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.
> 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.
Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "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.
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.
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.
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.
My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped.
Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?
It is precisely this anxiety that is the issue being discussed. Parents are terrified of what might happen to their kids, so too little happens to their kids (both good and bad)
The risk they die from drug overdose or something because they are maladjusted from being hovered over may be orders of magnitude greater. We live in a far safer time than people think with regard to violent crime (see graph below) and a far more dangerous time with regard to mental health and depression. Also obesity. Most people die from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. All made more prevalent by shuttling your kid around constantly instead of them using their own two legs like nature intended.
This idea that parents who let their kids play without 3 layers of bubble wrap and parental hovercraft mode don’t also talk with their kids and aren’t present is not just insulting, it’s far from true. Over coddling causes more problems than it prevents, it’s especially obvious when you compare the maturity levels, mental health and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine
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.
As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet?
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
> 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?
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
Cars and building for car infrastructure is part of it. Another part, I think, is the decline in neighborhood communities. By that I mean the social pressure to get to know/socialize with your neighbors, through everything from block parties to shared church membership. When kids go “wandering the neighborhood” they were never far from one of the member’s houses, or at least a familiar neighbor who would notice them and keep an eye out.
Which also goes back to car infrastructure. If you need to drive everywhere for any and all errands/activities, you won’t interact with people in nearby houses, you wont see neighbors at the local bar or small grocery store.
Ok I actually agree with you about debt and the general societal degradation, but kidnapping is a non-issue.
In modern times there's a total of about 70 child kidnappings per year in the US. I am excluding parental kidnappings which sends that up by orders of magnitude, but I think that's fair because that's an entirely different issue and you specifically said stranger anyhow (though even of those 70 - a sizable chunk are not strangers). For contrast about 400 people are struck by lightning each year.
Statistically, it just doesn't happen. It's just one of those things, like terrorism or mass shootings, that is so unbelievably terrifying that people overreact in a self destructive way to try to prevent something that is statistically much less of a threat than just normal behaviors we take for granted.
I don't think money is the key issue. There were no clubs or nice tracks when I grew up, but ditches, canals, and forested areas worked just as well.
What is included in the stats for kidnapping? Where I live a confused young man convinced a little girl to get on his ebike and forced her to ride along with him for a few hours before coming back to the neighbourhood and being stopped by police that was out in full force for him.
My point being, “only 70 a year in the US” sounds like a very low number and inconsequential number since we had an abduction close by already.
Any parent that has heard the same story is thinking of that instead of the stats.
That is a fast track from cars to societal collapse. But agree cars are terrifying. I live in what should be a walking friendly part of Boston that is very pedestrian unfriendly because drivers are overly aggressive, on their phones, or commuting through to avoid traffic and do not care. It is the only reason our 10 year old is not yet wandering around on his own. I have spent years writing local politicians about improved intersections and traffic enforcement and have given up. No one seems to care. The car is king in the US. Even in a corner of the country where there is a lot of room to design around them not for them.
The track that the US political economy is on with the feedback loop caused by government backed fixed term fixed interest loans requires an ever increasing LTV, meaning newer entrants in the housing market will have to accept increasingly precarious positions.
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)
I think a lot of parenting decisions like this are just made in line with the rest of the society. If you let your 9 year old roam the park by themselves, you run a rather small risk of injuries, death, kidnapping etc. But you run a pretty big risk of them being the only lone 9 year old at the park.
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?
Accurate. Oddly enough on this side of the pond most people who would not want to raise their kids in the US would mention school shootings. The real, ubiquitous, daily danger is massive cars and lazy drivers.
Just because you have even bigger problems in the US, that does not mean that is isn’t cause for concern to be the school shooting capital of the world by an enormous margin.
The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
I live in Britain. If you read back you'll see I am talking about the opinions of Britons and Europeans of raising children in the US.
My point is it still a very rare thing even in the most common place in the world. The weight of school shootings in people's minds is more emotional than statistical. Careless drivers kill way more people in the US and they do it every day.
Gun related deaths and homicide are big enough risk factors to be worth worrying about and mitigating as a parent, but school shootings in particular are so rare they are not a major safety concern for parents- gun accidents and homicide outside of school are much much bigger risks.
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.
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_.
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.
Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username)
There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.
It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints.
