“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.
How getting richer made teenagers less free
191–200 of 344 posts
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#192I 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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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,…
> 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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#195For 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…
> 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 sta…
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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#197I 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 extracurr…
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.
> You went to private school ... send kids to shittiest free school you can find.
You're making that up.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#198I 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 extracurr…
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 al…
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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 you…
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.
Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free
#200As 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.
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.