I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.
Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurricular activities.
Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate
When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them.
Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics, library group sessions, and to my absolute bewilderment and dismay—beauty pageants. On any given week, there are 5+ activities outside of school. My spouse stays up until 2 AM “helping” our daughter on her kindergarten school projects. Never mind all the activities our 2 year old is ramping up into.
I don’t think this is healthy at all for children, and it’s really created a rift in our marriage. It’s been so bizarre to me to see this change in behavior from what we discussed prior to marriage compared to now. I worry the kids are going to burn out. I certainly didn’t grow up this way, and my personality as a kid would not have handled this well.
When I was my daughter’s age, I was living in a foreign country due to my dad’s job at the time (didn’t have many “scheduled activities” though). Personally, I always thought being able to experience other cultures at an early age added significant value to my upbringing. My spouse however is adamantly opposed to even vacationing in foreign countries due to a fear of “something happening” to the children. Again, this represents a change in perspective that only came about in the last few years.
I’m not sure what has happened with my spouse, but it definitely tracks the article’s observation that parents are becoming increasingly anxious and fearful and we’re likely suffocating our kids’ development.
My friend is one of those 'overly involved' parents with his daughter: tennis lessons and competitions, sailing lessons and competitions, skiing lessons and competitions. He sacrificed a huge amount of time to give his daughter every opportunity.
I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?"
He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's now so good at tennis that wherever she goes she'll be in demand to join the ladies team."
Looks like he was right: she got into a good university with a sailing scholarship, she is athletic, has a good relationship with her parents and is an all round happy and pleasant person.
Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though? I understand that it worked well for your friend and I am not knocking athletics, my own daughter is doing gymnastics, but that seems like either a post-hoc justification on the part of your friend or a strategy with a low rate of success such that it seems a bit odd to go for as a parent.
Personally, I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out and die in the last 15 years (I am in my mid thirties). I grew up in the Gifted and Talented cohort but without that Tiger Mom kind of parenting. I did fine, got a full ride to a state school, make good money and work a relaxed remote job.
Most of my cohort went on to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie, the Ivy Leagues. Of the dozen or so I really think only one made it through that pipeline unscathed and successful. Several dropped out to become bums at their parent’s house, one was homeless and became a stripper. Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers.
These are all “good kids” from stable middle class or even richer families. It’s a bit strange to have watched.
That's sad. There are so many factors at play. I would say that with my friend and his daughter, one of the reasons it worked out well was because they spent so much time together: traveling to competitions, driving to the mountains for skiing every weekend. They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences, and things like introducing her to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.
> They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences
My son competes on the national and international level in two different sports, so we do a lot of traveling. The bonding is very important, just as it is knowing when to get out of the way and let them shine.
In one sport, I drop him off and pick him up for practice (he gets distracted/flustered when someone is there watching him practice). In the other, I practice with him and am trying to stay better than him as long as I can.
There are a few other things I think are important...
If they don't want to do something, don't push them to. My son decided not to compete in a national ranking event in a couple of months because his competitions are on Thursday and Saturday and he would miss three days of school when factoring in travel.
Try to anticipate their eventual needs and make sure the right tools/equipment/etc. are available for them before they realize they needed it. Also, have backup equipment just in case something breaks or fails.
Make sure that they understand the 'why' behind all the things that both they have done, and what you have done, to enable them to get to that level.
Finally, from a young age, teach them to "always do your best, and always do better next time." The first national competition he went to, he literally finished dead last out of over 250. When we were in the airport heading home, I let him know that it's alright if he doesn't want to do more of them. He didn't back down in the slightest, and asked me when the next one was because he knew he could do better. Next month will be the second time he competes in the Junior Olympics for that sport.
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?
No: getting to the NBA is very difficult, but you don't have to be that good. You 'just' have to be good enough to play at the college/university level with a scholarship. One doesn't necessarily have to 'go pro'.
I knew someone who got a scholarship to a business/finance program for cross-country running: he wasn't planning on being a pro runner. And doing these activities in high school is probably a good thing, from a social and health perspective, regardless of if it leads anywhere else.
> Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers
Sorry to hear that.
Unfortunately I think we have way over indexed on "success" being tied to money and seeking these careers at companies that drive people to exhaustion and let the competitive environment drive everyone harder and harder with a ratchet effect.
IMO it’s less about success but a lack of reliable safety nets. Absent a good supporting environment, what choice does an individual have than to maximise their own outcome.
Not just safety nets, but the disappearance of the middle class at least in the US. It increasingly feels like people either make twice or more what they need to live, or half what they need to live.
I can absolutely see why parents see the way things are, try to extrapolate out another 20 or 30 years, and feel like they have to make sure their child is in the "well-to-do" group. It feels like the days are gone where you could be an average performer at an average job and live an okay life.
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?
Not quite. NBA is for a tiny minority a a great well paying career. Most parents who raise their kids to play in the NBA will fail in that goal. However if you instead make the goal get a great scholarship playing basketball which is then used to pay for the degree that becomes their career it can be a great plan.
However here it sounds like the sailing was done not to get a great career, but to get a great college scholarship. This is likely a great plan. I suspect that while there are more basketball scholarships than sailing scholarships, there is a lot less competition for the sailing ones. It wouldn't surprise me if the typical sailing scholarship was higher than the typical basketball one - if you want someone on your team you need to get them away from the other schools, while for basketball if someone isn't obvious NBA bound (and thus your star starter) if they go elsewhere you just pick the next kid on the list for the scholarship.
The above isn't just sports. In music Violin vs Bassoon gets the same issues. Acting also fits in somehow. And your kids may well be doing more than one of the above.
> I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out
I've seen a lot of kids burn out from all backgrounds. The real problem I see with helicopter is because the kids never get to make mistakes they don't learn how to deal with them. The less controlled kids learn to be a little cautious and so when they rebel they are not going to go as far.
note that this example isn't doing these things professionally, but leveraged them to get into a good school, which nets a lot of valuable connections... it's not all or nothing, this person will be fine even if they don't become a pro tennis player
also I hear you on the suicides, but I grew up in a much poorer background and those are just overdoses in my situation.... there's easily a dozen kids in my graduating class that weren't pressured to do anything, had no idea what to do, and got addicted to drugs that killed them
HINT: NONE. If this is true, I'd really like to know what program that is.
Sailing isn't an NCAA sport, it's governed by its own association the ICSA. Sailing Scholarships are explicitly disallowed, in fact the bigger issue that's been happening in collegiate sailing is the opposite of a scholarship.
Eager and wealthy parents making huge donations to sailing programs, rowing programs, lawn dart programs, fencing programs, etc to get admission into top schools where their kid wouldn't be able to get in on their own merit.
I was probably incorrect stating that it was a scholarship, my bad - I know there were some incentives, but whether it was a financial deal or not I don't know. The main point for her, the student, was that due to her sporting achievements she was given offers of places from several of the top universities so she could take her pick.
These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago. Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing, there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen. When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.
> These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago.
Extracurriculars have been a part of elite school admissions for about a century.
It hasn’t really been a secret for most of that time.
Some people (somewhat correctly) say that this requirement was added to discriminate against Jews at that time, but it was also an education idea (“Progressive Education” by Dewey) that gained popularity around the same time.
Regardless of what the initial catalyst was, the universities seemed to like having folks who were “doers” as a significant part of their student body.
> Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing
These are not “niche sports” in certain parts of the country.
> there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen.
I can tell you point blank that serving in a soup kitchen does not help you get into an elite school.
For any school that ranks such things, if you have a laundry list of volunteer activities like this, it would get you the next to lowest rating in extracurriculars — this is basically the same as not doing anything.
The key to getting an high rating for any volunteer activity would be to show leadership (which is something the elite schools says point blank that they want) and meaningful impact.
> When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.
I’ve got news for you. A wide range of classes of people do these things.
There might be a floor at the absolutely lowest end of the economic spectrum (just due to instability of housing and food), but I’ve seen a ton of great examples from folks who were not upper or upper middle class. Often times necessity can be the mother of invention!
I assure you that these stories stand out to admissions committees, with the biggest challenge often being simply to get some of these folks from modest means to apply.
I think there are basically two kinds of micromanagement that need to be distinguished. The first one is encouraging your child to do something which you think has direct benefits, like learning to swim, which is good exercise and prevents drowning. The second is encouraging your kid to do something because you expect indirect social benefits: either some admissions officer will be impressed by an applicant who plays the oboe or the child will socialize with "the right crowd" or something like that. It's the second kind that can become pernicious because it creates an opportunity for the parent's own status anxieties and prejudices to be projected onto the child, like "lacrosse players are smarter than basketball players" so you want the kid to play lacrosse and not basketball even though they are basically comparable activities and this is dismissive of the needs and capabilities of children to learn to navigate social environments and pressures for themselves.
> When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them.
> Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics, library group sessions, and to my absolute bewilderment and dismay—beauty pageants. On any given week, there are 5+ activities outside of school. My spouse stays up until 2 AM “helping” our daughter on her kindergarten school projects. Never mind all the activities our 2 year old is ramping up into.
> I don’t think this is healthy at all for children, and it’s really created a rift in our marriage. It’s been so bizarre to me to see this change in behavior from what we discussed prior to marriage compared to now. I worry the kids are going to burn out. I certainly didn’t grow up this way, and my personality as a kid would not have handled this well.
Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "development".
> Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "development".
It's insidious, but when my kids have nothing to do, and I see them on the phone. I don't like it and I feel the urge to plan an activity.
Uh, when my son asks me for the phone, I say no, and he asks me why, I just tell him it’s because I think being bored once in a while is healthy. As long as the rules around using it are consistent he can work with that (he’ll start running to get to the bus/train on time too, because he can only use a phone if he can sit down)
one of the reasons NPR is declining so badly, those of us who had to listen to it for hours on end in the back of a hot car and got a kind of bizarro world moss-coane stockholm syndrome aren't reproducing enough to inculcate another generation of mug toting radio listening, garrison keillor on sunday afternoon types
I obviously don’t know your specific situation but having brought up kids in a similar environment, I may be able to offer some possible explanation for what you are living through.
First, never underestimate the impact of your environment on your way of thinking. We all like to think we’re independent thinkers but really we’re much more influenced by the people we interact with than we could even realize. Once you have a kid, a lot of your social circle will consist of other parents so you will unconsciously absorb their values and motivations as well, including the desire to put your kids through all these hoops.
Second, many professional class parents believe that the key to future success lies in getting their kids into the right school. Hence, it’s never too early to start the kid on the path to great grades, background experiences, scholarships, etc. I’ve seen parents stress out about preschool enrollments because of the “advantages” these schools provided.
Lastly, this is very often the default path for parents. It’s just what you are supposed to do. Everything is set up in that direction. Defaults are powerful and govern our behavior much more than we all realize.
Final last point, the truth is no one knows what works when raising kids. For every story of a free-range kid becoming self-reliant, there’s a story of a latchkey kid that became a bum. Therefore, parents are generally risk-avoidant with their kids (there’s no do-overs) and tend to do “good” and “respectable” approaches in child rearing (like signing them up for sports, extra curriculars, etc)
These parents (who believe there is one path to future success) will be in for a rude awakening in the coming 10-20 years when all the traditional high-status career paths have dried up. Can they not see the writing on the wall? Not that I would ever be such a parent, but even if I was, there's no point in pressuring and forcing your kids into this lifestyle given the unpredictability of the future. My goal is just supporting and letting my kid do the things that interest them.
Hmm, I’m fairly certain the ‘having children’ part is what triggers total collapse of the previous worldview. My spouse was adamant that we wouldn’t force our child to study excessively, but we’re at 7 years old and we have a 50cm stack of extra activities books that need to be worked through every morning and evening, in addition to the homework the school sets. It’s madness. The class teacher told me he’s not even involved with setting homework.
I certainly wasn’t expected to do any homework at 7. It wasn’t until middle school we were expected to do some amount of homework.
The US? My 2nd grader has one piece of homework per week, which takes about 10 minutes. If there was more I would tell the teacher to shove it. Instead I talk to my child. If he's interested we talk more about that, otherwise we switch to a topic that interests him. We've covered a lot of science, astronomy and math. Lately I've been telling him about primes, factorization and cryptography. I think our conversations lead to a love of learning and curiosity that is 100x more beneficial than a 50cm stack of homework...
I always thought it was parents being competitive - especially for unobvious social status signals.
We notice competitive behaviours at our jobs - we expect to see it, and in many work situations competition is admissible.
It is harder to notice competition in our social lives because we deceive ourselves with rationalisations (that appear reasonable) and the games are less obvious.
Just a personal theory (I'm a late learner for even simple status signaling).
Some of it is likely “subconscious” long-term planning. University programs that result in high income post-graduation typically have prerequisites that include heavy extracurricular activity involvement.
The truth is if you don’t do it early, it will be harder to scale up your ECs when your kids are older, which will then lower their chances in getting into something that provides a higher degree of insurance against financial uncertainty.
What's striking is the helplessness that seeps through your message. As if you had zero control over what happens. You're just a bystander watching what happens to your children.
It's time for you to wake up, and start exercising your own authority.
you are not married, are you? that's not how this works. while they certainly need to talk, and not just once, but continuously, you don't have the authority to change your partners behavior. you need to discuss your feelings about this matter and come to a consensus about the activities and the goals for your child.
it won't be easy. if i were in this position, i can't imagine what i would do. i feel even stronger than GP about this, and i'd probably feel quite helpless trying to get my partner to understand how i feel about this. even just trying to get my voice heard. if you don't have a way to communicate openly in your marriage from the start, then talking about things openly can be very hard, seemingly impossible even. with one issue that my wife and me had, it first took me years to notice and understand the issue and start to speak up about it, then it took a few more years for my wife to recognize and acknowledge the issue for herself, and then she still struggled to do something about it. and very time i messed up somewhere in our relationship, it was a setback for her development too. and i can't even blame her. it's something she learned from her parents (which is how she eventually figured it out)
well i’ll also point out, as a married man, my partner doesn’t have the “authority” to unilaterally decide how our child is raised. Notice the word OUR. There is no “I” in the word our.
It’s a joint decision. If it’s not, then you’re not operating as a team. If you’re not operating as a team…then you have a marriage problem IMO. Simple as that.
The healthy marriage outcome would be talking about it and compromising in some fashion. “my way or the highway”…yikes.
Yeah, they definitely need time to look out a window and imagine.
But I think there is serious value in organized activities. From Junior high through high school I had a rule for mine to do one thing with school, and one thing outside of school. I would have supported more than those 2 things, but I'm so glad I didn't have to.
I'm thinking about enforcing the same rule in college, with a caveat that Gym and Girlfriend don't count, but it seems weird to make those kinds of mandates for someone that has a job.
Enforcing? He'd presumably be an adult, and the entire point of university is to get out from under your parents' wings. This sounds like a horrible idea.
I was raised in such a house. This happened because my mother was an underachiever, and also because my father and grandparents were dead so she was unchallenged doing this.
But you are alive my friend. Don't let your child still have nightmares, regrets, and feelings of constantly not being enough in their 30s. If your child does'nt have a childhood she can never become an adult.
Your wife is living vicariously through the kid, in more ways than one.
That’s good - but only to an extent, like you’ve both identified in the past.
They need to seek their own hobbies and interests to fulfill their dopamine needs, and give themselves purpose besides dictating who the kids end up being.
Coming from the other direction: you could reclaim some of that time for the kids (take over pageant time and now that’s when we go to the trampoline place with you).
Don’t let your partner run further away from you! Have a chat and reign this thing in.
My parents made me do everything, and were so fucking mean about everything, I ended up missing out on the things I actually enjoyed b/c I didn't want yet another thing to get yelled at about.
Specific: guitar and music
To be fair: part of it was to be rid of me and to not have to watch me.
Beauty pagents? Go take a good long look in the mirror. That is pathetic. Is that what you want your kids to value? Passivity? Whatever the fuck beauty pagents encourage?
> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
Is that surprising? All of that sounds fully consistent to me when parents suffocate their kids with expectations and activities instead of meeting their actual needs.
They feel like they're suffocating them because they are, they feel inadequate because deep down they know it's wrong, and kids feel like they're not getting enough space because they aren't.
> We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.
Similar, except in a city. On weekends, when an adult may be home, we get sent outside as a form of grounding -- "outside. now." -- or if we watched too much tv/video games, and wouldn't come back inside til dark. No asking what we did, where we went, only that we came back in the same health we left. Not having parents home after school (11-14 y/o) meant after-school cartoon binge for a couple hours, then outside to roam around with other kids that didn't have adults home. We'd get in trouble if they came home and we were playing video games or watching tv.
It doesn't even require poverty/rural areas/etc. I grew up in (basically) sub-urban USA to a solidly middle-class family and I was always out wandering around the neighborhood or on my bike.
The irony is brutal: kids lose unstructured time and independence, parents lose breathing room, and nobody feels good about it. What used to be normal "being outside all day" now reads as neglect
It's a cultural shift. Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. Not that yours were necessarily bad parents for that time but there is way more information today of the issues with the world. I certainly wouldn't let my kid walk home alone in the woods at night: are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
I'd also say it's more likely that your peers are more personally present than parents of the 80s/90s, when parents would often just leave children alone and don't really talk to them. That in itself has been shown to provide good outcomes for children. So it's not all bad.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how much you drive changes your likelihood of being in an accident)
They are more aware but bad at putting it in perspective. This is the classic "fear leads to bad decisions".
Granted, depends on where you live, but statistically woods are probably a lot safer than a city with a lot of traffic. Sure, regionally that is not true, you might meet a Grizzly and/or Canadian.
> are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
Absolutely. A child has to grow up and detach from it parents at some point. It doesn't at all mean having a bad relationship, just being independent. Helps if you aren't a complete beginner by the time it inevitably happens.
