How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation | Hacker News Reader

How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation

afterbabel.com

36 pointsthrowup23858 comments

To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in.

As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.'

But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors.

Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong.

And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries.

But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?

> It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in.

The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit.

And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.

"the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else"

That sounds like article of faith. The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? What about other poorer European countries? In a cross-border comparison, there is no obvious strong correlation between the parameters you mention and violent crime, how could there be a causal relationship then?

And if we limit ourselves to the US, what about crime development in time? It certainly didn't rise and fall in lockstep with poverty, income and wealth inequality, not even in the last decades.

> The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society?

It got way worse during the Thatcher years and especially following them, with the formerly mighty heavy industry all but collapsing, and the Brexiteers made heavy bank on that. The aftershock of first Covid and then Ukraine with the gas price and general inflation was yet another heavy blow.

I live in a Czech city where the formerly mighty heavy industry collapsed spectacularly, after decades of being propped up by the previous regime for ideological reasons.

Knifings are still pretty rare here. I have met and lived with plenty of poor people and mere material precariousness won't remake one into a callous psychopath who behaves like a violent predator.

Drugs will, though. Frying the brain, as they say.

The UK has been described as an Eastern European economy with London bolted on. Poverty is very obviously increasing there, for anyone familiar with the country.

Come visit us in Eastern Europe and see for yourself that a lower income doesn't equal to "people behaving like wolves".

My grandpa grew up without electricity in his home, seven people in a single wooden hut. He was always a kind old man, even though a bit of a drunkard.

I don't think we can isolate any one variable.

Poverty does tend to correlate to crime, but poverty never exists in a vacuum. Population density probably has a greater bearing on crime, and poverty and population tend to go hand in hand in metropolitan areas.

If you have an area that is poor but has few people, there'll probably be less crime, as less people means it's easier to track each person socially, and thus there's more accountability.

I'm sure there are studies that show optimal 'tribe' sizes, and I know from experience how different orgs can be from small teams to large teams, so it stands to reason that the key driver is probably population density.

we have to differentiate between 'low level' crime and 'high level' crime, e.g. fraud, financial crime, all of those super-rich organised crime

>That sounds like article of faith. The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society?

From WW1 until about 1975, no it was getting less stratified. The upper classes famously had to relinquish their country houses because they couldn't afford to maintain them and the middle classes grew.

It wasn't until neoliberalism took a foothold under Thatcher that social stratification started to grow again.

Bit of both, really. Do not fall for the illusion of a golden age. Overall violence peaked in the middle of the 20th century and has been gradually falling.

The approach that does: https://www.svru.co.uk/ / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit

You need both carrot and stick, and you need the police to target people who are doing crime and not target people who are not doing crime.

Media distortion driving fear is a whole other category of problem.

I agree. That's a very good point. There isn't the same level of community spirit here in the UK that there was 60-80 years ago. Things change, and I'm sure population is a significant variable in the equation, but not the only one.

If we go out to rural areas, we'll probably find more neighbourly behaviour than we will in inner cities. Poverty, population density, economic status, and more. These all play a factor.

I immediately wanted to answer: you are wrong about the violent knife guys, that's only a feeling, look at the statistics, the crime rate in UK is decreasing like everywhere else.

Then I looked for the link to support my argument. OMG, statista says that the violence rate is skyrocketing since 2015, at least in England and Wales. This is not the case for other Western European countries.

Quite interesting! I try not to interprete these numbers, because I don't know the reasons behind them.

>This is not the case for other Western European countries.

It is in some of them like Sweden for example.

There is a very strong correlation between two factors here, one of them being violent crime, that Western Europeans are very hesitant to acknowledge.

Sweden is well known for having high levels of this other factor right now, so your observation about violent crime is not surprising.

Could you elaborate?

They mean immigration

I think we should be able to talk about it here. It shouldn't be a taboo subject where we fear pointing out correlation between immigration and poverty, and poverty and crime, links immigration and crime. Increase poverty and you increase crime. Increase immigration and you increase poverty. Therefore...?

So long as we're objective about this and leave tabloid mentality for Reddit and Twitter (...ok, X)

I agree, but it is a topic that tends to lead to unkind discourse, for reasons I’m not really qualified to elaborate on. I have no idea what the real situation, or possible answers, are.

Of course, I’m an immigrant, so…_shrug_

Around here (Western Europe) violent crimes trigger fear and outrage, they make the news circuit for days, and many a politician demands stricter laws. They are certainly acknowledged!

