We Have Ruined Childhood
11–20 of 505 posts
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#12Well, if you report 24x7 hate and danger, scare the crap out of people, and report that there is danger behind every tree, then yes, childhoods are ruined. Things are getting safer and the only way you would know it is go look at the CDC stats. Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
Agree with your general point, but:
1. There were children born before you with frightened helicopter parents and there will be children born tomorrow who grow up with more freedom than you did. Generational experience is not homogenous.
2. Current trends do not set our future paths into stone, and it is possible that we will be able to plant seeds to move things in freer, saner directions going forward.
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#13Does this feel to anyone else like a lengthy characterization of a very particular time/place of 20th century child rearing? And, if it does, is there a reason to believe that we got parenting exactly right in, what, American circa 1950-1970, after starkly different parenting norms both before and after?
Let's add "affluent and white and fortuitously non alcohol addicted" to "1950-1970" and I think you nailed it.
Not being alcohol addicted is not “fortuitous”. Fortuitous means purely by chance; accidentally; without any known cause.
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#14Well, if you report 24x7 hate and danger, scare the crap out of people, and report that there is danger behind every tree, then yes, childhoods are ruined. Things are getting safer and the only way you would know it is go look at the CDC stats. Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
I recently became a Scoutmaster.
That's what I'm trying to do: give the kids the same opportunity we had - freedom to explore the outdoors. Confidence to take care of themselves and not need an adult to do everything for them. To give them opportunites to build character.
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#15Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#16Does this feel to anyone else like a lengthy characterization of a very particular time/place of 20th century child rearing? And, if it does, is there a reason to believe that we got parenting exactly right in, what, American circa 1950-1970, after starkly different parenting norms both before and after?
Let's add "affluent and white and fortuitously non alcohol addicted" to "1950-1970" and I think you nailed it.
What does being white have to do with predominant parenting practices? If you would like to point out differences in parenting practices by race/wealth/class and possible causes for said discrepancies, then please do so.
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#17I have three school age kids and I'd put the difficulties of modern parenting into two bins:
1. Increasingly, both parents work full time and don't/can't rely on family for child care. The "and" is critical here, because in the past you might have had a single parent or dual income parents, but also had grandmothers and aunties as support. An increasingly mobile workforce, and smaller families mean that familial support structures are dwindling.
2. "Being a kid" is illegal. If you're under 12 in most of Virginia, you can't be unsupervised by an adult for more than three hours and can't be unsupervised overnight until you're 16. States have been turning schools into prison-lite since at least the 90s [1]
2.a. Other parents are your worst enemy in this case. I can't tell you how many times a "concerned" parent has approached one of my kids - while I could see them - about if they were lost, because there wasn't a parent literally hovering over them.
That doesn't even get to all the insane competitiveness of everything that keeps everyone on edge.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/how-ame...
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#18Well, if you report 24x7 hate and danger, scare the crap out of people, and report that there is danger behind every tree, then yes, childhoods are ruined. Things are getting safer and the only way you would know it is go look at the CDC stats. Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
>> I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
My grandfather collected bells - the ones they had in the old schoolhouses 100 years ago (he'd get them when the schools closed). I grew up in the suburbs but we had a steel bell about 1m diameter on our front porch. For grins mom would ring it occasionally at dinner time. You could hear it 3 streets over. She didn't always know where we were. Sometimes other kids would ring it at night and run away - if you thought ringing doorbells was annoying....
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#19https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
Are you aware this is a retrograde sect?
Re: We Have Ruined Childhood
#20Well, if you report 24x7 hate and danger, scare the crap out of people, and report that there is danger behind every tree, then yes, childhoods are ruined. Things are getting safer and the only way you would know it is go look at the CDC stats. Kids need time with their friends away from parents. I'm so glad I was able to grow up in the (sadly last) "be home for dinner, be back by dark" generation.
And yet there was "danger, scare the crap out of people" then too.
Don't take candy from a stranger. Razor blades in apples…
Unless it's a difference in degree, that alone is not what has changed.
To be sure we seem to be a more fearful society then we were then.