This idea that parents who let their kids play without 3 layers of bubble wrap and parental hovercraft mode don’t also talk with their kids and aren’t present is not just insulting, it’s far from true. Over coddling causes more problems than it prevents, it’s especially obvious when you compare the maturity levels, mental health situation and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
There's just no discussion that modern parents are more personally involved in their kids development than parents in the 70s/80s. That's just a fact, not an insult.
I never said you can't raise kids without all the overprotection and also be present.
The issue of over parenting seems to be a developed nation issue, I agree. I'm not in one and here kids don't do mountains of activities, but violence rates are very significant. There's just no point exposing my son to it in the hopes he comes out the other side unscathed, when even I don't want to be out alone at night. That's "vibe parenting", not an intelligent way of raising children.
You're making a different argument, throughout these threads.
The article is about the US. You say you are "not in [a developed nation like the US]", but instead somewhere that "violence rates are very significant".
That is just not the US. Headlines are scary, but the statistics don't support the fear. The worries you describe are absolutely irrational for 99+% of US parents.
I don't know where you are and I don't know the statistics for your area -- things might be worse there! But your comments sound like irrational US parent fears, without including that context.
No, it’s specifically an Anglo country phenomenon. It’s not really an issue in places like Denmark, France, Spain, Russia, China, Chile. There’s several books on the topic if you are open to recommendations.
Bringing Up Bebe, The Danish Way Of Parenting, The Coddling of the American Mind. These are pretty similar to Soviet style, but perhaps a bit less structured.
We are basically raising our daughter Soviet-style to the extent that we can; so far so good. It's difficult in a culture where ADHD American style of child raising is prevalent.
From a very young age when I wondered around the rural midwest, I had a gun. Usually a 20ga shotgun or a .22 rifle. Don't think my parents were too worried about me getting kidnapped or murdered. I used it for hunting but I knew what to do in the case of self defense.
Another one of those things that aren't allowed now.
Not sure if 'aware' is the right word. More like anxious.
Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.
When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.
An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.
Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.
My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped.
Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right?
The risk they die from drug overdose or something because they are maladjusted from being hovered over may be orders of magnitude greater. We live in a far safer time than people think with regard to violent crime (see graph below) and a far more dangerous time with regard to mental health and depression. Also obesity. Most people die from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. All made more prevalent by shuttling your kid around constantly instead of them using their own two legs like nature intended.
It is precisely this anxiety that is the issue being discussed. Parents are terrified of what might happen to their kids, so too little happens to their kids (both good and bad)
I wrote a long winded thing about my personal experience but deleted it because it was too personal and too depressing to think about.
The summary is that the risk of a CPS investigation of a kid playing or walking independently is probably 10-100x that of suffering a car accident. And the average car accident is way less traumatic than being ripped away from your family, tossed in a foster home, and feeling like your parents have abandoned you forever because they could not protect you from the state.
What's the solution though? Stop letting kids play outside? I think the solution should be to reform CPS so it's not so traumatizing, and have more governmental awareness campaigns of the benefits of kids playing outside. I see government billboards all the time about anti-smoking, eating healthy, prediabetes screening. There can similarly be billboards promoting kids playing outside.
2) At the bare minimum, victims of CPS reports should be able to face their accuser. Currently laws anonymize reporters, this is not compatible with an open and balanced justice system. Also, needs to be heavy penalties and liabilities for abusing CPS reporting -- asymmetrical risks would end up with just getting the same result over and over again.
3) Cultural change. People that curtail child independence of others' children should be shamed, publicly. People that let their kids have independence, left the hell alone.
there would not be any issue with anonymous reports if CPS would look for actual evidence before doing anything else, and reject any anonymous report as baseless if no evidence is found. innocent until proven guilty must hold here too.
Your analogy is missing something. Not letting a child explore the world has an opportunity cost. They miss out on opportunities to develop independence and psychological resilience. The book "The Anxious Generation" covers this in detail.
I work at a college, and can tell you that (while everyone views their childhoods with rose colored glasses), at my institution, statistically kids today are less able to cope with difficulty than they were when I started my career.
When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).
For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).
In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.
We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.
The chances of your kid being abducted by a stranger because you let them walk home from school are so many orders of magnitude lower than 0.5% that the analogy doesn't make any sense. You're probably more likely to kill them by handing them a plate of food or some other benign every day factor that isn't nearly as dramatic as anything the national news covers.
1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
As a parent, a cancer survivor, and the child of a high anxiety parent, Yes, yes you should wait and see. Every doctor's visit is a chance to catch something worse.
That said, if you're a chill parent reading this, you should probably be more proactive about it. There is a middle ground, overreacting is usually worse than under reacting, but it is important that you react.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were
does being more aware of these things mean you necessarily make better decisions overall for you children? Are humans good at translating news they see into accurate risk assessments?
Kids are in this weird position where they are placed on a pedestal (they’re sooo important! My little future leader!) but yet they have no real agency in their lives and are very restricted from making decisions, even ludicrously simple ones like can I take a walk outside by myself for half an hour.
I don’t have kids yet but I am thinking a lot about this, and I can only conclude that kids should be treated much more like adults. They should have jobs and real responsibilities, and also should face the same pressure that adults do.
Nobody expects me to be a CEO someday. If I want to, I have to push myself.
Similar generations and i've noticed the same thing, but living in an urban place, in a large complex of socialist apartment buildings, in a country that fell apart from a larger socialist one to a smaller capitalist one.
Two of the biggest differences were extracurricular activities and technology... back in my day, you maybe had one or two 'after school' things per week, usually immediately after school, for an hour (so you'd end at two oclock instead an hour earlier) and you then went home, where you had one tv per family. When your parents came home, the tv was gone, dads football, moms series, evening drama movies... and what were you supposed to do then? Read? Well.. you went out. ...same as most of your friends. We sat on benches, played football, basketball, girls wanted attention, got attention, from young-kids age to the age of neighbors caling police due to 'loud teenagers' outside.
And now? Every parent with kids has their kids in one additional language course, some music classes, sports, and not like once a week for an hour or two, but two, three times per week each, at different locations (=driving them around, even though there are a lot of busses). The kids are physically tired from all that, and then they get home, don't even have time to get bored, and even if they did, they now have a tv, phone, computer and a gaming console right in their room. Their friends aren't outside either, since they're being chauffered around for their activities. No proper socialization with peers, no time to do stupid stuff, no time to be bored... nothing.
And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time... yes, excercise, but we exercised too, by being outside, walking, biking, playing footbal with stones, etc.
> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...
I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.
Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
Sure, but in addition to everything they learn at school (and get tired of), do they really need 3x2 hours of violin, 3x2 hours of tennis and 3x2 hours of spanish weekly? + weekend tennis matches. (my coworkers kid taken as example, 12yo)
I like my job too, i learn a lot of it, but that's basically half-time of a second job (if you include commute) for a 12yo kid... that's just too much, both for the kids and their parents.
A trend amongst peers I have noticed ... people are parenting in the opposite manner to the way their werre raised.
Your parents were very active / suffocating ... do free range parenting. Your parents let you roam outside with few sports, clubs and activities ... do 7 day a week scheduled activities.
You went to private school ... send kids to shittiest free school you can find.
Most of us had parents that made mistakes. Some of those mistakes hurt us, stunted our development, or damaging our psyches. When we become parents, we try not to make the mistakes that our parents make.
But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.
In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.
Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.
Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.
Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.
Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.
My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
Modernity has also made life really fucking complicated. A 16 year old could walk to the factory, get some paper money and then do what they wanted with it.
Nowadays lets say your 16 year old wants a car and a job. To do that they need to schedule multiple tests with DMV, lessons with a driving instructor, update insurance documents and find the time to do hours of practice with you. At the end of that they need to navigate buying a used/new vehicle and setting up insurance. Then they need to navigate the world of job applications, and if they manage to get hired they will need to have their direct deposit bank account setup and have some kind of credit card payment system setup so they can use the money.
Seriously just typing this I get exhausted. It makes sense why parents are hovering over their kids because there are 10,000 things that need to get handled just to like be a "person". You can either watch your kid drown in a mire of bureaucracy or just let them focus on school and offload all of it from them.
That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.
Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.
When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.
And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.
I wouldn't conflate "best" with "most important". Personally I find the sappy emotions like love, happiness, and contentedness to be the best ones, generated by the best parts of life. However, I would absolutely say it is the most important feeling from a self-preservation standpoint.
There is also something to be said about today's unchecked, underutilized anxiety that one feels when sitting doing absolutely nothing. There has been an unending discussion about the causes of this, but I tend to align with the belief that since our current world doesn't provide many dangers for us to genuinely cause anxiety, our brain freaks out and finds less dire avenues to trigger it.
I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.
"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.
The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.
If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.
Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.
> you have to work three jobs
Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
Medicaid is a poor substitute of a proper PPO plan. The reimbursements are low, so there are fewer providers, and it requires you to not have any assets.
You can't compare late 90s/early 2000s internet with what kids have access to today. It wasn't a weapon aimed at your attention back then, and certainly not as easily accessible. There isn't much in common between the two, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively
We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/
> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.
Current version:
> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.
We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?
Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.
That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.
while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine
Then complain about short form video (which, I should add, is probably more culturally relevant than whatever we were consuming on the Internet growing up)
Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.
I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality and at no point complained about the internet in general , since you're out here commanding me I command you to consider that commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour
> commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour
No, it really doesn't. Look at Prohibition in America, or the "War on Drugs", or abstinence-only sex education.
What does tend to reduce harmful behavior is actual education about the risks and tackling the sources of those risks. In this case, that would look like addressing the addictiveness of these platforms, instead of, say, requiring an ID to use it. The latter will only encourage kids to go to other platforms, or bypass the ID checks, to say nothing of the privacy risks to everyone else.
Furthermore, the kids most in need of protection from those platforms, because their parents aren't protecting them, will likely just get their parents to ID them and let them on anyway.
> I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality
In what way is it disconnected from reality? It seems to me that it is in fact exquisitely linked to reality by the very nature of a significant part of the population being on the Internet, as opposed to 20-30 years ago, where the culture was more of a subset of the general culture.
Also, I didn't "command" you to do anything. I suggested something. A "command" would look more like, say, a law saying you can't use certain websites because of your age. A "suggestion", on the other hand, might look like, say, schools educating kids about why certain websites are harmful to them.
saying "then complain about x" is in the imperative mood regardless as to your intentions , it seems your examples align with my statement so there is nothing to argue there , if the whole world being on the net is exquisitely real to you then we are really never going to agree so I'm gonna leave it here
old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather
The irony is that parents feel like their kids are safer and more sheltered when they restrict their movement, while the opposite is true.
There was never a time in history where kids would be targeted and manipulated by corporations as today. The digital phone is a marketing gadget that brainwashes us to constantly interact with it. In extreme cases, every aspect of our lives is being scored, monetized and compared. Everything has become a hyper individualized hustle.
To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.
Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.
If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org
One of the testimonies mentions a 4 year old cooking dinner (pancakes, eggs and sausages).
That takes an unbelievable a level of dexterity for a 4 year old. Reminds me of those social media posts of 4 year olds saying things that are way beyond the wisdom they may possess.
And further, some forms of child labor are still the norm here: America has unrestricted child labor after age 16, and in fact many children do drop out of school at that age to support their families
It's true that children in the first decade or so of the 20th Century considered work normal and not that unpleasant despite their often horrific work conditions.
The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920.
These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article.
If you remove physical autonomy and replace it with algorithmic spaces optimized for engagement rather than growth, you shouldn't be surprised when teens struggle with agency, goals, or mental health...
In fairness: I drove through your home state regularly when I lived in Michigan and the billboards we saw were fucking bananas, including one about how radiators are hot and parents shouldn't restrain their children against them.
As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet?
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
The constrain isn’t merely financial, it’s broader than that. Teenagers are less free because adults and society have bulldozed the adversity out of teen lives. This sheltering is creating generations that are more - not less - fragile.
Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
The adversity is very much there, but it's all emotional and social. What's missing is (mild) physical adversity, and self-directed play and exploration.
Mild somewhat-dangerous-but-not-really play teaches that actions and decisions have consequences, and if you make a mistake it hurts - maybe a lot.
The world is a dangerous place, but some element of risk is both unavoidable and exciting. And it's safe (more or less) to explore and take risks.
When the stress is all emotional and social - high school bullying, status games, cliques and groups, gender wars, random adult authoritarianism - it teaches you that dissent is forbidden and you must conform to the group or you will be punished by it.
You never get the lessons about autonomy and exploration. You're physically comfortable but emotionally underdeveloped with a limited sense of individual agency. There's a fair chance you'll have social PTSD and confuse individuality with permanent rebellion. And your natural state will be permanently-triggered rage about something.
Punished? How? By who? All voices and opinions are not equal. If kids aren’t learning how to filter out the noise then yeah they’re playing in traffic. But once given the opportunity to learn they keep running into traffic. Self destructive behavior is not due to more danger, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy
There's definitely a kind of frenetic adversity in the whole college admissions process, at least for kids who are inclined to go that route. If anything, it has gotten much worse over the past 30 years; it's much more stressful than it used to be, and it's easy for teens to imagine that every little thing carries high stakes.
If by "adversity" you mean helping the family put food on the table, I certainly agree that there's less of that. Today we have more weird, more detached, and less rational forms of adversity.
I think it’s a broader awareness of a K shaped socioeconomic trajectory, that the odds of an upward trajectory drop considerably if you don’t follow the standard path into a top 20 university, metro, etc. as economic opportunities continue to agglomerate.
What gives me pause with that take is that it only really applies to certain geographical regions of the country. I grew up in a place where today you can still get a starter home for about 100k. The nicest homes, akin to the Home Alone house, on the market are around 500k or less. You don’t need a glamorous job to be a homeowner here, to own a couple cars on the comparatively cheap insurance rates, to send your kid to the very competent in state university. It is still the same break it has always had since the region is stagnant in population. Ironically the lack of growth actually helps the people when you consider the affordability it offers. However the mass media is blind to this region, you won’t hear about it save for browbeating over 1950s population counts, missing the point entirely of what that really means in practice for the people who live there.
K shaped economy doesn’t just refer to class, but of geography. There is a hidden line out of the middle of that K going dead straight.
<< Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
Maybe? I am giving my kid a lot of comfort, because I see how almost everything is stacked against her future. If the unrealistic expectations exist, it is from our ruling class that we simply accept it:D
Mentally and emotionally? Not. The pressure to "swim or sink" and grab one of those increasingly precious "well paying jobs" or be flipping burgers is much higher than it was when I was a kid.
Yes, but the two go hand in hand. Michael Easter talks about it in The Comfort Crisis. He probably used a more technical term, but that term escapes me for the moment. In short, worry is relative. For example, we you have to focus on getting your next meal, minor things get no attention, no concern. Now eliminate the need to worry about food and the minor things get center stage.
The point is, without anything significant to focus on youth today now make the once insignificant significant.
Again, I’m not doing the concept justice, but it is a thing.
Fair point, but this discussion has been comparing teenagers today with 40 years ago, not 100 or 140 years ago. Teens 40 years ago in the US at least were (with some exceptions) not worrying about where their next meal will come from.
> Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS
What??
> Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same.
I am speechless. Has so much changed in the 20 odd years since I was a kid? I was playing outside unsupervised from maybe age 9. What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
I have six young kids. This attitude is absolutely prevalent (and it's insane). I've been chewed out by a cashier for sending an 8 year old into a store alone. I've had a person run out of a restaurant, panicking, and grab my 2 year old because she was walking too far ahead of me. I've had people tell me it's unsafe to let me 10, 8, and 5-year olds bike together in the park ahead of me while I walk.
Just giving my kids space when I'm nearby, in sight of them has terrified countless onlookers.
No one has actually called CPS on me, thankfully, to my knowledge. But the general atmosphere is absolutely crushing for people who want to try to safely let their kids learn independence.
I was 10 in '72, in a big metropolis. I'd take off on my Stingray bike on all day jaunts all over. The only comments I got were from my mom who made sure I had change to phone home in case I got a flat. I started a 4am paper route on that bike two years later, nobody batted an eye. It was the best of times.
Yeah. I did the same when I was aged 8-12 in the early 1990's. I'd bike or walk everywhere, go into all kinds of stores and the library, and get into all kinds of minor trouble with the neighborhood kids. I'm very sad that my kids aren't able to have that kind of a life (even though I get that it's largely my own fault, because we live in an area where that is just not possible).
As a teenager in the 90's, I bicycled 20+ miles away into the mountains onto steep fire roads and ridge trails. In middle school at either 12- or 13-years-old, I went on a 2 day 72 mile (roundtrip) road cycling and camping school trip from San Jose to Mt Madonna; granted that was chaperoned but not by anyone my parents knew. I couldn't afford a car until college. If I wanted to get anywhere, it was on a bicycle or maybe the occasional city bus or light rail for somewhere far away. Mom was working a full-time job and taking night classes to finish an accounting degree.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I was in elementary school when the arcade game craze happened, PacMan, Donkey Kong, etc. I would wander the streets looking for games to play. There were arcade games in every grocery store, restaurants, every convenience store (so basically just 7-11s). Home gaming consoles could not begin to match what was in the arcades at that time. I would walk the streets looking for new ones to play.
I mostly played arcade games, but I would play pinball too. One day I was walking past a place and saw a pinball game and went in and started playing. I think it was on the second quarter when someone came and asked if I was there with my parents. I said no and they told me I had to leave since minors weren't allowed in a bar. I don't think I even know what a bar was at that time.
Elementary school kid hanging out in a bar without his parents would get some CPS attention these days I guess.
The worst of times part is, if I was "free range" it wasn't because my parents had discussed the risks and benefits of allowing me to wander the streets. No kid I knew had both parents at home back then. Our moms worked. We were free range because no one gave a shit what we did as long as we weren't causing them some immediate problem. So we had freedom. It was both glorious and horrible.
