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We Have Ruined Childhood

nytimes.com

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Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#221

Post by barry-cotter »

mikekchar wrote: post #116
mactrey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids in Japan lead carefree "be home by dark" lives up until late middle school and high school, when they start studying 4+hrs/day and sleeping <5hrs/night to prep for standardized tests. I don't think Japan is a horrific dystopia for teens but it's hardly the "let kids be kids" culture that America of yesteryear (apparently) was.

It's easy to get led into thinking this is ubiquitous, but it really isn't. Life gets difficult for school children around year 3 min middle school (about grade 9). The long and the short of it is that if you want to get a really top job, then you need to come from a top university, which means that you usually need to come from a top highschool, which means that you must get a good mark on your high school entrance…

> It's easy to get led into thinking this is ubiquitous, but it really isn't. Life gets difficult for school children around year 3 min middle school (about grade 9). The long and the short of it is that if you want to get a really top job, then you need to come from a top university, which means that you usually need to come from a top highschool, which means that you must get a good mark on your high school entrance example.

There are no fairly reliable, widely known alternative routes to the top jobs? In the US you can go to Directional State U and top jobs are mostly not barred to you. It’ll be very, very hard to get a job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs but it’s possible. Even if you went to the University of Northwest Texas grad school washes you clean of all plebeian stain. Harvard Business School or Yale Law School opens the same doors whether you went to a good university or not.

More generally who the hell do Google, Siemens or LVMH hire in Japan if all the good jobs go to graduates of Todai who expect to work at the same Japanese company for life?

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#222

Post by jacobolus »

treebog wrote: post #125
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being alcohol addicted is not “fortuitous”. Fortuitous means purely by chance; accidentally; without any known cause.

To a large extent, alcoholism is by chance, accidental, and without any known cause.

In many (most?) cases, not becoming addicted to alcohol is a straightforward result of deliberate repeated choices not to consume much alcohol.

There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate?

Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#223

Post by flukus »

protomyth wrote: post #46
jcranmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, and Red Lake are the mass shootings of my lifetime to take place in schools. Virginia Tech and another community college also saw mass shootings, if you want to include tertiary education. Note that three of these are in the top 10 (and 2 in the top 5) if you rank them by deaths.

Homicide isn't even in the top 10 ways to die in the US. The students are in more danger from drowning, by a wide margin, than any school shooting. https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...

In Australia at least this is an area we are getting worse at (https://lsv.com.au/research/water-competency-of-victorian-ch...). 3 out of 5 fail the current standard of swimming continuously for 50 meters at the end of primary school. The standard has dropped too, ~25 years ago when I was tested the standard was 200 meters and most of the "training" happened in unstructured time.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#225

Post by baddox »

maire wrote: post #196
Rotdhizon wrote: post #83

Seems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets anymore with your friends, someone will call the police on you. Can't hang out in the woods, as those have mostly been torn down to make way for new neighborhoods, and the woods that do remain are typically private property. Unless you are lucky enough to live i…

I am not sure how old you are but everything seemed to change when abducted children were put on milk cartons in the mid 1980s. Before that, kids roamed free. I tell my foreign friends that kids used to run the streets in America and they can hardly believe it. The funny thing is that the danger of "stranger abductions" has been over blown. Most abductions are non-custodial parents.

Maybe it spread from more urban areas to more rural areas, because growing up in the mid and late 90s in a small midwestern town we were pretty much let loose on the streets with our bicycles with no restrictions other than “don’t get into trouble” and a time we needed to be back.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#226

Post by m0zg »

One thing I don't get is parents who insist that their child be "several years ahead" in the school program. This issue is especially pervasive in my upper middle class tech-geek peer group. Why put this stress on the kid? What's the rush? What additional benefits does one get from entering college at 16?

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#227

Post by flukus »

xwdv wrote: post #199

Peaceful innocent childhoods were a fairly recent phenomenon. In older times being a child often meant forced labor and exposure to brutal or shocking parts of life before you were ready. We didn’t ruin childhood, we took it back to how it used to be.

> In older times being a child often meant forced labor and exposure to brutal or shocking parts of life before you were ready.

That was also mostly an aberration (for non-slaves) and mostly during the industrial revolution. Peaceful childhoods certainly existed before then if you look at tribal societies and the way they gradually give kids more and more real responsibility.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#228

Post by Reedx »

mbrumlow wrote: post #3

I have a child. I love him very much. I can not fathom why any parents would not have free time as priority. Free time is amazing. Here is why. - I get a break. - My child gets to learn how to learn on his own. - My child builds independence. - My child learns to manage his time on his own. I see this playing out in the work force too. Far too many people I have worked with that are younger need to be told exactly wh…

I worry about young kids whose parents give them an iPad at all times, to the point that they're not even without it during a meal at a restaurant or other occasions. And how that may affect their ability to develop resiliency and creativity.

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#229

Post by selimthegrim »

api wrote: post #121
Rotdhizon wrote: post #83

Seems like society is constantly pushing to remove all the ways in which kids used to live. Can't just wonder around and play on the sidewalks or the streets anymore with your friends, someone will call the police on you. Can't hang out in the woods, as those have mostly been torn down to make way for new neighborhoods, and the woods that do remain are typically private property. Unless you are lucky enough to live i…

> The 24/7 fear cycle of news has drilled it into so many peoples minds that if you see someone anywhere on your street outside, they are there to murder, rob, mutilate, or otherwise commit crime. Join NextDoor.com if you want a dose of how nuts people have gone. I live in Orange County CA and I have checked it from time to time. Apparently this place is a crime infested jungle full of human trafficking gangs that ab…

The citydata.com forums are a laugh riot too

Re: We Have Ruined Childhood

#230

Post by vakataka »

I am in my mid-twenties and had the pleasure of growing up quite carefree. I still remember how most of my evenings were spent playing with friends until my mother dragged me home for dinner. Although I had other activities like learning music and drama, I would attend those classes only twice a week and had a lot of leisure time. I think things changed by the time I was in high school. I remember once calling a friend for a game and I heard his mother say something like, "don't spend time with those losers. You will not amount to anything...". I have seen parents reject their children's friends because they think of them as underachievers who may bring down their children too. I feel people sometimes take life too seriously.
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