The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
I think part of that in Britain is because we live in towns. In a small town there's always a shop or pub or restaurant to work in and kids can walk or cycle to work. Same in NL. Because so much of America lives in pure residential suburbs, the opportunities aren't there.
Yeah, I think I started working in Restaurants aged 14 and really didn't stop. I still get a slight burst of nostalgia whenever I go to the countryside and see the pubs etc staffed by young'uns(it doesn't seem to happen much in London, don't know about other cities).
> 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.
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.
If you're in a suburb what else is there to do? Going to any interesting spots to hang out with friends involve asking your parents to bring you there with the family car and then arranging a strict timetable on when to pick you up again.
Aside from the fact that drivers have been known to mount sidewalks (especially while sending a text), the real problem is intersections, and crossing said stroads. When there's 8 lanes of Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and F-250's with hoods that are taller than your head you're putting a great deal of trust in the red lamp overhead to actually stop them from killing you.
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?
It's impossible for people to get how bad it is until they see it. My old house had a grocery store 1.2 miles away. To walk there, you have to cross a 6 lane highway. Entire neighborhoods here have no sidewalks. And the roads are so torn up they're unusable. My friend had to get rid of his road bike and get a fat tire suspension bike. None of the intersections have any lights or visibility. And you can't run off the road because the ditches have broken glass and garbage in them!. Trash that hasn't been cleaned up in years. Add to that there's a general culture of hostility towards bicycles.
A pedestrian got hit by a pickup truck and the trucks made a "caravan" to roll coal at the memorial spot where they hit her.
There's no consistency in america. I moved 15 minutes away to "the good" part of town, and every street is new and perfectly smooth. There are marked bike lanes everywhere and they're all connected. I didn't understand at the time, but moving to where the bike lanes are completely changed my life and opened up the entire city for exploring in a way that I didn't expect.
Aside from getting my adorable cats on craigslist, no other 1 decision has changed my life for the better so drastically. I sold my car. I bike to new food places on my lunch break. I met tons of amazing new friends. My fitness is way up.
People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them. In terms of happiness, I honestly feel like I got a 50k raise at my job or something. Car centric design is robbing people of the chance to disscover thier own cities
Streetview almost any US suburb. There often is not a way to safely cross a 60ft+ wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means large vehicles with distracted drivers are driving 50mph+.
Almost all businesses are located on these wide roads, and neighborhoods basically become islands for the kids. It’s especially bad in the winter, because it gets dark quicker, and crossing that 60ft+ wide 40mph+ road gets dicey even as an adult.
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.
> 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).
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.
I think it’s a broader awareness of a K shaped socioeconomic trajectory, that the odds of an upward trajectory drop considerably if you don’t follow the standard path into a top 20 university, metro, etc. as economic opportunities continue to agglomerate.
<< 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
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.
Look at US during late 40s / 50s. Do you think your definition is valid for those times en masse? (apart from the fact that most of those markers slowly improved over time due to overall progress).
Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
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.
all living creatures are selfish to the core and will always optimize to minimize effort and maximize personal reward , therefore existing in a soft gentle system will result in acclimatization to a soft gentle system ... this universe is hostile impersonal harsh brutal and altogether basically not a place that anybody could ever be prepared for after having congealed in an insular bubble like the global west ... it is enjoyable seeing everyone here utterly in denial about this ... reminds me of militant atheists lambasting religion and then doubling down when i suggest that maybe healthy community gathering and values is more important than whether or not god is real ...
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."
Like basically every truism, it's a broad generalization and when you pick it apart you find all sorts of cases where the terms are loosely defined or else the truism just doesn't fit. There is at least something to be said here, and this is something of an adaptation of Ibn Khaldun's work on the concept of "asabiyyah" in the Muqaddima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#al-Muqaddima_and_t...
From the Wikipedia summary:
"The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of aṣabiyyah, translated as "group cohesiveness" or "solidarity".[41] This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion."
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.
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 were brought up in good times. And those good times were brought on by the two generations before them who were brought up in tough times (two world wars, depression, etc)? But that feels tenuous at best
If there was any truth do this then Russia (arguably a "hard place" for most of its history) would be brimming with strong men (it is always "men" in these discussions) who then create which good times exactly?
But of course this saying is just a meme at best, it doesn't work like that in reality. In fact, good times make strong men just like good childhood makes strong adults.
It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships.
I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’.
I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general.
Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on.
Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
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.