Not kids, parents are scared, kids have no say unless they are already addicted to gaming, tv or whatever their latest addiction is, and then they themselves don't want to go and just sit and consume.
Even if the chance something actually happens is terribly low it became unacceptable. Death of any type became unacceptable, so got injuries, bullying is end of the world. Maybe due to having 1-2 kids instead of 10 and seeing occasionally other kids around die from whatever, so what was sort of normalized is shocking now.
Parenting got much, much harder, expectation of what a good parent is are stratospheric compared to - kid didn't die, you didn't beat him up (too much), didn't rape him and similar level. The more you invest yourself into any activity including parenting the the less you can ignore or accept failure of any sort. And so on.
I grew up free as a bird too, had a small bicycle and roamed fields and city too, but cars were few and slow ones. Its still possible but even for my kids it has to be outside of roads, luckily we live now next to forest and vineyards with roads closed to regular traffic. So it seems its whole societal change of mindset, not limited to US (although there I believe its the worst due to everything car-centric, few continuous pedestrian walks etc)
I think a lot of parenting decisions like this are just made in line with the rest of the society. If you let your 9 year old roam the park by themselves, you run a rather small risk of injuries, death, kidnapping etc. But you run a pretty big risk of them being the only lone 9 year old at the park.
Now as an adult I'd be worried about cycling around with cars that would hit me in the chest and not the legs on impact
Also cars make it very easy for a stranger to pull up and kidnap, parents subconsciously know that and factor it into their decisions
There was also youth clubs where I grew up and a BMX track and no phones so play was mostly happening outside
Society is going to continue to degrading as long as debts keep increasing
Debts will keep increasing because the only way to create new money is everytime someone gets a loan the bank injects the principle into the economy but then expects interest on top so there will never be enough money in the economy for everyone to pay off all their debts
We'll either get mass debt forgiveness or societal collapse and so far we've opted for societal collapse
Ok I actually agree with you about debt and the general societal degradation, but kidnapping is a non-issue.
In modern times there's a total of about 70 child kidnappings per year in the US. I am excluding parental kidnappings which sends that up by orders of magnitude, but I think that's fair because that's an entirely different issue and you specifically said stranger anyhow (though even of those 70 - a sizable chunk are not strangers). For contrast about 400 people are struck by lightning each year.
Statistically, it just doesn't happen. It's just one of those things, like terrorism or mass shootings, that is so unbelievably terrifying that people overreact in a self destructive way to try to prevent something that is statistically much less of a threat than just normal behaviors we take for granted.
I don't think money is the key issue. There were no clubs or nice tracks when I grew up, but ditches, canals, and forested areas worked just as well.
When people try to downplay rates by comparing to another very rare event, I respond by saying “I don’t want to go outside during a thunderstorm” rather than “you don’t need to risk it cus it’s so rare”.
Most Americans are feeling the same way and you must understand this to understand why Cheeto in chief keeps winning.
What is included in the stats for kidnapping? Where I live a confused young man convinced a little girl to get on his ebike and forced her to ride along with him for a few hours before coming back to the neighbourhood and being stopped by police that was out in full force for him.
My point being, “only 70 a year in the US” sounds like a very low number and inconsequential number since we had an abduction close by already.
Any parent that has heard the same story is thinking of that instead of the stats.
It is true that people have wildly incorrect understanding of crime rates and that this causes them to make strange decisions both in their personal lives and in the policies they support.
Child abductions are amazingly rare. Data for them is strong because they are consistently reported.
Cars and building for car infrastructure is part of it. Another part, I think, is the decline in neighborhood communities. By that I mean the social pressure to get to know/socialize with your neighbors, through everything from block parties to shared church membership. When kids go “wandering the neighborhood” they were never far from one of the member’s houses, or at least a familiar neighbor who would notice them and keep an eye out.
Which also goes back to car infrastructure. If you need to drive everywhere for any and all errands/activities, you won’t interact with people in nearby houses, you wont see neighbors at the local bar or small grocery store.
So many of the issues in the US stem from an isolating car (instead of people) oriented infrastructure. Everything from social breakdown, obesity, aggressive brodozers, insane utility and insurance expenses - the list goes on.
That is a fast track from cars to societal collapse. But agree cars are terrifying. I live in what should be a walking friendly part of Boston that is very pedestrian unfriendly because drivers are overly aggressive, on their phones, or commuting through to avoid traffic and do not care. It is the only reason our 10 year old is not yet wandering around on his own. I have spent years writing local politicians about improved intersections and traffic enforcement and have given up. No one seems to care. The car is king in the US. Even in a corner of the country where there is a lot of room to design around them not for them.
Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020.
As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bikes.
sure, population has grown, but unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
also, bike lanes were virtually non-existent back then
That's not the density I was referring to. That doesn't measure city/suburb density. We have many more suburbs (therefore more density overall) but the number of houses within a suburb (where a child might be riding around) is not likely to have increased.
I think we have a disagreement in terms beyond "density". I'm talking about bicycle as transportation, and I believe you may be talking about bicycle as recreation.
To clarify, transportation is a means to get you to a destination. I don't know where you live, but I haven't lived in or ever even seen a suburb that provides all the destinations that a child (assuming they're old enough to ride a bike alone) would want to bike to.
Friends live in different neighborhoods. The mall certainly wasn't in my neighborhood. The video store, my church, the woods, the local pool, the public library, all required crossing streets which have become busier and busier.
The size of the United States has not increased since 1970, but the number of people has. So yes, no shit, (US pop / US land area) has gone up. But the question is, "is the average neighborhood more dense than it was in 1970", and that's not a question you can answer from that number, because obviously cities & towns have spread since then.
If you want an intellectually honest comparison, take a look at the District of Columbia, which is basically 100% city and has been for many decades. It's gone down since 1970.
The other commenter and I were talking about cars.
Car ownership rates increased slightly, number of households nearly doubled, and average population density went up in every state except DC. There are more cars. Cars do not stay in one place, especially in the case of suburbanization.
Also, I'm not sure why/how the DC piece is intellectually honest. The Washington Metropolitan Statistical area has more than doubled in population since 1970[1]. Do you think all of the people who moved to PG County stay out of DC? That must be why the beltway is so easy to maneuver!
> unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
This was the original mention of density. Sure, cars don't stay in one place, but if we're talking about kids walking/biking around their suburban neighborhood, how big is the impact if there's a new 50k suburb on the other side of the urban core? Even commuters from the exurbs are taking the dastardly 45mph stroads, not the stopsign-laden 25mph streets through your neighborhood.
The common parlance around here is that "greater density" means smaller houses closer together or multi-unit structures. If you build a new subdivision outside town, nobody says "oh wow the town got so much denser", it just got broader. Waving at "57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020" says absolutely nothing about the experience of the average person on the average streets near their homes.
As an average person, I've observed that both my childhood and current neighborhoods (Mid-Atlantic and Midwest respectively) have increased in the number of cars present, and that's within and between neighborhoods. I have also observed more in-fill subdivisions between neighborhoods. Since the '90s, I've seen just the bike ride that I'd take multiple times a week in my Mid-Atlantic suburb yield one acre lots turned into 8 homes, a small office park being converted into multiple 5-over-1s, a country club being turned into 400 homes. In the past decade in the Midwest, I've seen 2 single family homes torn down to make 8 units with an 8 car garage and 8 more spaces out back, multiple small businesses torn down to make way for "luxury" student housing with a parking spot for every bed room, a shopping center and apartment complex torn down and turned into an even bigger apartment complex with parking for every bedroom. Many of these are on my block or on the bike path around town.
There are more cars. There is more density.
So there you go, I've provided census data, I've provided observations from my own life across multiple geographies that backs up the data.
If you're claiming that there aren't more cars in neighborhoods, please back up that claim.
It's not just how many cars there are, but how big they are, how aggressively they're driven, and how much infrastructure there is for bikes alongside.
The track that the US political economy is on with the feedback loop caused by government backed fixed term fixed interest loans requires an ever increasing LTV, meaning newer entrants in the housing market will have to accept increasingly precarious positions.
The 30 year fixed mortgage is an insanely good deal, and I say this as a guy who has one. The monthly cost can only stay the same (and decline due to inflation) or decline if interest rates fall and you refinance or adjust the loan. If interest rates go up, you're completely protected.
A mortgage may be more than rent for a similar place now, but I suspect it won't be that many years before the lines cross.
Loads of things, but the big thing that changed in past decades is the media. A case of a child getting abducted or killed goes nation- or worldwide now, which makes everyone feel less safe in letting their kids roam free.
I'm an 80s kid, I was playing outside at age 6 unsupervised / with my friends. I feel like this should be pretty normal and totally agree with your last line:
What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.
Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin.
The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
I live in Britain. If you read back you'll see I am talking about the opinions of Britons and Europeans of raising children in the US.
My point is it still a very rare thing even in the most common place in the world. The weight of school shootings in people's minds is more emotional than statistical. Careless drivers kill way more people in the US and they do it every day.
Gun related deaths and homicide are big enough risk factors to be worth worrying about and mitigating as a parent, but school shootings in particular are so rare they are not a major safety concern for parents- gun accidents and homicide outside of school are much much bigger risks.
I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about:
- cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life.
- bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars
- sexual harassment: she’s only ten, but sadly in some neighborhoods, that’s old enough that she’s likely to get hassled. That’s a sad fact of life she’ll have to deal with at some point, but I’m not ready yet
- bullying: I had several encounters with groups of older kids when I was off free-ranging as a kid
- subway: some deranged homeless person throws someone off the platform or stabs someone every week here
I could go on, but the bottom line is that the potential harm outweighs the potential benefit for me right now. In my mind there’s no right answer here, just pros and cons. Appealing to how things were a century ago, or even when I grew up, is pretty irrelevant. My daughter might mature a couple years later than I did, and I can live with that.
Also, I’m just pretty fundamentally unimpressed with most moral panics. “The Anxious Generation” seems like just the latest entry in a tradition stretching thousands of years where people worry about how the changes in society are ruining the next generation, and long for a return to how life was when they grew up. However, each generation somehow manages to figure it out.
I understand and worry about my kids the same age too. But the paradox I myself admit to is that those perceived dangers aren't new nor have they increased significantly since I was young in the 70s -- other than scooters being new -- and yet I, and pretty much every other kid, had tons of freedom and was just fine. So it's mostly about the fears in my head, not the reality on the ground.
Yeah, but “I made it just fine” is poor logic to me. This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking, mom drinking while pregnant, no seatbelts, etc. They were mostly fine too.
Your entire generation definitely didn’t make it just fine, lots of kids were killed, abducted, assaulted, raped, traumatized, or just disappeared. That doesn’t mean anything on its own about how we should live today, but they didn’t make it just fine.
And yes, traffic fatalities were much higher before seatbelts, but they still only affected a tiny fraction of kids. The vast majority were just fine.
One thing I always think about when reading these posts: the complaints about how kids never roam free anymore are also accompanied by claims that abductions are incredibly rare now. But how do we know they’re not incredibly rare because kids don’t roam free? It feels like claiming that you shouldn’t have to wear your seatbelt because traffic fatalities are much lower than they were when seatbelts were introduced!
I mean, realistically, you can tell who is going to do all those weird things. We decided that rampant criminality was fine on the streets. City life in America is about being collateral damage in the Democratic Party campaign to enrich their special interest through NGOs.
“No, that serial molester of children just needs a daily check-in with the NGO my friend runs. Then he’s fine to go around. No carceral justice.”
> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward.
This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are leading to an increasingly alienated generation of kids. I grew up in suburbs and I couldn't even safely bike to my friend's house because the sidewalk would randomly end before arriving at his neighborhood, and the stroad next to it was at 45mph speed limit (thus in Texas: 60mph) and mostly filled with massive pickup trucks that probably couldn't even see me. So, my options before my parents got home were to play WoW and browse 4chan or do my homework, and if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.
Imo this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit." I was into manosphere stuff, mildly zenophobic, incredibly transphobic, and insufferably cynical. Getting to college and seeing the disgust on people's faces when I'd drop a 4chan joke was a complete culture shock to me. Took me a good 2 years to adjust to "normal society," by then I also had to overcome a reputation as an asshole.
I can't even imagine what it's like for kids like me these days now that there's full on weaponized Discords trying to convince them to shoot up schools for the lulz. At least on 4chan that kind of stuff got banned or mocked.
What really stuck with me is how delayed the correction was. You didn't get immediate feedback that "this is not how people actually relate to each other" until college, and by then the social debt was already there. That's a brutal way to learn norms
I am somewhat doubtful about the importance of American car centric suburbs because its happening in a lot of other countries too. its happened in the last few decades in British cities that have become a lot less car oriented.
I think it is linked to things such as pressure on kids to do school work, less trust of both kids and people in general. A lot more control. A lot more metrics replacing judgement.
Glad to hear you figured it out. I somewhat identify eventhough I didn't go as deep.
> if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.
Oh I hate this. Busywork. Also I think you and I got incentivized to play as much computer games as possible due to the arbitrary limitations of it and constant fear of being pulled off to some busywork. It was like a never ending battle ...
I think many parents don't realize that "doing the laundry" on command is like 10x the work of doing it when you please. You can't relax after school.
If you're in a suburb what else is there to do? Going to any interesting spots to hang out with friends involve asking your parents to bring you there with the family car and then arranging a strict timetable on when to pick you up again.
In the 50s the suburbs were new and inhabited mainly by families who also had kids. By the time I came around those people still lived in most houses and they were quite old in the neighborhood with few, if any families with kids my age. Quite a contrast to the stories I was told about my parents upbringing in the suburbs, where they could collect a dozen plus kids going door to door down the block.
I think just being able to get together with a couple other kids means that, even lacking videogames or boardgames or whatever, means that the opportunities available abound. Kids are infinitely creative and very good at inventing games out of any situation you throw them into. Give them two sticks and a piece of string and they'll turn it into a game of "don't let the string hit the ground" or something.
In the 70s and 80s if you wanted to play video games you would go to an arcade and meet other kids there. Where are those arcades now? Or you might go to and hang out at a mall, but those are few and far in between now too.
The fact that adults don't have third places anymore affects kids just as much, maybe even more.
It doesn't help that you can do a lot more indoors now, and the indoors has gotten more addictive. So relative to that, there's even less you can do outdoors.
Aside from the fact that drivers have been known to mount sidewalks (especially while sending a text), the real problem is intersections, and crossing said stroads. When there's 8 lanes of Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and F-250's with hoods that are taller than your head you're putting a great deal of trust in the red lamp overhead to actually stop them from killing you.
I was at a conference in St Cloud, MN a few years ago, and I could see the Panda Express from my hotel. Took around 40 minutes to walk there because I couldn't get the timing right to frogger myself across the 6 lanes. Got stuck in the island in the middle for a good 15 minutes because the slip lane always had cars in it.
sidewalk ended apparently. i am imagining some super hostile urban planning. like did a cyclist cheat with the planner's spouse? is there not another route?
It's impossible for people to get how bad it is until they see it. My old house had a grocery store 1.2 miles away. To walk there, you have to cross a 6 lane highway. Entire neighborhoods here have no sidewalks. And the roads are so torn up they're unusable. My friend had to get rid of his road bike and get a fat tire suspension bike. None of the intersections have any lights or visibility. And you can't run off the road because the ditches have broken glass and garbage in them!. Trash that hasn't been cleaned up in years. Add to that there's a general culture of hostility towards bicycles.
A pedestrian got hit by a pickup truck and the trucks made a "caravan" to roll coal at the memorial spot where they hit her.
There's no consistency in america. I moved 15 minutes away to "the good" part of town, and every street is new and perfectly smooth. There are marked bike lanes everywhere and they're all connected. I didn't understand at the time, but moving to where the bike lanes are completely changed my life and opened up the entire city for exploring in a way that I didn't expect.
Aside from getting my adorable cats on craigslist, no other 1 decision has changed my life for the better so drastically. I sold my car. I bike to new food places on my lunch break. I met tons of amazing new friends. My fitness is way up.
People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them. In terms of happiness, I honestly feel like I got a 50k raise at my job or something. Car centric design is robbing people of the chance to disscover thier own cities
> People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them.
I really wish someone would do a study somehow on what kind of psychological effects are caused by being angry at everyone in your city for an hour twice a day (sitting in traffic).
Too, in regions with winter weather (snow, or worse, sleet and ice), what few sidewalks or walking/biking trails which might exist are often further limited due to accumulated snow, if not slick with ice.
This can be found even within town/village centres, let alone the stroads and strip-malls on their peripheries. Walking and cycling become far more perilous.
Not impossible, but challenging, and a clear danger for the very young, elderly, or disabled.
Local ordinances to maintain clear sidewalks are quite often observed in the breach.
Then there's the shortened daylight hours, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
You are right for most people. I am not (and cannot get) fit enough to walk and ride everywhere. I walk as much as I can because cars suck but I appreciate the car. You got me thinking about ebikes. Speed is also a thing though. Getting somewhere in 2 minutes instead of 10 is very convenient.
The best cities have laws that allow for light motorized vehicles in the bike lanes. Not just ebikes, but also mobility scooters, microcars, electric wheelchairs, and adaptive bicycles.
My friend has a velotric T1 and it's really great. Definitely get an ebike. I got a reflective jacket on ebay for $20 so cars can see me at night. Ebikes are just as good as normal bikes ( it took me years to realize this ). I have an EUC so I wont get an ebike fore now.
And yeah if I end up having kids, Ill get a minivan or something for chauffeuring. Sometimes you do in fact, need a car
Streetview almost any US suburb. There often is not a way to safely cross a 60ft+ wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means large vehicles with distracted drivers are driving 50mph+.
