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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
<< 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.
> 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.
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)
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
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 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
TrackerFF|2 months ago
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.
throwaway732255|2 months ago
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.
dns_snek|2 months ago
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.
1659447091|2 months ago
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.
3D30497420|2 months ago
HexPhantom|2 months ago
dlisboa|2 months ago
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.
mlsu|2 months ago
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.
ajsnigrutin|2 months ago
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
blitzar|2 months ago
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.
squeefers|2 months ago
> 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?
lm28469|2 months ago
HexPhantom|2 months ago
Cthulhu_|2 months ago
"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.
moffkalast|2 months ago
Aeglaecia|2 months ago
dgb23|2 months ago
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.
a3w|2 months ago
Then again, this seems US centric.
But this comment just seems cruel, making people think it is their fault if they have bad feelings.
Desafinado|2 months ago
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.
ericmcer|2 months ago
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.
melagonster|2 months ago
owisd|2 months ago
ozozozd|2 months ago
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.
elil17|2 months ago
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
Cthulhu_|2 months ago
hilbert42|2 months ago
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/
HexPhantom|2 months ago
nicgrev103|2 months ago
nrhrjrjrjtntbt|2 months ago
(Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
hnlmorg|2 months ago
https://youtu.be/sDyxyRcZWBA?si=sqDnodWQ-jWKCdCH
(I know the song came long after the PSA)
majesticmerc|2 months ago
chiefalchemist|2 months ago
Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
TheOtherHobbes|2 months ago
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.
A_D_E_P_T|2 months ago
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.
ensocode|2 months ago
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?
UncleMeat|2 months ago
smeeger|2 months ago
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2|2 months ago
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'
insane_dreamer|2 months ago
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.
reedf1|2 months ago
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?
D13Fd|2 months ago
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.
kakacik|2 months ago
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)
slifin|2 months ago
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
n4r9|2 months ago
I wonder if that causes some selection bias (e.g. density correlating with poverty).
Cthulhu_|2 months ago
myko|2 months ago
What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
IlikeKitties|2 months ago
CPS it seems.
senordevnyc|2 months ago
- 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.
insane_dreamer|2 months ago
renewiltord|2 months ago
“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.”
komali2|2 months ago
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.
cons0le|2 months ago
I'm so glad you got out man. Seriously. You climbed out of a hole that many can't even see.
HexPhantom|2 months ago
ensocode|2 months ago
graemep|2 months ago
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.
rightbyte|2 months ago
> 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.
squeefers|2 months ago
because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach
locallost|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
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zkmon|2 months ago
That's what I call as rich childhood.
HexPhantom|2 months ago
insane_dreamer|2 months ago
IAmBroom|2 months ago
> 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.
casey2|2 months ago
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.
joncrane|2 months ago
dredmorbius|2 months ago
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)>
jfjfrjtjtitjmi|2 months ago
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).
renewiltord|2 months ago
elias_t|2 months ago
Little typo, looking at the link it's 11.2 not 13.2. Someone knows why this peak?
jchallis|2 months ago
HFguy|2 months ago
That is quite a quote. Hard to believe that wasn't long ago.
CalRobert|2 months ago
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_.
ninkendo|2 months ago
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.
throawayonthe|2 months ago
dirkc|2 months ago
elif|2 months ago
lordnacho|2 months ago
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.
insane_dreamer|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
seydor|2 months ago
password54321|2 months ago
[deleted]
A_D_E_P_T|2 months ago
aleksandrm|2 months ago
ForceBru|2 months ago
dlisboa|2 months ago
It's very easy to be a parent when you have no children.
unknown|2 months ago
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starsky411|2 months ago
actionfromafar|2 months ago
dredmorbius|2 months ago
"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>
gherkinnn|2 months ago
meindnoch|2 months ago
komali2|2 months ago
UncleMeat|2 months ago
hshdhdhj4444|2 months ago