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.
> 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.
Parents appear increasingly terrified of childhood boredom, and thus meticulously cram their children's schedules with activities they feel are "crucial" for "development".
I don’t prescribe to this and it’s amazing to see the disdain my children’s “lack of structure” receives from others—-both kids and parents alike.
People are weird.
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.
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.
What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.
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.
My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped.
Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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
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.
youtube came out 20 years ago, the iphone 19 years ago, instagram 15 years ago, musical.ly 11 years ago and merged with tiktok 7 years ago...
we are so cooked frfr
That's what I call as rich childhood.
https://youtu.be/sDyxyRcZWBA?si=sqDnodWQ-jWKCdCH
(I know the song came long after the PSA)
(Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
In the 90s/early 00's 10pm was like a weekday, school night curfew.
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?
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
Which also goes back to car infrastructure. If you need to drive everywhere for any and all errands/activities, you won’t interact with people in nearby houses, you wont see neighbors at the local bar or small grocery store.
In modern times there's a total of about 70 child kidnappings per year in the US. I am excluding parental kidnappings which sends that up by orders of magnitude, but I think that's fair because that's an entirely different issue and you specifically said stranger anyhow (though even of those 70 - a sizable chunk are not strangers). For contrast about 400 people are struck by lightning each year.
Statistically, it just doesn't happen. It's just one of those things, like terrorism or mass shootings, that is so unbelievably terrifying that people overreact in a self destructive way to try to prevent something that is statistically much less of a threat than just normal behaviors we take for granted.
I don't think money is the key issue. There were no clubs or nice tracks when I grew up, but ditches, canals, and forested areas worked just as well.
My point being, “only 70 a year in the US” sounds like a very low number and inconsequential number since we had an abduction close by already.
Any parent that has heard the same story is thinking of that instead of the stats.
I wonder if that causes some selection bias (e.g. density correlating with poverty).
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)
What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
The US have more school shootings than the rest of the world combined. It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.
My point is it still a very rare thing even in the most common place in the world. The weight of school shootings in people's minds is more emotional than statistical. Careless drivers kill way more people in the US and they do it every day.
I ran the numbers upon having kids. It is irrational.
CPS it seems.
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.
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_.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so-many-pedes...
There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.
I just wish this were available to more families.
The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
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.
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.
I'm so glad you got out man. Seriously. You climbed out of a hole that many can't even see.
> 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.
because the sidewalk was next to a busy road? sounds like a bit of a reach
A pedestrian got hit by a pickup truck and the trucks made a "caravan" to roll coal at the memorial spot where they hit her.
There's no consistency in america. I moved 15 minutes away to "the good" part of town, and every street is new and perfectly smooth. There are marked bike lanes everywhere and they're all connected. I didn't understand at the time, but moving to where the bike lanes are completely changed my life and opened up the entire city for exploring in a way that I didn't expect.
Aside from getting my adorable cats on craigslist, no other 1 decision has changed my life for the better so drastically. I sold my car. I bike to new food places on my lunch break. I met tons of amazing new friends. My fitness is way up.
People aren't good at visualizing what being in a car all the time is taking from them. In terms of happiness, I honestly feel like I got a 50k raise at my job or something. Car centric design is robbing people of the chance to disscover thier own cities
Almost all businesses are located on these wide roads, and neighborhoods basically become islands for the kids. It’s especially bad in the winter, because it gets dark quicker, and crossing that 60ft+ wide 40mph+ road gets dicey even as an adult.
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).
Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.
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.
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?
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'
Same would be valid for western Europe, eastern part got fucked up by soviets pushing communism and related terror left and right.
From the Wikipedia summary:
"The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of aṣabiyyah, translated as "group cohesiveness" or "solidarity".[41] This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion."
I'm not sure how it's supposed to work out. The US is arguably currently under the control of the baby boomers, who were brought up in good times. And those good times were brought on by the two generations before them who were brought up in tough times (two world wars, depression, etc)? But that feels tenuous at best
This obviously means "human" in this context.
But of course this saying is just a meme at best, it doesn't work like that in reality. In fact, good times make strong men just like good childhood makes strong adults.
In the abstract yes. In practice I mainly hear this meme spouted by trad-masculine-sparta types.
Yeah, I rather doubt that the direction of history can so easily be summarized by good/bad times and soft/hard men.
I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general.
Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on.
Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.