Almost all businesses are located on these wide roads, and neighborhoods basically become islands for the kids. It’s especially bad in the winter, because it gets dark quicker, and crossing that 60ft+ wide 40mph+ road gets dicey even as an adult.
I wish we had a neighborhood island. The road we live on is a quarter mile long (so, short) with few houses. It ends in a road where cars go 40+ mph. That road is awful - not only are there no sidewalks, but it twists and turns, and the road is cut into a hill with steep unwalkable slopes on either side. At any point a car could be coming downhill around the bend and your options as a pedestrian are to hope they see you or to just get run over.
One reason I think this is the case is because working with children, broadly teaching, pedagogy etc. is also something that needs to be learned. Parents in the past realistically did not have the time to spend so much time with their children. We have more time now, but lack the skills (in general) to do it effectively. What I see often is kids not really having the freedom to make mistakes and figure out things on their own. In my case I realized how bad I am at teaching during covid lockdowns and home schooling. The desire to help was there, but it's difficult to grasp the level the kids can understand. One solution for me was to say, work on it on your own, and try as best as you can. Doing it wrong is allowed and if you are really confused, ask me. But with a lot of parents, they run around their kids trying to help them do everything right from the beginning. I just don't think that can work.
As children (not even teens), we were allowed to roam the farms around the village and swim in any farm-well we like entire day in the hot sun. Jump from trees into the well, chase animals, walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays. We used to get random thorns in the feet. The kid would pluck it out by surgical poking with steel pin in his own foot.
The tragedy is that we responded to the real dangers of the past by trying to eliminate all risk, and in doing so stripped away most of the texture that made childhood feel real
We did not try to eliminate all risk. That is a lie. We increased risk by allowing criminals to go on the street and then criminalized permitting your child to be a victim.
The risk remains. We just added another risk.
If I let my 6 year old daughter cross King St in San Francisco and a car illegally turning right while she is in the crosswalk kills her, who will society prosecute harder? Me or the driver? I think I know.
If a sex offender who has been repeatedly released from jail by a judge who feels that “this time, his fourth time, it’ll be different” assaults my daughter society will judge me not him.
I might lose any surviving children, presumably for willful neglect. And you will go out and say that incarceration is bad or whatever. Don’t give me this bullshit. “Try to eliminate all risk”? No.
You just decided you want to punish the risk-takers. That’s very different. “Crime is because of poverty”. Yeah, dude, the reason that Bill Gene Hobbs goes around touching little girls is because he’s poor. Give me a break. “Try to eliminate all risk”. Pull the other one. Obviously the crime rates look great, you don’t convict anyone anymore. No crimes committed.
> walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays
... precautions were taken against hookworm infestations. And yes, I went barefoot in the mud, too, but apparently just living somewhere with winter seasons is enough to inhibit them.
Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.
I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise.
See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile:
> Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been.
I would disagree. There now far less legal protections from dog attack. 20 years ago aggressive behaviour and attack was very clearly defined!
I refuse to allow my children to park, it is full of aggresive dogs and their shit. Animal parks are too dangerous (bcos of dogs). Support animal fraudsters invaded every "safe" niche.
They are free to molest, maul and attack children. Victim blaming and gaslighting (dog is not "reactive", just agressive). If kid gets mauled, it has to go through painful rabies shots, instead of just testing the predator!
And there is not a chance to get any compensation, since dog owner had no way to know dog could attack anyone (first bite is free).
In San Francisco, a coyote bit a child in Golden Gate Park. The animal rights idiots blamed the child for playing in the park and running in the bushes. Rightfully the coyote was destroyed but allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. They do weird things like this.
You know what, I’m happy to lose the franchise if it will take it away from the childless women. These people who redirect their obviously innate mother instinct to wild animals are far too risky to allow near government.
For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards.
We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside.
What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.
From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.
I didn't say I live in a place just like Houten, I said I live in a place where you regularly see kids under 10 years old riding bikes together without adults (and like GP said, often with a fishing pole or soccer ball in tow.)
You don't need a place that's the literal "best place for cycling in the world" for this, you just need to (1) build a bike path that's not adjacent to the road (ours is typically 10-20ft away from the road) and (2) have it be along a main thoroughfare where everyone lives a short distance from it.
I see that in poor areas of the midwest. You need enough single working moms with no time to supervise their kids that it saturates the area with enough independent kids that a Karen can't damn all of them no matter how fast they call CPS. The other kids get jealous too so the whole dynamic changes.
If it's a rich area with stay at home moms (#1 Karens) or enough retired boomers sitting around with nothing to do but enjoy the power of calling modern CPS, forget it.
I lived in the US for thirty years. I’m American. I would be ECSTATIC if the US had one place like this. Best I can think of are maybe accidentally low car areas like Catalina island.
Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username)
There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.
It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints.
The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
I think part of that in Britain is because we live in towns. In a small town there's always a shop or pub or restaurant to work in and kids can walk or cycle to work. Same in NL. Because so much of America lives in pure residential suburbs, the opportunities aren't there.
It was a nice surprise to see teenagers working in my local brewery this past weekend, collecting glasses, clearing and cleaning tables, etc. They were probably between 13 and 16. Not allowed to serve alcohol until they are 18, and can take on the personal legal responsibilities for Responsible Service of Alcohol.
Most jobs for teenagers here are in fast food service - two of my friends have mid/late teenagers working these jobs. Most jobs in retail, at least near me, seem to be taken by adults.
Yeah, I think I started working in Restaurants aged 14 and really didn't stop. I still get a slight burst of nostalgia whenever I go to the countryside and see the pubs etc staffed by young'uns(it doesn't seem to happen much in London, don't know about other cities).
In your analogy, swimmers may have gone down 90% but kids are still being submerged in water as much as ever if not more. The vast majority of traffic deaths are people INSIDE cars.
The increase is mostly attributable to 30-39 year olds on arterial highways at night.
Kids playing on neighborhood streets show continued improvement... In fact IIHS pedestrian fatality data says that 1-13 year olds are the group with the HIGHEST reduction
This exchange shows why I don’t trust most people who initially through statistics out on the internet. It takes a real autist to come in with the correct reading of it.
That data shows a local minimum in 2009 and suggests that pedestrian deaths were higher during the "golden age" the commenter is referring to than today, and that is in spite of many more cars on the road today
Even in my lifetime, it seems like growing up has become increasingly a sort of highwire-walking. Especially in the educated segment that I find myself in, it seems like you HAVE to do certain things to grow up "successfully". When I was a kid, there were no expectations beyond getting a degree, and even that was a particular quirk in my father's thinking; my uncle did not make it a given for his kids.
Through my old school I know a guy who is also at my old uni, so I compare notes with him. Nowadays, everyone feels like they have to have an internship every year to get a job. Well, to do that, you needed to be at a top uni, getting top grades. To get into top uni, you needed to go to a good high school, and to do that, you needed to go to a good primary school.
I ended up living in this little bubble where everyone in my local area hires a tutor for their kid. The kids do the typical middle-class activities: an instrument or other performance art, a team sport, or maybe an individual sport. Everything is done with the goal of getting into the best senior school, or the best university.
The parents are all of the type who went through this gauntlet. Two lawyers, a lawyer and a doctor, finance and law, and so on. Everyone is spending a hefty chunk to afford to live here, and on their kid's education.
To circle back to the point of the article, these are professions that make a lot of money. They didn't exist in nearly the same scale as they did a hundred years ago, and London benefits from being the world centre of at least one of these formerly tie-wearing professions, so there's enough of a concentration here to make you think your kid could get one of these jobs in a few years.
But the road is long, and not every kid is going to enjoy becoming a lawyer or a banker. But it's also the case that it's hard to see how you could live in your childhood neighborhood without one of these jobs, so the parents steer the kids down the road before they are really old enough to decide.
I wonder if having fewer kids is behind the rat-race atmosphere. With all your eggs in one basket, they need to be well protected. If you had 4 kids, like my uncle, you wouldn't have time to puff them all down the same path.
It's because the gap has widened between the "good paying jobs" and everything else (the "shit jobs"). The former has become more scarce which means you have to hustle more to get them or you're getting the later.
It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today.
Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
This remind me of that saying - no original version but it was like: tough times makes tough people, soft times makes soft people.
And I hope it’s not true.
But indeed the more choices you have in life, the harder it gets to chose the right thing to do.
Look at US during late 40s / 50s. Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse? (apart from the fact that most of those markers slowly improved over time due to overall progress).
Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
> Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse
Lead poisoning leading to lower IQs, alcoholism was definitely rampant (though less stigmatised at the time), traumatised from the war, aggressiveness towards spouses and each other (see: war trauma)
Why can't this meme die? It is so obviously rubbish. Good times allow for a people to divert more energy to specialisation and growth and might and art and then displace the "hardened" people.
all living creatures are selfish to the core and will always optimize to minimize effort and maximize personal reward , therefore existing in a soft gentle system will result in acclimatization to a soft gentle system ... this universe is hostile impersonal harsh brutal and altogether basically not a place that anybody could ever be prepared for after having congealed in an insular bubble like the global west ... it is enjoyable seeing everyone here utterly in denial about this ... reminds me of militant atheists lambasting religion and then doubling down when i suggest that maybe healthy community gathering and values is more important than whether or not god is real ...
Good times make soft men, bad times make hard men. I never quite understood what the implication was and I always questioned the historical accuracy because no part of history is so easily defined as "good time" or "bad time."
Like basically every truism, it's a broad generalization and when you pick it apart you find all sorts of cases where the terms are loosely defined or else the truism just doesn't fit. There is at least something to be said here, and this is something of an adaptation of Ibn Khaldun's work on the concept of "asabiyyah" in the Muqaddima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#al-Muqaddima_and_t...
From the Wikipedia summary:
"The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of aṣabiyyah, translated as "group cohesiveness" or "solidarity".[41] This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion."
I think the quote itself indicates something of pre-internet outlook, where one's world was more localized. From that perspective, "good time"/"bad time" is more tied to one's geography ( and by extention, tribe ) more than anything else. If true, then "bad time" is simply war, famine, pestilence from more common set of maladies. And if the outlook is more local, the saying does start to make a lot of sense, because our constraints define how we approach life in general. Not to search very far, depression crash made a generation of Americans very wary of trading stocks.
There's the other half, which is often only implied: soft men make bad times, hard men make good times. It's supposed to be cyclical: good times -> soft people -> bad times -> hard people -> good times. Usually directly followed by "back in my days things were tough, but kids these days are just weak"
I'm not sure how it's supposed to work out. The US is arguably currently under the control of the baby boomers, who were brought up in good times. And those good times were brought on by the two generations before them who were brought up in tough times (two world wars, depression, etc)? But that feels tenuous at best
If there was any truth do this then Russia (arguably a "hard place" for most of its history) would be brimming with strong men (it is always "men" in these discussions) who then create which good times exactly?
But of course this saying is just a meme at best, it doesn't work like that in reality. In fact, good times make strong men just like good childhood makes strong adults.
I disagree, people who say this often are "great men of history" types that genuinely ascribe much of the significant events in human history to the activities of men alone.
It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships.
I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’.
I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general.
Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on.
Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
But how do you account for things like cycles of violence and PTSD? I have veteran friends that, sure, could handle being shot at better than me, but on the other hand I can go to a fireworks show without worrying about having a public breakdown. Or I got friends that suffer for lack of the structure the military provided and just veg out now, picking fights at the bar for a little excitement.
Hell I guess you can describe them as "hard men" but I wouldn't want to be that way and it doesn't seem to make you more successful in modern society.
People with mental health issues need help and support. Just because there’s a pithy saying, doesn’t make it universally beneficial to have suffered hardship.
Not sure what else you’re expecting? I’m not advocating imposed hardship, just trying to give some context for why it can often lead to a more robust and driven person. It’s clearly not universally true.
I imagine there are lots of veterans that are able to cope and have become more robust. But there will always be mental health aftershocks, because that’s why it was a hardship in the first place.
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.
Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurricular activities.
Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate
When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them.
Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics, library group sessions, and to my absolute bewilderment and dismay—beauty pageants. On any given week, there are 5+ activities outside of school. My spouse stays up until 2 AM “helping” our daughter on her kindergarten school projects. Never mind all the activities our 2 year old is ramping up into.
I don’t think this is healthy at all for children, and it’s really created a rift in our marriage. It’s been so bizarre to me to see this change in behavior from what we discussed prior to marriage compared to now. I worry the kids are going to burn out. I certainly didn’t grow up this way, and my personality as a kid would not have handled this well.
When I was my daughter’s age, I was living in a foreign country due to my dad’s job at the time (didn’t have many “scheduled activities” though). Personally, I always thought being able to experience other cultures at an early age added significant value to my upbringing. My spouse however is adamantly opposed to even vacationing in foreign countries due to a fear of “something happening” to the children. Again, this represents a change in perspective that only came about in the last few years.
I’m not sure what has happened with my spouse, but it definitely tracks the article’s observation that parents are becoming increasingly anxious and fearful and we’re likely suffocating our kids’ development.
My friend is one of those 'overly involved' parents with his daughter: tennis lessons and competitions, sailing lessons and competitions, skiing lessons and competitions. He sacrificed a huge amount of time to give his daughter every opportunity.
I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?"
He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's now so good at tennis that wherever she goes she'll be in demand to join the ladies team."
Looks like he was right: she got into a good university with a sailing scholarship, she is athletic, has a good relationship with her parents and is an all round happy and pleasant person.
Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though? I understand that it worked well for your friend and I am not knocking athletics, my own daughter is doing gymnastics, but that seems like either a post-hoc justification on the part of your friend or a strategy with a low rate of success such that it seems a bit odd to go for as a parent.
Personally, I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out and die in the last 15 years (I am in my mid thirties). I grew up in the Gifted and Talented cohort but without that Tiger Mom kind of parenting. I did fine, got a full ride to a state school, make good money and work a relaxed remote job.
Most of my cohort went on to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie, the Ivy Leagues. Of the dozen or so I really think only one made it through that pipeline unscathed and successful. Several dropped out to become bums at their parent’s house, one was homeless and became a stripper. Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers.
These are all “good kids” from stable middle class or even richer families. It’s a bit strange to have watched.
That's sad. There are so many factors at play. I would say that with my friend and his daughter, one of the reasons it worked out well was because they spent so much time together: traveling to competitions, driving to the mountains for skiing every weekend. They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences, and things like introducing her to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.
> They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences
My son competes on the national and international level in two different sports, so we do a lot of traveling. The bonding is very important, just as it is knowing when to get out of the way and let them shine.
In one sport, I drop him off and pick him up for practice (he gets distracted/flustered when someone is there watching him practice). In the other, I practice with him and am trying to stay better than him as long as I can.
There are a few other things I think are important...
If they don't want to do something, don't push them to. My son decided not to compete in a national ranking event in a couple of months because his competitions are on Thursday and Saturday and he would miss three days of school when factoring in travel.
Try to anticipate their eventual needs and make sure the right tools/equipment/etc. are available for them before they realize they needed it. Also, have backup equipment just in case something breaks or fails.
Make sure that they understand the 'why' behind all the things that both they have done, and what you have done, to enable them to get to that level.
Finally, from a young age, teach them to "always do your best, and always do better next time." The first national competition he went to, he literally finished dead last out of over 250. When we were in the airport heading home, I let him know that it's alright if he doesn't want to do more of them. He didn't back down in the slightest, and asked me when the next one was because he knew he could do better. Next month will be the second time he competes in the Junior Olympics for that sport.
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?
No: getting to the NBA is very difficult, but you don't have to be that good. You 'just' have to be good enough to play at the college/university level with a scholarship. One doesn't necessarily have to 'go pro'.
I knew someone who got a scholarship to a business/finance program for cross-country running: he wasn't planning on being a pro runner. And doing these activities in high school is probably a good thing, from a social and health perspective, regardless of if it leads anywhere else.
> Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers
Sorry to hear that.
Unfortunately I think we have way over indexed on "success" being tied to money and seeking these careers at companies that drive people to exhaustion and let the competitive environment drive everyone harder and harder with a ratchet effect.
IMO it’s less about success but a lack of reliable safety nets. Absent a good supporting environment, what choice does an individual have than to maximise their own outcome.
Not just safety nets, but the disappearance of the middle class at least in the US. It increasingly feels like people either make twice or more what they need to live, or half what they need to live.
I can absolutely see why parents see the way things are, try to extrapolate out another 20 or 30 years, and feel like they have to make sure their child is in the "well-to-do" group. It feels like the days are gone where you could be an average performer at an average job and live an okay life.
Fighting for the crows nest on the titanic
Do countries with reliable safety nets have lower rates of taking one's own life? What does reliable mean for a safety net?
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?
Not quite. NBA is for a tiny minority a a great well paying career. Most parents who raise their kids to play in the NBA will fail in that goal. However if you instead make the goal get a great scholarship playing basketball which is then used to pay for the degree that becomes their career it can be a great plan.
However here it sounds like the sailing was done not to get a great career, but to get a great college scholarship. This is likely a great plan. I suspect that while there are more basketball scholarships than sailing scholarships, there is a lot less competition for the sailing ones. It wouldn't surprise me if the typical sailing scholarship was higher than the typical basketball one - if you want someone on your team you need to get them away from the other schools, while for basketball if someone isn't obvious NBA bound (and thus your star starter) if they go elsewhere you just pick the next kid on the list for the scholarship.
The above isn't just sports. In music Violin vs Bassoon gets the same issues. Acting also fits in somehow. And your kids may well be doing more than one of the above.
> I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out
I've seen a lot of kids burn out from all backgrounds. The real problem I see with helicopter is because the kids never get to make mistakes they don't learn how to deal with them. The less controlled kids learn to be a little cautious and so when they rebel they are not going to go as far.
note that this example isn't doing these things professionally, but leveraged them to get into a good school, which nets a lot of valuable connections... it's not all or nothing, this person will be fine even if they don't become a pro tennis player
also I hear you on the suicides, but I grew up in a much poorer background and those are just overdoses in my situation.... there's easily a dozen kids in my graduating class that weren't pressured to do anything, had no idea what to do, and got addicted to drugs that killed them
there's no single right path
What school is offering sailing scholarships?
