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How getting richer made teenagers less free

theargumentmag.com

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Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#21

Post by 3D30497420 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

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 extracurr…

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.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#22

Post by squeefers »

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

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 extracurr…

> 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?

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#23

Post by kakacik »

reedf1 wrote: post #10

> 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 hon…

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)

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#24

Post by squeefers »

komali2 wrote: post #3

> 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…

> 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

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#25

Post by 3D30497420 »

wongarsu wrote: post #19
komali2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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 w…

> 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.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#27

Post by lotsofpulp »

myko wrote: post #14
reedf1 wrote: post #10

> 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 hon…

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.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#29

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

squeefers wrote: post #24
komali2 wrote: post #3

> 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…

> 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

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?

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#30

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

komali2 wrote: post #5
starsky411 wrote: post #2

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.

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."

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.
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