimously approved increasing penalties), they'd imply Democrats don't want these unaccompanied minors to work.
Even though this is not, in fact, a partisan issue, one thing is clear. There are many leftists in this discussion who don't want these unaccompanied minors to work. So how do you all expect them to survive?
Flipping burgers has always been legal, and remains legal.
> Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines
From the article, Iowa now allows minors to work in "industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, and roofing". Roofing consistently ranks among the top 10 most dangerous professions in the US, according to the BLS. Industrial laundries deal with heavy machinery and nasty chemicals.
To outside observers, I was a fairly spoiled kid. I didn't have any jobs in high school, and I had a light load of chores. It's not that my parents were particularly wealthy, but I pushed back hard and was generally difficult with them, for the sake of preserving my study time, my free time, and getting a good night's sleep.
But it paid off. I got a scholarship, and went to a state university. Classes started a few days after I turned eighteen. I went out and got a part-time job immediately to pay for living expenses. I worked hard and did my job well, graduated, and landed a job that paid better than my parents.
From the get-go, I was a serious worker who put everything I had into the job while I was on the clock. I'm still that way today, and I find that people are either like that or they aren't. I find there's no correlation between the people who had jobs as teens and how serious, responsible, and industrious they are.
This is all very hand wavey but I'm worried about this new digital generation. I'm now the person I never thought I'd be saying this, but these kids are soft.
"Soft" is not how I'd describe that experience.
Soft is a perfectly fine way to describe them.
Funny you should mention, measles is back, and worldwide fatalities is on the rise. And are you suggesting that US healthcare has improved in the last couple decades? Antivax efforts have made the possibility of a return of endemic polio possible since folks travel, and it's not extinct. Measles was on its way to extinction in the 1990s, but after Wakefield's fraudulent study and the partisan politicization of disease, a host of diseases we never had to worry about anymore are popping back up again. As child vaccination rates continue to drop, we will see it all again.
The adults by and large have all been vaccinated. The kids however are being treated like guinea pigs in an ideological experiment where the losers are the kids themselves.
And as a child of the 70s and 80s, yes, I personally remember the ever-present threat of nuclear war growing up. I also remember the teen suicide rate being abnormally high due to it. Kinda like the rise we see today. It takes its toll, and doesn't at all mean they're "soft".
Necessarily.
If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you likely lived during an era where your parents paid little to no attention to what you were doing on a daily basis. People had children after a childhood of benign neglect and decided that they were going to be their kids' friends and began to hover. They bought into every stupid little bit of propaganda and couldn't let their kids out of earshot. So now they have a bunch of kids who only ever get away from their parental units when they're at school, and they are unsocialized as hell because most hoverparents will take their kids' word over that of their teachers.
They have no internal conflict resolution skills because their parents would jump in to handle the situation. They have little to no socialization skills. They need apps to find dates.
Generations are largely what their parents make them to be, and these kids are the absolute epitome of soft. And they're gonna be real big mad in another 30 years when they don't get anywhere with work because their entitlement continues to outweigh their performance.