HINT: NONE. If this is true, I'd really like to know what program that is.
Sailing isn't an NCAA sport, it's governed by its own association the ICSA. Sailing Scholarships are explicitly disallowed, in fact the bigger issue that's been happening in collegiate sailing is the opposite of a scholarship.
Eager and wealthy parents making huge donations to sailing programs, rowing programs, lawn dart programs, fencing programs, etc to get admission into top schools where their kid wouldn't be able to get in on their own merit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
I was probably incorrect stating that it was a scholarship, my bad - I know there were some incentives, but whether it was a financial deal or not I don't know. The main point for her, the student, was that due to her sporting achievements she was given offers of places from several of the top universities so she could take her pick.
These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago. Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing, there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen. When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.
So much of your comment is wrong:
> These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago.
Extracurriculars have been a part of elite school admissions for about a century.
It hasn’t really been a secret for most of that time.
Some people (somewhat correctly) say that this requirement was added to discriminate against Jews at that time, but it was also an education idea (“Progressive Education” by Dewey) that gained popularity around the same time.
Regardless of what the initial catalyst was, the universities seemed to like having folks who were “doers” as a significant part of their student body.
> Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing
These are not “niche sports” in certain parts of the country.
> there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen.
I can tell you point blank that serving in a soup kitchen does not help you get into an elite school.
For any school that ranks such things, if you have a laundry list of volunteer activities like this, it would get you the next to lowest rating in extracurriculars — this is basically the same as not doing anything.
The key to getting an high rating for any volunteer activity would be to show leadership (which is something the elite schools says point blank that they want) and meaningful impact.
> When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.
I’ve got news for you. A wide range of classes of people do these things.
There might be a floor at the absolutely lowest end of the economic spectrum (just due to instability of housing and food), but I’ve seen a ton of great examples from folks who were not upper or upper middle class. Often times necessity can be the mother of invention!
I assure you that these stories stand out to admissions committees, with the biggest challenge often being simply to get some of these folks from modest means to apply.
Really. A wide range of classes of people do these things. I didn't know.
I think there are basically two kinds of micromanagement that need to be distinguished. The first one is encouraging your child to do something which you think has direct benefits, like learning to swim, which is good exercise and prevents drowning. The second is encouraging your kid to do something because you expect indirect social benefits: either some admissions officer will be impressed by an applicant who plays the oboe or the child will socialize with "the right crowd" or something like that. It's the second kind that can become pernicious because it creates an opportunity for the parent's own status anxieties and prejudices to be projected onto the child, like "lacrosse players are smarter than basketball players" so you want the kid to play lacrosse and not basketball even though they are basically comparable activities and this is dismissive of the needs and capabilities of children to learn to navigate social environments and pressures for themselves.
I would guess a parent who can enroll their kid in sailing for leisure could have paid for college anyhow
> When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them.
> Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics, library group sessions, and to my absolute bewilderment and dismay—beauty pageants. On any given week, there are 5+ activities outside of school. My spouse stays up until 2 AM “helping” our daughter on her kindergarten school projects. Never mind all the activities our 2 year old is ramping up into.
> I don’t think this is healthy at all for children, and it’s really created a rift in our marriage. It’s been so bizarre to me to see this change in behavior from what we discussed prior to marriage compared to now. I worry the kids are going to burn out. I certainly didn’t grow up this way, and my personality as a kid would not have handled this well.
Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "development".
> Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "development".
It's insidious, but when my kids have nothing to do, and I see them on the phone. I don't like it and I feel the urge to plan an activity.
Uh, when my son asks me for the phone, I say no, and he asks me why, I just tell him it’s because I think being bored once in a while is healthy. As long as the rules around using it are consistent he can work with that (he’ll start running to get to the bus/train on time too, because he can only use a phone if he can sit down)
one of the reasons NPR is declining so badly, those of us who had to listen to it for hours on end in the back of a hot car and got a kind of bizarro world moss-coane stockholm syndrome aren't reproducing enough to inculcate another generation of mug toting radio listening, garrison keillor on sunday afternoon types
I obviously don’t know your specific situation but having brought up kids in a similar environment, I may be able to offer some possible explanation for what you are living through.
First, never underestimate the impact of your environment on your way of thinking. We all like to think we’re independent thinkers but really we’re much more influenced by the people we interact with than we could even realize. Once you have a kid, a lot of your social circle will consist of other parents so you will unconsciously absorb their values and motivations as well, including the desire to put your kids through all these hoops.
Second, many professional class parents believe that the key to future success lies in getting their kids into the right school. Hence, it’s never too early to start the kid on the path to great grades, background experiences, scholarships, etc. I’ve seen parents stress out about preschool enrollments because of the “advantages” these schools provided.
Lastly, this is very often the default path for parents. It’s just what you are supposed to do. Everything is set up in that direction. Defaults are powerful and govern our behavior much more than we all realize.
Final last point, the truth is no one knows what works when raising kids. For every story of a free-range kid becoming self-reliant, there’s a story of a latchkey kid that became a bum. Therefore, parents are generally risk-avoidant with their kids (there’s no do-overs) and tend to do “good” and “respectable” approaches in child rearing (like signing them up for sports, extra curriculars, etc)
These parents (who believe there is one path to future success) will be in for a rude awakening in the coming 10-20 years when all the traditional high-status career paths have dried up. Can they not see the writing on the wall? Not that I would ever be such a parent, but even if I was, there's no point in pressuring and forcing your kids into this lifestyle given the unpredictability of the future. My goal is just supporting and letting my kid do the things that interest them.
Have you considered talking to your wife instead of posting about it to a bunch of startup dudes?
Hmm, I’m fairly certain the ‘having children’ part is what triggers total collapse of the previous worldview. My spouse was adamant that we wouldn’t force our child to study excessively, but we’re at 7 years old and we have a 50cm stack of extra activities books that need to be worked through every morning and evening, in addition to the homework the school sets. It’s madness. The class teacher told me he’s not even involved with setting homework.
I certainly wasn’t expected to do any homework at 7. It wasn’t until middle school we were expected to do some amount of homework.
The US? My 2nd grader has one piece of homework per week, which takes about 10 minutes. If there was more I would tell the teacher to shove it. Instead I talk to my child. If he's interested we talk more about that, otherwise we switch to a topic that interests him. We've covered a lot of science, astronomy and math. Lately I've been telling him about primes, factorization and cryptography. I think our conversations lead to a love of learning and curiosity that is 100x more beneficial than a 50cm stack of homework...
I always thought it was parents being competitive - especially for unobvious social status signals.
We notice competitive behaviours at our jobs - we expect to see it, and in many work situations competition is admissible.
It is harder to notice competition in our social lives because we deceive ourselves with rationalisations (that appear reasonable) and the games are less obvious.
Just a personal theory (I'm a late learner for even simple status signaling).
Could you put your child in a different school that didn't do that?
Some of it is likely “subconscious” long-term planning. University programs that result in high income post-graduation typically have prerequisites that include heavy extracurricular activity involvement.
The truth is if you don’t do it early, it will be harder to scale up your ECs when your kids are older, which will then lower their chances in getting into something that provides a higher degree of insurance against financial uncertainty.
What's striking is the helplessness that seeps through your message. As if you had zero control over what happens. You're just a bystander watching what happens to your children.
It's time for you to wake up, and start exercising your own authority.
you are not married, are you? that's not how this works. while they certainly need to talk, and not just once, but continuously, you don't have the authority to change your partners behavior. you need to discuss your feelings about this matter and come to a consensus about the activities and the goals for your child.
it won't be easy. if i were in this position, i can't imagine what i would do. i feel even stronger than GP about this, and i'd probably feel quite helpless trying to get my partner to understand how i feel about this. even just trying to get my voice heard. if you don't have a way to communicate openly in your marriage from the start, then talking about things openly can be very hard, seemingly impossible even. with one issue that my wife and me had, it first took me years to notice and understand the issue and start to speak up about it, then it took a few more years for my wife to recognize and acknowledge the issue for herself, and then she still struggled to do something about it. and very time i messed up somewhere in our relationship, it was a setback for her development too. and i can't even blame her. it's something she learned from her parents (which is how she eventually figured it out)
well i’ll also point out, as a married man, my partner doesn’t have the “authority” to unilaterally decide how our child is raised. Notice the word OUR. There is no “I” in the word our.
It’s a joint decision. If it’s not, then you’re not operating as a team. If you’re not operating as a team…then you have a marriage problem IMO. Simple as that.
The healthy marriage outcome would be talking about it and compromising in some fashion. “my way or the highway”…yikes.
Don't forget that there are many indians lurking hackernews. With their particular views about women.
just because those views exist, doesn't mean those views are good: https://madrascourier.com/opinion/its-time-to-educate-indian...
Let us know how his divorce goes.
Yeah, they definitely need time to look out a window and imagine.
But I think there is serious value in organized activities. From Junior high through high school I had a rule for mine to do one thing with school, and one thing outside of school. I would have supported more than those 2 things, but I'm so glad I didn't have to.
I'm thinking about enforcing the same rule in college, with a caveat that Gym and Girlfriend don't count, but it seems weird to make those kinds of mandates for someone that has a job.
Enforcing? He'd presumably be an adult, and the entire point of university is to get out from under your parents' wings. This sounds like a horrible idea.
I was raised in such a house. This happened because my mother was an underachiever, and also because my father and grandparents were dead so she was unchallenged doing this.
But you are alive my friend. Don't let your child still have nightmares, regrets, and feelings of constantly not being enough in their 30s. If your child does'nt have a childhood she can never become an adult.
Your wife is living vicariously through the kid, in more ways than one.
That’s good - but only to an extent, like you’ve both identified in the past.
They need to seek their own hobbies and interests to fulfill their dopamine needs, and give themselves purpose besides dictating who the kids end up being.
Coming from the other direction: you could reclaim some of that time for the kids (take over pageant time and now that’s when we go to the trampoline place with you).
Don’t let your partner run further away from you! Have a chat and reign this thing in.
There’s at least one stranger rooting for you.
Instagram Mom algorithms is what happened, probably.
My parents made me do everything, and were so fucking mean about everything, I ended up missing out on the things I actually enjoyed b/c I didn't want yet another thing to get yelled at about.
Specific: guitar and music
To be fair: part of it was to be rid of me and to not have to watch me.
Beauty pagents? Go take a good long look in the mirror. That is pathetic. Is that what you want your kids to value? Passivity? Whatever the fuck beauty pagents encourage?
At least dance is a skill.
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> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
Is that surprising? All of that sounds fully consistent to me when parents suffocate their kids with expectations and activities instead of meeting their actual needs.
They feel like they're suffocating them because they are, they feel inadequate because deep down they know it's wrong, and kids feel like they're not getting enough space because they aren't.
nono the parents are feeling that they're suffocating, lol
> We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.
Similar, except in a city. On weekends, when an adult may be home, we get sent outside as a form of grounding -- "outside. now." -- or if we watched too much tv/video games, and wouldn't come back inside til dark. No asking what we did, where we went, only that we came back in the same health we left. Not having parents home after school (11-14 y/o) meant after-school cartoon binge for a couple hours, then outside to roam around with other kids that didn't have adults home. We'd get in trouble if they came home and we were playing video games or watching tv.
It doesn't even require poverty/rural areas/etc. I grew up in (basically) sub-urban USA to a solidly middle-class family and I was always out wandering around the neighborhood or on my bike.
The irony is brutal: kids lose unstructured time and independence, parents lose breathing room, and nobody feels good about it. What used to be normal "being outside all day" now reads as neglect
It's a cultural shift. Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. Not that yours were necessarily bad parents for that time but there is way more information today of the issues with the world. I certainly wouldn't let my kid walk home alone in the woods at night: are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
I'd also say it's more likely that your peers are more personally present than parents of the 80s/90s, when parents would often just leave children alone and don't really talk to them. That in itself has been shown to provide good outcomes for children. So it's not all bad.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
To be fair, one of the reasons for the decrease in crime may be the steps taken by average people to minimize it, due to anxiety.
Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how much you drive changes your likelihood of being in an accident)
They are more aware but bad at putting it in perspective. This is the classic "fear leads to bad decisions".
Granted, depends on where you live, but statistically woods are probably a lot safer than a city with a lot of traffic. Sure, regionally that is not true, you might meet a Grizzly and/or Canadian.
> are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
Absolutely. A child has to grow up and detach from it parents at some point. It doesn't at all mean having a bad relationship, just being independent. Helps if you aren't a complete beginner by the time it inevitably happens.
This idea that parents who let their kids play without 3 layers of bubble wrap and parental hovercraft mode don’t also talk with their kids and aren’t present is not just insulting, it’s far from true. Over coddling causes more problems than it prevents, it’s especially obvious when you compare the maturity levels, mental health situation and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
I like how contemporary parents are either overly involved or lazy having forgotten how to parent ... whatever is needed to blame them for the moment.
There's just no discussion that modern parents are more personally involved in their kids development than parents in the 70s/80s. That's just a fact, not an insult.
I never said you can't raise kids without all the overprotection and also be present.
The issue of over parenting seems to be a developed nation issue, I agree. I'm not in one and here kids don't do mountains of activities, but violence rates are very significant. There's just no point exposing my son to it in the hopes he comes out the other side unscathed, when even I don't want to be out alone at night. That's "vibe parenting", not an intelligent way of raising children.
You're making a different argument, throughout these threads.
The article is about the US. You say you are "not in [a developed nation like the US]", but instead somewhere that "violence rates are very significant".
That is just not the US. Headlines are scary, but the statistics don't support the fear. The worries you describe are absolutely irrational for 99+% of US parents.
I don't know where you are and I don't know the statistics for your area -- things might be worse there! But your comments sound like irrational US parent fears, without including that context.
No, it’s specifically an Anglo country phenomenon. It’s not really an issue in places like Denmark, France, Spain, Russia, China, Chile. There’s several books on the topic if you are open to recommendations.
I'm curious about book recommendations on this (as someone raising kids in the US but originally from Russia)
Bringing Up Bebe, The Danish Way Of Parenting, The Coddling of the American Mind. These are pretty similar to Soviet style, but perhaps a bit less structured.
We are basically raising our daughter Soviet-style to the extent that we can; so far so good. It's difficult in a culture where ADHD American style of child raising is prevalent.
From a very young age when I wondered around the rural midwest, I had a gun. Usually a 20ga shotgun or a .22 rifle. Don't think my parents were too worried about me getting kidnapped or murdered. I used it for hunting but I knew what to do in the case of self defense.
Another one of those things that aren't allowed now.
Not sure if 'aware' is the right word. More like anxious.
Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.
When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.
An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.
It's an anxiety spiral.
How are the rates of murder, kidnappings, and child sex abuse compared to a few decades ago during the free range parenting golden age?
> the risk
What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.
Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.
That's not really an answer though.
My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped.
Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right?
It's just a zero insight use of numbers.
That's literally my point. I did exactly what you did, just in a different context to point out the absurdity of the statement.
i see it as blatantly ignoring risks because they don't align to your worldview
The risk they die from drug overdose or something because they are maladjusted from being hovered over may be orders of magnitude greater. We live in a far safer time than people think with regard to violent crime (see graph below) and a far more dangerous time with regard to mental health and depression. Also obesity. Most people die from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. All made more prevalent by shuttling your kid around constantly instead of them using their own two legs like nature intended.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
It is precisely this anxiety that is the issue being discussed. Parents are terrified of what might happen to their kids, so too little happens to their kids (both good and bad)
Do you let your children ride in cars? The risk of death in a passenger vehicle is over 100x that of being kidnapped.
I wrote a long winded thing about my personal experience but deleted it because it was too personal and too depressing to think about.
The summary is that the risk of a CPS investigation of a kid playing or walking independently is probably 10-100x that of suffering a car accident. And the average car accident is way less traumatic than being ripped away from your family, tossed in a foster home, and feeling like your parents have abandoned you forever because they could not protect you from the state.
That's terrible.
What's the solution though? Stop letting kids play outside? I think the solution should be to reform CPS so it's not so traumatizing, and have more governmental awareness campaigns of the benefits of kids playing outside. I see government billboards all the time about anti-smoking, eating healthy, prediabetes screening. There can similarly be billboards promoting kids playing outside.
1) Childhood independence protection
2) At the bare minimum, victims of CPS reports should be able to face their accuser. Currently laws anonymize reporters, this is not compatible with an open and balanced justice system. Also, needs to be heavy penalties and liabilities for abusing CPS reporting -- asymmetrical risks would end up with just getting the same result over and over again.
3) Cultural change. People that curtail child independence of others' children should be shamed, publicly. People that let their kids have independence, left the hell alone.
there would not be any issue with anonymous reports if CPS would look for actual evidence before doing anything else, and reject any anonymous report as baseless if no evidence is found. innocent until proven guilty must hold here too.
Your analogy is missing something. Not letting a child explore the world has an opportunity cost. They miss out on opportunities to develop independence and psychological resilience. The book "The Anxious Generation" covers this in detail.
I work at a college, and can tell you that (while everyone views their childhoods with rose colored glasses), at my institution, statistically kids today are less able to cope with difficulty than they were when I started my career.
When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).
For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).
In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.
We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.
The chances of your kid being abducted by a stranger because you let them walk home from school are so many orders of magnitude lower than 0.5% that the analogy doesn't make any sense. You're probably more likely to kill them by handing them a plate of food or some other benign every day factor that isn't nearly as dramatic as anything the national news covers.
That sounds like maladaptive anxiety.
1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them?