If you (or anybody, really) files a charge with the police you can bet good money on the fact that it enters the statistics. For all the faults of modern bureaucracy, being sloppy is not one of them. They may be ineffectual but the paperwork is in order!

Or in London too. You're safer walking alone at night in Prague or Budapest than in many parts of London.

Not coincidentally, we saw massive cuts to the policing and criminal justice budgets in the years after 2010. Prisons are 99% full, the prosecution and probation services are overwhelmed, there's a two-year backlog of court cases and thousands of experienced police officers were replaced with cheaper new recruits.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Britain has descended into lawlessness, but not a vast exaggeration. A great deal of crime is simply being ignored, because there aren't the resources in the system to investigate or prosecute it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crg5vp0296eo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60071691

It's almost as if showing young people lots of movies where people murder other people who move weirdly (the zombies) might lead to kids imitating this behaviour.

And I'm pretty sure this perfectly correlates with poverty. Both parents working means the kids are at home without supervision and with unlimited access to the TV and streaming services. In my childhood, it was still pretty easy to see that zombies were a movie invention, but with modern CGI, I can't tell the difference anymore.

The link between zombie movies and people stabbing each other with ""zombie knives"" (which I've never seen featured in zombie movies...) seems extremely dubious. I don't think these stabbings are caused by people acting out things they saw in movies.

I'm not sure about the first point. I grew up watching zombie films, playing resident evil, all those games, and have no feelings of going out and doing it to actual people.

Yes, graphics were worse when we grew up (assuming same rough age) but we still looked at them and said "Wow so realistic!" so I don't think that the issue is that people now see realistic zombie films and think, great, I'll go stab someone on the bus for disagreeing with me.

I think its more the case that people are living in dangerous neighbourhoods, so they carry a knife for protection and are amped up ready to use it and so at the first sign of confrontation, they do. What used to be a fist fight is now a knife fight. What used to be a sore head is now a dead body.

But, I do agree with the poverty link. I grew up in poverty, I saw the lifestyle, the way people act, the way they aren't raised by their parents. It's been this way for thousands of years. It'll never change.

> So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors.

So we evolved to create a device / technology that creates expectations and an environment that are entirely counter to our evolutionary upbringing?

We now expect to stop what is impossible to stop (i.e., life)?

And we can't stop ourselves to stop wanting to stop that thing (again, life)?

And we've normalized and culturalized all this to the point that we blame the device and anyone but ourselves for our own decisions and actions?

Surveillance Capitalism... is a certified success.

p.s..Parents have / did care. But they generally didn't feed an unhealthy paradigm. They had a reasonable sense of what mattered, when, and why. Their foundation was trust, not fear; and often they had faith (which is something the paradigm has convinced so many they don't need).

Nope. Previous generation didn't care? Thats properly insulting to whole generation, maybe its your situation and I am sorry in such case, but please stop making such wrong accusations.

Death was around, from time to time some kid would die - hit by car, fell down something, got sick etc. If anything parents were more resistant to suffering, just sucked it up and moved, they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude. They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued.

Its up to each of us to create for our kids environments we want them to raise in. You are a control freak or helicopter parent? Well there will be consequences. You run in cca full trust mode with your kids and just manage things like healthy food, tons of physical activities, a lot of time spent in wild nature and let them figure the rest? They can have it too, but some trust into them not killing themselves is required. You don't like the place you live in? Change it if you can or leave it otherwise, world is big and plenty of good places to spend rest of your life in.

Apologies if it upset you, not my intention, but the prevailing feeling (in the UK at least, and these are UK HN hours) is that Gen X were quite absent parents for the most part. They weren't as strict as TGG or Boomers, but weren't as switched on and present as Millennials.

> they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude

> Previous generation didn't care

Allow me to make one small change then

    - Previous generation didn't care
    + Previous generation didn't care as much

> They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued.

If that method of handling their emotions made them more resilient to hardship, then maybe it was the correct way after all.

The problems you don't even acknowledge are there won't ever be resolved nor addressed. Sure, you can keep ignoring them, but as life goes on the pile of stuff just sitting there that you constantly have to keep looking away from grows significantly. Not life I want to live, nor a parent I want to be.