As a parent, a cancer survivor, and the child of a high anxiety parent, Yes, yes you should wait and see. Every doctor's visit is a chance to catch something worse.
That said, if you're a chill parent reading this, you should probably be more proactive about it. There is a middle ground, overreacting is usually worse than under reacting, but it is important that you react.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were
does being more aware of these things mean you necessarily make better decisions overall for you children? Are humans good at translating news they see into accurate risk assessments?
Kids are in this weird position where they are placed on a pedestal (they’re sooo important! My little future leader!) but yet they have no real agency in their lives and are very restricted from making decisions, even ludicrously simple ones like can I take a walk outside by myself for half an hour.
I don’t have kids yet but I am thinking a lot about this, and I can only conclude that kids should be treated much more like adults. They should have jobs and real responsibilities, and also should face the same pressure that adults do.
Nobody expects me to be a CEO someday. If I want to, I have to push myself.
Similar generations and i've noticed the same thing, but living in an urban place, in a large complex of socialist apartment buildings, in a country that fell apart from a larger socialist one to a smaller capitalist one.
Two of the biggest differences were extracurricular activities and technology... back in my day, you maybe had one or two 'after school' things per week, usually immediately after school, for an hour (so you'd end at two oclock instead an hour earlier) and you then went home, where you had one tv per family. When your parents came home, the tv was gone, dads football, moms series, evening drama movies... and what were you supposed to do then? Read? Well.. you went out. ...same as most of your friends. We sat on benches, played football, basketball, girls wanted attention, got attention, from young-kids age to the age of neighbors caling police due to 'loud teenagers' outside.
And now? Every parent with kids has their kids in one additional language course, some music classes, sports, and not like once a week for an hour or two, but two, three times per week each, at different locations (=driving them around, even though there are a lot of busses). The kids are physically tired from all that, and then they get home, don't even have time to get bored, and even if they did, they now have a tv, phone, computer and a gaming console right in their room. Their friends aren't outside either, since they're being chauffered around for their activities. No proper socialization with peers, no time to do stupid stuff, no time to be bored... nothing.
And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time... yes, excercise, but we exercised too, by being outside, walking, biking, playing footbal with stones, etc.
tldr: blame parents
> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...
I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.
Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
Sure, but in addition to everything they learn at school (and get tired of), do they really need 3x2 hours of violin, 3x2 hours of tennis and 3x2 hours of spanish weekly? + weekend tennis matches. (my coworkers kid taken as example, 12yo)
I like my job too, i learn a lot of it, but that's basically half-time of a second job (if you include commute) for a 12yo kid... that's just too much, both for the kids and their parents.
Kids oftentimes want to do that.
And with foreign languages, notably english, relying on school means they likely wont learn it.
A trend amongst peers I have noticed ... people are parenting in the opposite manner to the way their werre raised.
Your parents were very active / suffocating ... do free range parenting. Your parents let you roam outside with few sports, clubs and activities ... do 7 day a week scheduled activities.
You went to private school ... send kids to shittiest free school you can find.
Most of us had parents that made mistakes. Some of those mistakes hurt us, stunted our development, or damaging our psyches. When we become parents, we try not to make the mistakes that our parents make.
But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.
In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.
Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.
> You went to private school ... send kids to shittiest free school you can find.
You're making that up.
> and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty
> We'd be outside all day long
> most of my peers have middle-class jobs.
>Their kids are barely outside.
wonder what the link is there then?
The link is: the first part was 'then', the second is 'now'.
what absolute cretins downvoted that?
Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.
Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.
Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.
My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
Modernity has also made life really fucking complicated. A 16 year old could walk to the factory, get some paper money and then do what they wanted with it.
Nowadays lets say your 16 year old wants a car and a job. To do that they need to schedule multiple tests with DMV, lessons with a driving instructor, update insurance documents and find the time to do hours of practice with you. At the end of that they need to navigate buying a used/new vehicle and setting up insurance. Then they need to navigate the world of job applications, and if they manage to get hired they will need to have their direct deposit bank account setup and have some kind of credit card payment system setup so they can use the money.
Seriously just typing this I get exhausted. It makes sense why parents are hovering over their kids because there are 10,000 things that need to get handled just to like be a "person". You can either watch your kid drown in a mire of bureaucracy or just let them focus on school and offload all of it from them.
That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.
Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.
When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.
Are your kids fully grown adults yet?
If patients are lawyers, doctors, or engineers, this system will still work for them.
And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.
What looks like fear of responsibility can also be fear of doing something wrong in a world where mistakes are heavily punished and rarely forgiven
Anxiety is the only real emotion and it is the best one because it truly protects you from evil.
I wouldn't conflate "best" with "most important". Personally I find the sappy emotions like love, happiness, and contentedness to be the best ones, generated by the best parts of life. However, I would absolutely say it is the most important feeling from a self-preservation standpoint.
There is also something to be said about today's unchecked, underutilized anxiety that one feels when sitting doing absolutely nothing. There has been an unending discussion about the causes of this, but I tend to align with the belief that since our current world doesn't provide many dangers for us to genuinely cause anxiety, our brain freaks out and finds less dire avenues to trigger it.
Anger is real too, dammit!
Only if you’re not already influential, usually coinciding with wealthy.
I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.
"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.
It is called class anxiety.
The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.
If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.
> You can't get healthcare
Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.
> you have to work three jobs
Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
62-65% of all bankruptcies in the US are tied to medical expenses.
Your comment is a textbook example of survivorship bias.
Medicaid is a poor substitute of a proper PPO plan. The reimbursements are low, so there are fewer providers, and it requires you to not have any assets.
Medicaid is better than most PPO plans!
Sure you’re more limited with providers, but there are plenty and out of pocket costs are near zero.
There are people who cant buy insuline, have no insuline and their health is going down bwlecause od that.
Like common.
28 is the new 18. The problem is nobody's getting any younger on the other side of life, so that's a decade of life lost.
There's already people explicitly working on anti-aging technology. We'll see what happens over the next few decades there.
And don’t forget that fusion is just 20 years away!
wonder whats gonna happen in a decade or two when our youngest and brightest minds have all been penned by a culture disconnected from reality
There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.
You can't compare late 90s/early 2000s internet with what kids have access to today. It wasn't a weapon aimed at your attention back then, and certainly not as easily accessible. There isn't much in common between the two, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively
We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/
edit: ah finally; through another HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944) I was able to find the original link to the article (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html) and an archived version of the first version (https://web.archive.org/web/20031008160117/http://www.randsi...). Notably, the list of activities changed:
2003 version:
> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.
Current version:
> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.
We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?
Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.
That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.
while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine
Then complain about short form video (which, I should add, is probably more culturally relevant than whatever we were consuming on the Internet growing up)
Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.
I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality and at no point complained about the internet in general , since you're out here commanding me I command you to consider that commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour
> commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour
No, it really doesn't. Look at Prohibition in America, or the "War on Drugs", or abstinence-only sex education.
What does tend to reduce harmful behavior is actual education about the risks and tackling the sources of those risks. In this case, that would look like addressing the addictiveness of these platforms, instead of, say, requiring an ID to use it. The latter will only encourage kids to go to other platforms, or bypass the ID checks, to say nothing of the privacy risks to everyone else.
Furthermore, the kids most in need of protection from those platforms, because their parents aren't protecting them, will likely just get their parents to ID them and let them on anyway.
> I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality
In what way is it disconnected from reality? It seems to me that it is in fact exquisitely linked to reality by the very nature of a significant part of the population being on the Internet, as opposed to 20-30 years ago, where the culture was more of a subset of the general culture.
Also, I didn't "command" you to do anything. I suggested something. A "command" would look more like, say, a law saying you can't use certain websites because of your age. A "suggestion", on the other hand, might look like, say, schools educating kids about why certain websites are harmful to them.
saying "then complain about x" is in the imperative mood regardless as to your intentions , it seems your examples align with my statement so there is nothing to argue there , if the whole world being on the net is exquisitely real to you then we are really never going to agree so I'm gonna leave it here
how old are you? the avg ~20 year old has indeed already grown up with addictive social media
youtube came out 20 years ago, the iphone 19 years ago, instagram 15 years ago, musical.ly 11 years ago and merged with tiktok 7 years ago...
we are so cooked frfr
Can confirm, although I won’t be 20 until tomorrow (:
Nothing you listed ever felt “new”, it’s always just sort of been around.
old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather
The great Fermi Filter maybe
The irony is that parents feel like their kids are safer and more sheltered when they restrict their movement, while the opposite is true.
There was never a time in history where kids would be targeted and manipulated by corporations as today. The digital phone is a marketing gadget that brainwashes us to constantly interact with it. In extreme cases, every aspect of our lives is being scored, monetized and compared. Everything has become a hyper individualized hustle.
To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.
Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.
I mean, not really. 'Unsheltered' kids that face hard reality are the ones that end up in gangs.
I read the article. And see zero evidence given that letting kids survive is a bad thing if you trade in nothing important.
Then again, this seems US centric.
But this comment just seems cruel, making people think it is their fault if they have bad feelings.
The whole discussion is US centric.
In France kids are still free to roam around, or stay alone at home at 10yo (sometimes younger).
In Japan kids start commuting to school, sometimes taking the train alone, at 6.
If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org
One of the testimonies mentions a 4 year old cooking dinner (pancakes, eggs and sausages).
That takes an unbelievable a level of dexterity for a 4 year old. Reminds me of those social media posts of 4 year olds saying things that are way beyond the wisdom they may possess.
I call BS.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/uq0jon/big_bro...
"No one in America today lives under the cloud of desperation that these children did."
Is this true? Certainly many fewer people do.
However, there have been high profile child labor busts recently: - 13yo child in a car factory: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/business/hyundai-child-la... - 54 migrant children in meat packing plants: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/settlement-child-labor-dol-depa...
And further, some forms of child labor are still the norm here: America has unrestricted child labor after age 16, and in fact many children do drop out of school at that age to support their families
Not to mentions calls to weaken child labour laws in certain states to try and make up the difference in abducted workers: https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-...
It's true that children in the first decade or so of the 20th Century considered work normal and not that unpleasant despite their often horrific work conditions.
The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920.
These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article.
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/
If you remove physical autonomy and replace it with algorithmic spaces optimized for engagement rather than growth, you shouldn't be surprised when teens struggle with agency, goals, or mental health...
It's 10pm; do you know where your kids are? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJeBbhPYBs
10pm is a different animal. Out that late and I dont know where they are? 18+
(Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
My parents generation was so laisse faire with their child rearing that they ran ads to remind them to go figure out where we were.
In fairness: I drove through your home state regularly when I lived in Michigan and the billboards we saw were fucking bananas, including one about how radiators are hot and parents shouldn't restrain their children against them.
The woke mind virus has won if you can’t chain your child to scalding radiators without the government using the fake news media to condemn it.
It wasn't uncommon for kids under 18 to be out that late just a couple of decades ago.
In the 90s/early 00's 10pm was like a weekday, school night curfew.
As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet?
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
Every time I hear that PSA I’m reminded of the acid track “where is your child”
https://youtu.be/sDyxyRcZWBA?si=sqDnodWQ-jWKCdCH
(I know the song came long after the PSA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZybUKAtD40
The constrain isn’t merely financial, it’s broader than that. Teenagers are less free because adults and society have bulldozed the adversity out of teen lives. This sheltering is creating generations that are more - not less - fragile.
Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
The adversity is very much there, but it's all emotional and social. What's missing is (mild) physical adversity, and self-directed play and exploration.
Mild somewhat-dangerous-but-not-really play teaches that actions and decisions have consequences, and if you make a mistake it hurts - maybe a lot.
The world is a dangerous place, but some element of risk is both unavoidable and exciting. And it's safe (more or less) to explore and take risks.
When the stress is all emotional and social - high school bullying, status games, cliques and groups, gender wars, random adult authoritarianism - it teaches you that dissent is forbidden and you must conform to the group or you will be punished by it.
You never get the lessons about autonomy and exploration. You're physically comfortable but emotionally underdeveloped with a limited sense of individual agency. There's a fair chance you'll have social PTSD and confuse individuality with permanent rebellion. And your natural state will be permanently-triggered rage about something.
Punished? How? By who? All voices and opinions are not equal. If kids aren’t learning how to filter out the noise then yeah they’re playing in traffic. But once given the opportunity to learn they keep running into traffic. Self destructive behavior is not due to more danger, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy
I don't think that's it.
There's definitely a kind of frenetic adversity in the whole college admissions process, at least for kids who are inclined to go that route. If anything, it has gotten much worse over the past 30 years; it's much more stressful than it used to be, and it's easy for teens to imagine that every little thing carries high stakes.
If by "adversity" you mean helping the family put food on the table, I certainly agree that there's less of that. Today we have more weird, more detached, and less rational forms of adversity.
I think it’s a broader awareness of a K shaped socioeconomic trajectory, that the odds of an upward trajectory drop considerably if you don’t follow the standard path into a top 20 university, metro, etc. as economic opportunities continue to agglomerate.
What gives me pause with that take is that it only really applies to certain geographical regions of the country. I grew up in a place where today you can still get a starter home for about 100k. The nicest homes, akin to the Home Alone house, on the market are around 500k or less. You don’t need a glamorous job to be a homeowner here, to own a couple cars on the comparatively cheap insurance rates, to send your kid to the very competent in state university. It is still the same break it has always had since the region is stagnant in population. Ironically the lack of growth actually helps the people when you consider the affordability it offers. However the mass media is blind to this region, you won’t hear about it save for browbeating over 1950s population counts, missing the point entirely of what that really means in practice for the people who live there.
K shaped economy doesn’t just refer to class, but of geography. There is a hidden line out of the middle of that K going dead straight.
> Generations that know nothing but comfort.
sad but true
> They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
what is real life like? I guess real is what parents demonstrate, not?
This is an evergreen complaint made of every generation.
Yes. And look where it has led us. Little by little. Easier than previously has become too easy too much of the time.
teens experience more adversity now than before. social and existential adversity.
<< Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
Maybe? I am giving my kid a lot of comfort, because I see how almost everything is stacked against her future. If the unrealistic expectations exist, it is from our ruling class that we simply accept it:D
just sayin'
> Generations that know nothing but comfort.
Physical, perhaps.
Mentally and emotionally? Not. The pressure to "swim or sink" and grab one of those increasingly precious "well paying jobs" or be flipping burgers is much higher than it was when I was a kid.
Yes, but the two go hand in hand. Michael Easter talks about it in The Comfort Crisis. He probably used a more technical term, but that term escapes me for the moment. In short, worry is relative. For example, we you have to focus on getting your next meal, minor things get no attention, no concern. Now eliminate the need to worry about food and the minor things get center stage.
The point is, without anything significant to focus on youth today now make the once insignificant significant.
Again, I’m not doing the concept justice, but it is a thing.
Fair point, but this discussion has been comparing teenagers today with 40 years ago, not 100 or 140 years ago. Teens 40 years ago in the US at least were (with some exceptions) not worrying about where their next meal will come from.
> Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS
What??
> Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same.
I am speechless. Has so much changed in the 20 odd years since I was a kid? I was playing outside unsupervised from maybe age 9. What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
I have six young kids. This attitude is absolutely prevalent (and it's insane). I've been chewed out by a cashier for sending an 8 year old into a store alone. I've had a person run out of a restaurant, panicking, and grab my 2 year old because she was walking too far ahead of me. I've had people tell me it's unsafe to let me 10, 8, and 5-year olds bike together in the park ahead of me while I walk.
Just giving my kids space when I'm nearby, in sight of them has terrified countless onlookers.
No one has actually called CPS on me, thankfully, to my knowledge. But the general atmosphere is absolutely crushing for people who want to try to safely let their kids learn independence.
I was 10 in '72, in a big metropolis. I'd take off on my Stingray bike on all day jaunts all over. The only comments I got were from my mom who made sure I had change to phone home in case I got a flat. I started a 4am paper route on that bike two years later, nobody batted an eye. It was the best of times.
Yeah. I did the same when I was aged 8-12 in the early 1990's. I'd bike or walk everywhere, go into all kinds of stores and the library, and get into all kinds of minor trouble with the neighborhood kids. I'm very sad that my kids aren't able to have that kind of a life (even though I get that it's largely my own fault, because we live in an area where that is just not possible).
As a teenager in the 90's, I bicycled 20+ miles away into the mountains onto steep fire roads and ridge trails. In middle school at either 12- or 13-years-old, I went on a 2 day 72 mile (roundtrip) road cycling and camping school trip from San Jose to Mt Madonna; granted that was chaperoned but not by anyone my parents knew. I couldn't afford a car until college. If I wanted to get anywhere, it was on a bicycle or maybe the occasional city bus or light rail for somewhere far away. Mom was working a full-time job and taking night classes to finish an accounting degree.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I was in elementary school when the arcade game craze happened, PacMan, Donkey Kong, etc. I would wander the streets looking for games to play. There were arcade games in every grocery store, restaurants, every convenience store (so basically just 7-11s). Home gaming consoles could not begin to match what was in the arcades at that time. I would walk the streets looking for new ones to play.
I mostly played arcade games, but I would play pinball too. One day I was walking past a place and saw a pinball game and went in and started playing. I think it was on the second quarter when someone came and asked if I was there with my parents. I said no and they told me I had to leave since minors weren't allowed in a bar. I don't think I even know what a bar was at that time.
Elementary school kid hanging out in a bar without his parents would get some CPS attention these days I guess.
The worst of times part is, if I was "free range" it wasn't because my parents had discussed the risks and benefits of allowing me to wander the streets. No kid I knew had both parents at home back then. Our moms worked. We were free range because no one gave a shit what we did as long as we weren't causing them some immediate problem. So we had freedom. It was both glorious and horrible.
Genuinely, move.
You become the average of those around you, and that sounds terrible.
Not kids, parents are scared, kids have no say unless they are already addicted to gaming, tv or whatever their latest addiction is, and then they themselves don't want to go and just sit and consume.
Even if the chance something actually happens is terribly low it became unacceptable. Death of any type became unacceptable, so got injuries, bullying is end of the world. Maybe due to having 1-2 kids instead of 10 and seeing occasionally other kids around die from whatever, so what was sort of normalized is shocking now.
Parenting got much, much harder, expectation of what a good parent is are stratospheric compared to - kid didn't die, you didn't beat him up (too much), didn't rape him and similar level. The more you invest yourself into any activity including parenting the the less you can ignore or accept failure of any sort. And so on.
I grew up free as a bird too, had a small bicycle and roamed fields and city too, but cars were few and slow ones. Its still possible but even for my kids it has to be outside of roads, luckily we live now next to forest and vineyards with roads closed to regular traffic. So it seems its whole societal change of mindset, not limited to US (although there I believe its the worst due to everything car-centric, few continuous pedestrian walks etc)
I think a lot of parenting decisions like this are just made in line with the rest of the society. If you let your 9 year old roam the park by themselves, you run a rather small risk of injuries, death, kidnapping etc. But you run a pretty big risk of them being the only lone 9 year old at the park.
That. Our oldest was out by himself all the time when he was smaller. Then it got to be less and less.
Because it was just him. His friends couldn't go anywhere unless a parent went with them.
There's no unsupervised time, and then we're all confused when 18 year olds can't cope with life.
Cars, I nearly got run over as a kid a few times
Now as an adult I'd be worried about cycling around with cars that would hit me in the chest and not the legs on impact
Also cars make it very easy for a stranger to pull up and kidnap, parents subconsciously know that and factor it into their decisions
There was also youth clubs where I grew up and a BMX track and no phones so play was mostly happening outside
Society is going to continue to degrading as long as debts keep increasing
Debts will keep increasing because the only way to create new money is everytime someone gets a loan the bank injects the principle into the economy but then expects interest on top so there will never be enough money in the economy for everyone to pay off all their debts
We'll either get mass debt forgiveness or societal collapse and so far we've opted for societal collapse
Ok I actually agree with you about debt and the general societal degradation, but kidnapping is a non-issue.
In modern times there's a total of about 70 child kidnappings per year in the US. I am excluding parental kidnappings which sends that up by orders of magnitude, but I think that's fair because that's an entirely different issue and you specifically said stranger anyhow (though even of those 70 - a sizable chunk are not strangers). For contrast about 400 people are struck by lightning each year.
Statistically, it just doesn't happen. It's just one of those things, like terrorism or mass shootings, that is so unbelievably terrifying that people overreact in a self destructive way to try to prevent something that is statistically much less of a threat than just normal behaviors we take for granted.
I don't think money is the key issue. There were no clubs or nice tracks when I grew up, but ditches, canals, and forested areas worked just as well.
When people try to downplay rates by comparing to another very rare event, I respond by saying “I don’t want to go outside during a thunderstorm” rather than “you don’t need to risk it cus it’s so rare”.
Most Americans are feeling the same way and you must understand this to understand why Cheeto in chief keeps winning.
What is included in the stats for kidnapping? Where I live a confused young man convinced a little girl to get on his ebike and forced her to ride along with him for a few hours before coming back to the neighbourhood and being stopped by police that was out in full force for him.
My point being, “only 70 a year in the US” sounds like a very low number and inconsequential number since we had an abduction close by already.
Any parent that has heard the same story is thinking of that instead of the stats.
It is true that people have wildly incorrect understanding of crime rates and that this causes them to make strange decisions both in their personal lives and in the policies they support.
Child abductions are amazingly rare. Data for them is strong because they are consistently reported.
Cars and building for car infrastructure is part of it. Another part, I think, is the decline in neighborhood communities. By that I mean the social pressure to get to know/socialize with your neighbors, through everything from block parties to shared church membership. When kids go “wandering the neighborhood” they were never far from one of the member’s houses, or at least a familiar neighbor who would notice them and keep an eye out.
Which also goes back to car infrastructure. If you need to drive everywhere for any and all errands/activities, you won’t interact with people in nearby houses, you wont see neighbors at the local bar or small grocery store.
So many of the issues in the US stem from an isolating car (instead of people) oriented infrastructure. Everything from social breakdown, obesity, aggressive brodozers, insane utility and insurance expenses - the list goes on.
That is a fast track from cars to societal collapse. But agree cars are terrifying. I live in what should be a walking friendly part of Boston that is very pedestrian unfriendly because drivers are overly aggressive, on their phones, or commuting through to avoid traffic and do not care. It is the only reason our 10 year old is not yet wandering around on his own. I have spent years writing local politicians about improved intersections and traffic enforcement and have given up. No one seems to care. The car is king in the US. Even in a corner of the country where there is a lot of room to design around them not for them.
cars were just as plentiful in the 70s and 80s as now and yet parents weren't nearly as worried about it as they are now
and kids were much more on bikes then than now -- which is a rare sight unless it's parents with their little kids on a Sunday ride in the park
Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020.
As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bikes.
1: https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/passenger_travel_20... 2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH
sure, population has grown, but unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
also, bike lanes were virtually non-existent back then
Fantastic news, population density has increased substantially![1] 57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020.
1: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/density-d...
That's not the density I was referring to. That doesn't measure city/suburb density. We have many more suburbs (therefore more density overall) but the number of houses within a suburb (where a child might be riding around) is not likely to have increased.
I think we have a disagreement in terms beyond "density". I'm talking about bicycle as transportation, and I believe you may be talking about bicycle as recreation.
To clarify, transportation is a means to get you to a destination. I don't know where you live, but I haven't lived in or ever even seen a suburb that provides all the destinations that a child (assuming they're old enough to ride a bike alone) would want to bike to.
Friends live in different neighborhoods. The mall certainly wasn't in my neighborhood. The video store, my church, the woods, the local pool, the public library, all required crossing streets which have become busier and busier.
The size of the United States has not increased since 1970, but the number of people has. So yes, no shit, (US pop / US land area) has gone up. But the question is, "is the average neighborhood more dense than it was in 1970", and that's not a question you can answer from that number, because obviously cities & towns have spread since then.
If you want an intellectually honest comparison, take a look at the District of Columbia, which is basically 100% city and has been for many decades. It's gone down since 1970.
No one asked that question except for you.
The other commenter and I were talking about cars.
Car ownership rates increased slightly, number of households nearly doubled, and average population density went up in every state except DC. There are more cars. Cars do not stay in one place, especially in the case of suburbanization.
Also, I'm not sure why/how the DC piece is intellectually honest. The Washington Metropolitan Statistical area has more than doubled in population since 1970[1]. Do you think all of the people who moved to PG County stay out of DC? That must be why the beltway is so easy to maneuver!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area
> unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
This was the original mention of density. Sure, cars don't stay in one place, but if we're talking about kids walking/biking around their suburban neighborhood, how big is the impact if there's a new 50k suburb on the other side of the urban core? Even commuters from the exurbs are taking the dastardly 45mph stroads, not the stopsign-laden 25mph streets through your neighborhood.
The common parlance around here is that "greater density" means smaller houses closer together or multi-unit structures. If you build a new subdivision outside town, nobody says "oh wow the town got so much denser", it just got broader. Waving at "57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020" says absolutely nothing about the experience of the average person on the average streets near their homes.
All right:
As an average person, I've observed that both my childhood and current neighborhoods (Mid-Atlantic and Midwest respectively) have increased in the number of cars present, and that's within and between neighborhoods. I have also observed more in-fill subdivisions between neighborhoods. Since the '90s, I've seen just the bike ride that I'd take multiple times a week in my Mid-Atlantic suburb yield one acre lots turned into 8 homes, a small office park being converted into multiple 5-over-1s, a country club being turned into 400 homes. In the past decade in the Midwest, I've seen 2 single family homes torn down to make 8 units with an 8 car garage and 8 more spaces out back, multiple small businesses torn down to make way for "luxury" student housing with a parking spot for every bed room, a shopping center and apartment complex torn down and turned into an even bigger apartment complex with parking for every bedroom. Many of these are on my block or on the bike path around town.
There are more cars. There is more density.
So there you go, I've provided census data, I've provided observations from my own life across multiple geographies that backs up the data.
If you're claiming that there aren't more cars in neighborhoods, please back up that claim.
It's not just how many cars there are, but how big they are, how aggressively they're driven, and how much infrastructure there is for bikes alongside.
The track that the US political economy is on with the feedback loop caused by government backed fixed term fixed interest loans requires an ever increasing LTV, meaning newer entrants in the housing market will have to accept increasingly precarious positions.
The 30 year fixed mortgage is an insanely good deal, and I say this as a guy who has one. The monthly cost can only stay the same (and decline due to inflation) or decline if interest rates fall and you refinance or adjust the loan. If interest rates go up, you're completely protected.
A mortgage may be more than rent for a similar place now, but I suspect it won't be that many years before the lines cross.
Yeah I'm shocked how this article can get away without a mention of cars...
That is a shocking stat, although I see that the source article only looked at the 20 most populous counties in the US: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8325358/
I wonder if that causes some selection bias (e.g. density correlating with poverty).
Loads of things, but the big thing that changed in past decades is the media. A case of a child getting abducted or killed goes nation- or worldwide now, which makes everyone feel less safe in letting their kids roam free.
I'm an 80s kid, I was playing outside at age 6 unsupervised / with my friends. I feel like this should be pretty normal and totally agree with your last line:
What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
I teach my kids their biggest risk is a driver distracted by their phone in a vehicle with a hood height at or above the kids’ head height.
Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.
Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin.
The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
I live in Britain. If you read back you'll see I am talking about the opinions of Britons and Europeans of raising children in the US.
My point is it still a very rare thing even in the most common place in the world. The weight of school shootings in people's minds is more emotional than statistical. Careless drivers kill way more people in the US and they do it every day.
Gun related deaths and homicide are big enough risk factors to be worth worrying about and mitigating as a parent, but school shootings in particular are so rare they are not a major safety concern for parents- gun accidents and homicide outside of school are much much bigger risks.
As an aside, firearms are the leading cause of deaths for kids in the US:
https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2025/12/guns-are-the-leadi...
https://www.cnn.com/health/guns-death-us-children-teens-dg
I don't think it's particularly useful to focus on school shootings in particular vs other shootings
> It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
I ran the numbers upon having kids. It is irrational.
> What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
CPS it seems.
Call the CPS on them! Why? because they are risking their child having the CPS called on them ... and that is dangerous.
I have a ten year old daughter in NYC, and I’m probably one of the types of parents who many here are castigating. I’m not ready for her to go out and explore the city on her own. Here’s what I worry about:
- cars: she’s not always the most present and aware, and it takes one mistake to ruin or end her life.
- bikes and scooters: less dangerous in some ways, but more ubiquitous and unpredictable than cars
- sexual harassment: she’s only ten, but sadly in some neighborhoods, that’s old enough that she’s likely to get hassled. That’s a sad fact of life she’ll have to deal with at some point, but I’m not ready yet
- bullying: I had several encounters with groups of older kids when I was off free-ranging as a kid
- subway: some deranged homeless person throws someone off the platform or stabs someone every week here
I could go on, but the bottom line is that the potential harm outweighs the potential benefit for me right now. In my mind there’s no right answer here, just pros and cons. Appealing to how things were a century ago, or even when I grew up, is pretty irrelevant. My daughter might mature a couple years later than I did, and I can live with that.
Also, I’m just pretty fundamentally unimpressed with most moral panics. “The Anxious Generation” seems like just the latest entry in a tradition stretching thousands of years where people worry about how the changes in society are ruining the next generation, and long for a return to how life was when they grew up. However, each generation somehow manages to figure it out.
I understand and worry about my kids the same age too. But the paradox I myself admit to is that those perceived dangers aren't new nor have they increased significantly since I was young in the 70s -- other than scooters being new -- and yet I, and pretty much every other kid, had tons of freedom and was just fine. So it's mostly about the fears in my head, not the reality on the ground.
Yeah, but “I made it just fine” is poor logic to me. This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking, mom drinking while pregnant, no seatbelts, etc. They were mostly fine too.
It's not just me who made it fine; my entire generation did.
> This would be true for kids who grew up with parents smoking
not really, given the number of people with lung cancer then compared to today
> no seatbelts
again, the number of fatalities was much higher then
Your entire generation definitely didn’t make it just fine, lots of kids were killed, abducted, assaulted, raped, traumatized, or just disappeared. That doesn’t mean anything on its own about how we should live today, but they didn’t make it just fine.
And yes, traffic fatalities were much higher before seatbelts, but they still only affected a tiny fraction of kids. The vast majority were just fine.
One thing I always think about when reading these posts: the complaints about how kids never roam free anymore are also accompanied by claims that abductions are incredibly rare now. But how do we know they’re not incredibly rare because kids don’t roam free? It feels like claiming that you shouldn’t have to wear your seatbelt because traffic fatalities are much lower than they were when seatbelts were introduced!
I mean, realistically, you can tell who is going to do all those weird things. We decided that rampant criminality was fine on the streets. City life in America is about being collateral damage in the Democratic Party campaign to enrich their special interest through NGOs.
“No, that serial molester of children just needs a daily check-in with the NGO my friend runs. Then he’s fine to go around. No carceral justice.”
> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward.
This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are leading to an increasingly alienated generation of kids. I grew up in suburbs and I couldn't even safely bike to my friend's house because the sidewalk would randomly end before arriving at his neighborhood, and the stroad next to it was at 45mph speed limit (thus in Texas: 60mph) and mostly filled with massive pickup trucks that probably couldn't even see me. So, my options before my parents got home were to play WoW and browse 4chan or do my homework, and if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.
Imo this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit." I was into manosphere stuff, mildly zenophobic, incredibly transphobic, and insufferably cynical. Getting to college and seeing the disgust on people's faces when I'd drop a 4chan joke was a complete culture shock to me. Took me a good 2 years to adjust to "normal society," by then I also had to overcome a reputation as an asshole.
I can't even imagine what it's like for kids like me these days now that there's full on weaponized Discords trying to convince them to shoot up schools for the lulz. At least on 4chan that kind of stuff got banned or mocked.
>this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit.
I'm so glad you got out man. Seriously. You climbed out of a hole that many can't even see.
What really stuck with me is how delayed the correction was. You didn't get immediate feedback that "this is not how people actually relate to each other" until college, and by then the social debt was already there. That's a brutal way to learn norms
Probably you won't be the freak anymore in today's online society as most of the others do the same
I am somewhat doubtful about the importance of American car centric suburbs because its happening in a lot of other countries too. its happened in the last few decades in British cities that have become a lot less car oriented.
I think it is linked to things such as pressure on kids to do school work, less trust of both kids and people in general. A lot more control. A lot more metrics replacing judgement.
Glad to hear you figured it out. I somewhat identify eventhough I didn't go as deep.
> if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.
Oh I hate this. Busywork. Also I think you and I got incentivized to play as much computer games as possible due to the arbitrary limitations of it and constant fear of being pulled off to some busywork. It was like a never ending battle ...
I think many parents don't realize that "doing the laundry" on command is like 10x the work of doing it when you please. You can't relax after school.
> so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.
because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach
If you're in a suburb what else is there to do? Going to any interesting spots to hang out with friends involve asking your parents to bring you there with the family car and then arranging a strict timetable on when to pick you up again.
> If you're in a suburb what else is there to do?
i mean, i agree with you, theres nothing to do anymore. but surely there was less to do in the 50s? if youre poor, theres never much to do really.
In the 50s the suburbs were new and inhabited mainly by families who also had kids. By the time I came around those people still lived in most houses and they were quite old in the neighborhood with few, if any families with kids my age. Quite a contrast to the stories I was told about my parents upbringing in the suburbs, where they could collect a dozen plus kids going door to door down the block.
> but surely there was less to do in the 50s?
I think just being able to get together with a couple other kids means that, even lacking videogames or boardgames or whatever, means that the opportunities available abound. Kids are infinitely creative and very good at inventing games out of any situation you throw them into. Give them two sticks and a piece of string and they'll turn it into a game of "don't let the string hit the ground" or something.
But, alone, yes I agree there was far less to do.
In the 70s and 80s if you wanted to play video games you would go to an arcade and meet other kids there. Where are those arcades now? Or you might go to and hang out at a mall, but those are few and far in between now too.
The fact that adults don't have third places anymore affects kids just as much, maybe even more.
It doesn't help that you can do a lot more indoors now, and the indoors has gotten more addictive. So relative to that, there's even less you can do outdoors.
Aside from the fact that drivers have been known to mount sidewalks (especially while sending a text), the real problem is intersections, and crossing said stroads. When there's 8 lanes of Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and F-250's with hoods that are taller than your head you're putting a great deal of trust in the red lamp overhead to actually stop them from killing you.
I was at a conference in St Cloud, MN a few years ago, and I could see the Panda Express from my hotel. Took around 40 minutes to walk there because I couldn't get the timing right to frogger myself across the 6 lanes. Got stuck in the island in the middle for a good 15 minutes because the slip lane always had cars in it.
sidewalk ended apparently. i am imagining some super hostile urban planning. like did a cyclist cheat with the planner's spouse? is there not another route?
It's impossible for people to get how bad it is until they see it. My old house had a grocery store 1.2 miles away. To walk there, you have to cross a 6 lane highway. Entire neighborhoods here have no sidewalks. And the roads are so torn up they're unusable. My friend had to get rid of his road bike and get a fat tire suspension bike. None of the intersections have any lights or visibility. And you can't run off the road because the ditches have broken glass and garbage in them!. Trash that hasn't been cleaned up in years. Add to that there's a general culture of hostility towards bicycles.
A pedestrian got hit by a pickup truck and the trucks made a "caravan" to roll coal at the memorial spot where they hit her.