If somebody's kid dies from polio or whatever, there's no solving that by talking about feelings. Scientists and doctors can make sure it doesn't happen again but we're talking about the way parents reacted, or didn't react, to trauma. If in fact they generally didn't talk about it and just soldiered on, that was an effective method of dealing with it. Better than spending years in therapy crying about it, as seems to be fashionable these days, which won't bring their kid back. And particularly, moving on without dwelling on the past seems better for the surviving children than the parents becoming overprotective (the thesis of this discussion, if I've understood it.)

> My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us.

I think that, as a not yet fully developed adult, you weren't exactly noticing that they did care.[1]

Think about it this way: remember all those times they stopped you from doing something stupid that would have hurt yourself? Yeah - that was them caring for your wellbeing.

[1] Fair enough, you say 'seemed to not care' and not 'did not care'

I think it's more the "the time is 9pm. do you know where your children are?" PSAs and such of the time, where kids were expected to be outdoors or on their own playing for extended periods of time.

ref: https://youtu.be/jBy9VDEWKOE?si=maH8tfgA35KF8osf

Unfortunately growing up in poverty, there weren't that many times they stopped us doing stupid things. I feel like it has given us street smarts, yet at the same time, I couldn't imagine doing the same to my children. Weak strong cycle perhaps.

How do Americans deal with other parents? I've heard so many strange stories about parents getting arrested for things that seem perfectly normal across the pond, like letting your kid walk to school or the store (or that Danish lady whose child was taken away from her by cops because she had it in a carriage outside the cafe, a normal thing to do in Denmark, such an insane response to a simple cultural difference)

Yes these absurd consequences end up forcing parents to raise sheltered children who have too much intake of social media insanity because they can’t just play outside all day on their own. And that lack of self reliance and poor digital exposure leads to their development issues that carry into adulthood.

But at the same time, American cities are unpredictable and there is often a rational fear of crimes for parents. In some cities crime is due to a lack of law enforcement. In others it is due to poverty and lack of opportunity. In others it is due to uncontrolled immigration (for example poorly assimilated refugee groups). In others it is due to uncontrolled school environments, where your “good” kid may run into problems with the “bad” kids they share a classroom with. With all of this going on, parents can feel like they have to be controlling and in a constant alert state to avoid something unexpected happening to their precious children. And that fear leads them to this style of parenting, not just fear of consequences from police officers.

But if you go away from cities, to rural areas, you’ll see parenting is more comparable to European parenting.

1) Some years ago, I lived opposite from a school with children aged 6–18. Some used the bike – the school was reachable by a bike path–, others walked, took the bus or the tram.

Then there was the parent-taxi group, who were hauled into their parents' SUV right after school. I wonder how they were ever able to spend time with their friends, be spontaneous or just ... "explore."

2) 1995. In our village, some children aged 6 took the bus alone. As a child myself, I was amazed by that. I would have never imagined to do that (I lived in walking distance myself, so I walked.)

But these pupils weren't "alone", of course. They might have felt alone at first, but of course everyone knew a six-year-old with a backpack at 7:30 is headed to school. The other children in the bus know. The bus driver knows. Everyone knows. You can't really get lost.

The SUV parents made it much more dangerous for the bike kids to ride to school, leading to more SUV parents, etc.

It's accepted for parents to not be reasonable where it concerns their children. Unlike other instances of a person's judgement being impaired, it's not the norm to let another person be reasonable for them - or for them to seek out rational advice.

The outcome is that parents compromise their children's development because they're afraid their child will get struck by lightning under a blue sky. Chances are we're raising a generation of adults even worse than the last few: already many spend most of their conscious thought jumping at shadows, never grew out of relying on a parental figure, and have next to no agency. Luckily there's still enough fully formed adults around to shepherd them through life, but I do worry how bad the next bunch going is going to be.

It's an ad for a non-profit which offers experiences for kids. It takes a while to get to the ad, though.

Focusing on tech or anxiety is too superficial and misses the deeper reason. The nature of parenting has completely changed. For modern parents today kids are really more like a tool for self-actualization (so is almost everything else), personal projects, rather than independent people in their own right.

That's why they're so obsessed with following them around, kids are just an extended version of the life project that is you and so every minute of the day must be spent optimizing it. It's why this phone anxiety isn't prevalent in all classes but this discussion always evolves around members of the middle class and up.

It's also I think one of the most important factors of falling birth rates that nobody ever seems to talk about. If you're obsessed with one kid every waking hour of the day nobody simply has the time to have another one.