There's no consistency in america. I moved 15 minutes away to "the good" part of town, and every street is new and perfectly smooth. There are marked bike lanes everywhere and they're all connected. I didn't understand at the time, but moving to where the bike lanes are completely changed my life and opened up the entire city for exploring in a way that I didn't expect.
Aside from getting my adorable cats on craigslist, no other 1 decision has changed my life for the better so drastically. I sold my car. I bike to new food places on my lunch break. I met tons of amazing new friends. My fitness is way up.
People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them. In terms of happiness, I honestly feel like I got a 50k raise at my job or something. Car centric design is robbing people of the chance to disscover thier own cities
> People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them.
I really wish someone would do a study somehow on what kind of psychological effects are caused by being angry at everyone in your city for an hour twice a day (sitting in traffic).
Too, in regions with winter weather (snow, or worse, sleet and ice), what few sidewalks or walking/biking trails which might exist are often further limited due to accumulated snow, if not slick with ice.
This can be found even within town/village centres, let alone the stroads and strip-malls on their peripheries. Walking and cycling become far more perilous.
Not impossible, but challenging, and a clear danger for the very young, elderly, or disabled.
Local ordinances to maintain clear sidewalks are quite often observed in the breach.
Then there's the shortened daylight hours, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
You are right for most people. I am not (and cannot get) fit enough to walk and ride everywhere. I walk as much as I can because cars suck but I appreciate the car. You got me thinking about ebikes. Speed is also a thing though. Getting somewhere in 2 minutes instead of 10 is very convenient.
The best cities have laws that allow for light motorized vehicles in the bike lanes. Not just ebikes, but also mobility scooters, microcars, electric wheelchairs, and adaptive bicycles.
My friend has a velotric T1 and it's really great. Definitely get an ebike. I got a reflective jacket on ebay for $20 so cars can see me at night. Ebikes are just as good as normal bikes ( it took me years to realize this ). I have an EUC so I wont get an ebike fore now.
And yeah if I end up having kids, Ill get a minivan or something for chauffeuring. Sometimes you do in fact, need a car
Streetview almost any US suburb. There often is not a way to safely cross a 60ft+ wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means large vehicles with distracted drivers are driving 50mph+.
Almost all businesses are located on these wide roads, and neighborhoods basically become islands for the kids. It’s especially bad in the winter, because it gets dark quicker, and crossing that 60ft+ wide 40mph+ road gets dicey even as an adult.
I wish we had a neighborhood island. The road we live on is a quarter mile long (so, short) with few houses. It ends in a road where cars go 40+ mph. That road is awful - not only are there no sidewalks, but it twists and turns, and the road is cut into a hill with steep unwalkable slopes on either side. At any point a car could be coming downhill around the bend and your options as a pedestrian are to hope they see you or to just get run over.
I took you up on the challenge. Something near SF since HN's spiritual home, and not too out in the sticks.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/CzuphnMwvwmoo8yLA
Yeah that looks terrible. That was pretty much random first place I looked.
I stayed at a hotel in Dallas that has a free shuttle for crossing the road.
As there isn’t a way to walk to the strip mall across the road.
One reason I think this is the case is because working with children, broadly teaching, pedagogy etc. is also something that needs to be learned. Parents in the past realistically did not have the time to spend so much time with their children. We have more time now, but lack the skills (in general) to do it effectively. What I see often is kids not really having the freedom to make mistakes and figure out things on their own. In my case I realized how bad I am at teaching during covid lockdowns and home schooling. The desire to help was there, but it's difficult to grasp the level the kids can understand. One solution for me was to say, work on it on your own, and try as best as you can. Doing it wrong is allowed and if you are really confused, ask me. But with a lot of parents, they run around their kids trying to help them do everything right from the beginning. I just don't think that can work.
As children (not even teens), we were allowed to roam the farms around the village and swim in any farm-well we like entire day in the hot sun. Jump from trees into the well, chase animals, walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays. We used to get random thorns in the feet. The kid would pluck it out by surgical poking with steel pin in his own foot.
That's what I call as rich childhood.
The tragedy is that we responded to the real dangers of the past by trying to eliminate all risk, and in doing so stripped away most of the texture that made childhood feel real
We did not try to eliminate all risk. That is a lie. We increased risk by allowing criminals to go on the street and then criminalized permitting your child to be a victim.
The risk remains. We just added another risk.
If I let my 6 year old daughter cross King St in San Francisco and a car illegally turning right while she is in the crosswalk kills her, who will society prosecute harder? Me or the driver? I think I know.
If a sex offender who has been repeatedly released from jail by a judge who feels that “this time, his fourth time, it’ll be different” assaults my daughter society will judge me not him.
I might lose any surviving children, presumably for willful neglect. And you will go out and say that incarceration is bad or whatever. Don’t give me this bullshit. “Try to eliminate all risk”? No.
You just decided you want to punish the risk-takers. That’s very different. “Crime is because of poverty”. Yeah, dude, the reason that Bill Gene Hobbs goes around touching little girls is because he’s poor. Give me a break. “Try to eliminate all risk”. Pull the other one. Obviously the crime rates look great, you don’t convict anyone anymore. No crimes committed.
You are talking to yourself
we've replaced that with TikTok and Roblox and tell ourselves how much better society has become
I mostly agree, as long as:
> walk barefoot in the in midday of 40 deg C of summer holidays
... precautions were taken against hookworm infestations. And yes, I went barefoot in the mud, too, but apparently just living somewhere with winter seasons is enough to inhibit them.
富不过三代 Wealth does not last three generations.
Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.
I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
That may be the idiom, but evidence suggest otherwise.
See Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises (2014), tracking intergenerational wealth in England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)>
> Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been.
I would disagree. There now far less legal protections from dog attack. 20 years ago aggressive behaviour and attack was very clearly defined!
I refuse to allow my children to park, it is full of aggresive dogs and their shit. Animal parks are too dangerous (bcos of dogs). Support animal fraudsters invaded every "safe" niche.
They are free to molest, maul and attack children. Victim blaming and gaslighting (dog is not "reactive", just agressive). If kid gets mauled, it has to go through painful rabies shots, instead of just testing the predator!
And there is not a chance to get any compensation, since dog owner had no way to know dog could attack anyone (first bite is free).
In San Francisco, a coyote bit a child in Golden Gate Park. The animal rights idiots blamed the child for playing in the park and running in the bushes. Rightfully the coyote was destroyed but allowing the childless to vote is a disaster. They do weird things like this.
> allowing the childless to vote is a disaster.
I've never met a Matriarchist before.
You know what, I’m happy to lose the franchise if it will take it away from the childless women. These people who redirect their obviously innate mother instinct to wild animals are far too risky to allow near government.
> In 1950, there were 2.7 suicides per 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds. Today, there are 7.5 (though that’s down from a 1990s peak of 13.2).
Little typo, looking at the link it's 11.2 not 13.2. Someone knows why this peak?
One factor is definitely underreporting. Several “accidental deaths” in the 1950s were code for suicide.
“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.”
That is quite a quote. Hard to believe that wasn't long ago.
For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards.
Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked)
Or here's a more polished, edited video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside.
What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.
From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEfr7Amn6U (5 minute overview of Houten)
I didn't say I live in a place just like Houten, I said I live in a place where you regularly see kids under 10 years old riding bikes together without adults (and like GP said, often with a fishing pole or soccer ball in tow.)
You don't need a place that's the literal "best place for cycling in the world" for this, you just need to (1) build a bike path that's not adjacent to the road (ours is typically 10-20ft away from the road) and (2) have it be along a main thoroughfare where everyone lives a short distance from it.
Where is this? It sounds nice.
I see that in poor areas of the midwest. You need enough single working moms with no time to supervise their kids that it saturates the area with enough independent kids that a Karen can't damn all of them no matter how fast they call CPS. The other kids get jealous too so the whole dynamic changes.
If it's a rich area with stay at home moms (#1 Karens) or enough retired boomers sitting around with nothing to do but enjoy the power of calling modern CPS, forget it.
I lived in the US for thirty years. I’m American. I would be ECSTATIC if the US had one place like this. Best I can think of are maybe accidentally low car areas like Catalina island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island
(Not where I live, but it's in my state.)
Ah, good example. It would be nice to see more places built like this intentionally rather than accidentally.
houten is infamous in some circles as the antithesis of american living :))
That sounds majestic
It really is. I’m very lucky to live here.
I recently had a trip to NL and was very surprised to see jobs for children being advertised there!
Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username)
There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.
I just wish this were available to more families.
I was quite surprised to see grocery stores with my name on it :)
It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints.
The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
I think part of that in Britain is because we live in towns. In a small town there's always a shop or pub or restaurant to work in and kids can walk or cycle to work. Same in NL. Because so much of America lives in pure residential suburbs, the opportunities aren't there.
I am in Sydney, Australia.
It was a nice surprise to see teenagers working in my local brewery this past weekend, collecting glasses, clearing and cleaning tables, etc. They were probably between 13 and 16. Not allowed to serve alcohol until they are 18, and can take on the personal legal responsibilities for Responsible Service of Alcohol.
Most jobs for teenagers here are in fast food service - two of my friends have mid/late teenagers working these jobs. Most jobs in retail, at least near me, seem to be taken by adults.
That’s because fast food places have a special deal with the government and can legally pay below minimum wage to youngsters.
Yeah, I think I started working in Restaurants aged 14 and really didn't stop. I still get a slight burst of nostalgia whenever I go to the countryside and see the pubs etc staffed by young'uns(it doesn't seem to happen much in London, don't know about other cities).
In your analogy, swimmers may have gone down 90% but kids are still being submerged in water as much as ever if not more. The vast majority of traffic deaths are people INSIDE cars.
Pedestrian deaths in the US are up 78% since 2009. [0]
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so-many-pedes...
The increase is mostly attributable to 30-39 year olds on arterial highways at night.
Kids playing on neighborhood streets show continued improvement... In fact IIHS pedestrian fatality data says that 1-13 year olds are the group with the HIGHEST reduction
This exchange shows why I don’t trust most people who initially through statistics out on the internet. It takes a real autist to come in with the correct reading of it.
That data shows a local minimum in 2009 and suggests that pedestrian deaths were higher during the "golden age" the commenter is referring to than today, and that is in spite of many more cars on the road today
Another gem from your own source that refutes this entire line of reasoning:
"Deaths of children under 10 are actually down significantly (167 deaths in 2009 to 98 deaths in 2023), and deaths for ages 10-19 are down as well."
Even in my lifetime, it seems like growing up has become increasingly a sort of highwire-walking. Especially in the educated segment that I find myself in, it seems like you HAVE to do certain things to grow up "successfully". When I was a kid, there were no expectations beyond getting a degree, and even that was a particular quirk in my father's thinking; my uncle did not make it a given for his kids.
Through my old school I know a guy who is also at my old uni, so I compare notes with him. Nowadays, everyone feels like they have to have an internship every year to get a job. Well, to do that, you needed to be at a top uni, getting top grades. To get into top uni, you needed to go to a good high school, and to do that, you needed to go to a good primary school.
I ended up living in this little bubble where everyone in my local area hires a tutor for their kid. The kids do the typical middle-class activities: an instrument or other performance art, a team sport, or maybe an individual sport. Everything is done with the goal of getting into the best senior school, or the best university.
The parents are all of the type who went through this gauntlet. Two lawyers, a lawyer and a doctor, finance and law, and so on. Everyone is spending a hefty chunk to afford to live here, and on their kid's education.
To circle back to the point of the article, these are professions that make a lot of money. They didn't exist in nearly the same scale as they did a hundred years ago, and London benefits from being the world centre of at least one of these formerly tie-wearing professions, so there's enough of a concentration here to make you think your kid could get one of these jobs in a few years.
But the road is long, and not every kid is going to enjoy becoming a lawyer or a banker. But it's also the case that it's hard to see how you could live in your childhood neighborhood without one of these jobs, so the parents steer the kids down the road before they are really old enough to decide.
I wonder if having fewer kids is behind the rat-race atmosphere. With all your eggs in one basket, they need to be well protected. If you had 4 kids, like my uncle, you wouldn't have time to puff them all down the same path.
It's because the gap has widened between the "good paying jobs" and everything else (the "shit jobs"). The former has become more scarce which means you have to hustle more to get them or you're getting the later.
i don't think they mind
[flagged]
Who are "they" and what is their aim? Don't be afraid. What's the worst that can happen if you speak plainly?
It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today.
Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
I'm sorry, but this is a bullshit article.
Care to elaborate? Why do you think it's bullshit?
The one thing this thread has shown me:
It's very easy to be a parent when you have no children.
This remind me of that saying - no original version but it was like: tough times makes tough people, soft times makes soft people. And I hope it’s not true. But indeed the more choices you have in life, the harder it gets to chose the right thing to do.
In aggregate, tough times make people malnourished, alcoholic, traumatized, lower IQ, apathetic, aggressive. In no particular order or combination.
Look at US during late 40s / 50s. Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse? (apart from the fact that most of those markers slowly improved over time due to overall progress).
Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
> Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse
Lead poisoning leading to lower IQs, alcoholism was definitely rampant (though less stigmatised at the time), traumatised from the war, aggressiveness towards spouses and each other (see: war trauma)
Yes, it absolutely was.
The original quote is from G. Michael Hopf, in Those Who Remain (2016):
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
<https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8751435-hard-times-create-s...>
It reflects many former cyclical-view-of-history / social cycle theory concepts, dating back literally thousands of years:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory>
Why can't this meme die? It is so obviously rubbish. Good times allow for a people to divert more energy to specialisation and growth and might and art and then displace the "hardened" people.
all living creatures are selfish to the core and will always optimize to minimize effort and maximize personal reward , therefore existing in a soft gentle system will result in acclimatization to a soft gentle system ... this universe is hostile impersonal harsh brutal and altogether basically not a place that anybody could ever be prepared for after having congealed in an insular bubble like the global west ... it is enjoyable seeing everyone here utterly in denial about this ... reminds me of militant atheists lambasting religion and then doubling down when i suggest that maybe healthy community gathering and values is more important than whether or not god is real ...
Yep. That's why bees and ants simply don't exist.
zooming out a bit , humans look a lot like ants
This is a famous quote by the renowned warrior-philosopher Joe Rogan.
Predates him significantly, I suspect: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315310>.
Good times make soft men, bad times make hard men. I never quite understood what the implication was and I always questioned the historical accuracy because no part of history is so easily defined as "good time" or "bad time."
Like basically every truism, it's a broad generalization and when you pick it apart you find all sorts of cases where the terms are loosely defined or else the truism just doesn't fit. There is at least something to be said here, and this is something of an adaptation of Ibn Khaldun's work on the concept of "asabiyyah" in the Muqaddima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#al-Muqaddima_and_t...
From the Wikipedia summary:
"The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of aṣabiyyah, translated as "group cohesiveness" or "solidarity".[41] This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion."
I think the quote itself indicates something of pre-internet outlook, where one's world was more localized. From that perspective, "good time"/"bad time" is more tied to one's geography ( and by extention, tribe ) more than anything else. If true, then "bad time" is simply war, famine, pestilence from more common set of maladies. And if the outlook is more local, the saying does start to make a lot of sense, because our constraints define how we approach life in general. Not to search very far, depression crash made a generation of Americans very wary of trading stocks.
There's the other half, which is often only implied: soft men make bad times, hard men make good times. It's supposed to be cyclical: good times -> soft people -> bad times -> hard people -> good times. Usually directly followed by "back in my days things were tough, but kids these days are just weak"
I'm not sure how it's supposed to work out. The US is arguably currently under the control of the baby boomers, who were brought up in good times. And those good times were brought on by the two generations before them who were brought up in tough times (two world wars, depression, etc)? But that feels tenuous at best
If there was any truth do this then Russia (arguably a "hard place" for most of its history) would be brimming with strong men (it is always "men" in these discussions) who then create which good times exactly?
>it is always "men" in these discussions
This obviously means "human" in this context.
But of course this saying is just a meme at best, it doesn't work like that in reality. In fact, good times make strong men just like good childhood makes strong adults.
> This obviously means "human" in this context.
I disagree, people who say this often are "great men of history" types that genuinely ascribe much of the significant events in human history to the activities of men alone.
> This obviously means "human" in this context.
In the abstract yes. In practice I mainly hear this meme spouted by trad-masculine-sparta types.
> But that feels tenuous at best
Yeah, I rather doubt that the direction of history can so easily be summarized by good/bad times and soft/hard men.
To understand is to suffer
It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships.
I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
Overcoming hardships may leave people more resilient, but it may also leave them physical and/or psychological wrecks.
As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’.
I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general.
Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on.
Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
But how do you account for things like cycles of violence and PTSD? I have veteran friends that, sure, could handle being shot at better than me, but on the other hand I can go to a fireworks show without worrying about having a public breakdown. Or I got friends that suffer for lack of the structure the military provided and just veg out now, picking fights at the bar for a little excitement.
Hell I guess you can describe them as "hard men" but I wouldn't want to be that way and it doesn't seem to make you more successful in modern society.
People with mental health issues need help and support. Just because there’s a pithy saying, doesn’t make it universally beneficial to have suffered hardship.
Not sure what else you’re expecting? I’m not advocating imposed hardship, just trying to give some context for why it can often lead to a more robust and driven person. It’s clearly not universally true.
I imagine there are lots of veterans that are able to cope and have become more robust. But there will always be mental health aftershocks, because that’s why it was a hardship in the first place.
The point is, hardship did not made them stronger. It made them weaker.
Abused kids domt grow stronger either. They grow weaker and less capable of navigating life too.
I swear, people will do anything to make claims about history except speak with actual historians.
How did we end up in a world where the stupidest memes are considered insightful.
Not only stupid, but also a nazi meme...
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.