This is an ad

Lenore Skenazy is one of the researchers frequenlty cited by Jonathan Haidt.

> Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years”

Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. If there would be an aggressive dog in a neighbourhood, a few decades ago, it would get solved pretty fast.

Today, murderous beast is not put down, even after disfiguring a person! Instead it gets processed through no-kill shelters, and goes to new family with falsified history!

Today we have many more dogs. No training. Large work dogs who need attention and space, go crazy in tiny apartments!

And attacking kids is somehow normalized. They were "walking a wrong way" on public street, and that somehow confused and scared "reactive" dog!

Maybe there is less gun killing, but that does not mean there are no dangers!

The way people raise dogs does seem worse. When I was a kid, people would chain their unruly dogs to trees in the back yard. Today people would be scandalized by that, and certainly don't want to hear that their precious super special pupper is anything less than a good dog. Dogs off-leash even in public seem far more common now, as do owners excusing bad behavior and refusing to correct it. If your pitbull or german shepherd starts jumping on me, I don't want to hear you say "oh he's just excited!" And I don't want to hear about how well trained your dog is if you need to shout commands at it a dozen times before it listens.

People are treating their dogs like children (even people who have real children) and spoiling them with a hands-off you're-so-special mentality.

I’ve seen a massive increase in entitled dog owners in the past ten years. But especially since COVID. It worries me when a clearly inexperienced owner is walking their badly trained pitbull or whatever off leash through the park, near children.

> Most stuff does not get reported as a crime.

Of course. The real-world numbers do not match your worldview so there must be a large dark figure of unreported cases. This is a case of your fears twisting your perception.

Take your dog example. I don't know where you live, I live in Germany. With about 10 million dogs [1] there are about 5 fatal incidents per year [2]. If the dog is not killed in the ensuing police action [3] it is often "amtlich getötet" (officially killed). The dog owner is usually criminally charged with involuntary manslaughter, because dogs going haywire is in virtually all cases a failure of the owner. There are no reported cases of bringing a dog back into circulation after a fatal incident. These are the numbers in Germany.

[1] Despite the URL the data is from 1998 to 2022. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/157642/umfrag... [2] https://www.zzf.de/marktdaten/heimtiere-in-deutschland [3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfr...

There is a special case in the UK of people deliberately breeding aggressive dogs and then claiming that they aren't, the "Bully XL" problem.

Interesting that Germany charges the owner. It's not clear whether that happens here - if it was the case, I would have thought more noise would have been made about it while legislating to ban that breed.

Yes, that's the way around here. By German law, animals are things with special protections against cruelty. Much like, e.g. a car, the animal therefore can't be the guilty party. It is the responsibility of the "driver" to control the thing so that it does not cause harm.

You loose control over your car and somebody dies? The controller is charged with involuntary manslaughter. You loose control over your dog (e.g. dog runs across street, lorry has to evade, lorry kills pedestrian) and somebody dies? The controller is charged with involuntary manslaughter.

I would actually be surprised if the UK treats this differently.

Interesting, I live in EU.

I was in Munich a few years ago. Dog owner mugged me, scratched me, and stole my lunch. They broke several rules and attacked innocent person! Then they fled the scene! No proof of vaccination! I had to spend several hours on ER and pay tests out of my pocket.

Police refused to take a crime report! I got attacker on camera!

In US few million people go to ER with dog related injuries every year!

I'm sorry to hear that. It is not clear to me if the dog attacked you or the dog owner, which in out discussion would make a difference.

Anyhow, the real upset here is the police refusing to take a report. Obviously, this is not unheard of, but it is still forbidden* All reports must be filed. The reporter may need to come to the precinct, but the reporter may not be refused. In Germany the prosecution determines if a report is investigated, not the police. The police officer was therefore in negligence of his duty. You can, without respite or form, file a disciplinary complaint, in your case direct it to the office of the police president of Munich.

* That's actually not quite correct. If the report is obviously non-sensical, erroneous, or false the police officer may refuse to file it. You can escalate and you can still file a disciplinary complaint.

> In US few million people go to ER with dog related injuries every year!

I guess, in Germany it's less. I've only found numbers for Berlin (3.5 million citizens, 130000 dogs) where about 500 dog related injuries are treated each year. But that's something different than a dog attack. I've been injured by dogs, and the dogs were certainly not attacking me. Believe me, if a dog wants to attack you, you get ample warning and you'll notice.

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