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.
My friend is one of those 'overly involved' parents with his daughter: tennis lessons and competitions, sailing lessons and competitions, skiing lessons and competitions. He sacrificed a huge amount of time to give his daughter every opportunity.
I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?"
He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's now so good at tennis that wherever she goes she'll be in demand to join the ladies team."
Looks like he was right: she got into a good university with a sailing scholarship, she is athletic, has a good relationship with her parents and is an all round happy and pleasant person.
I was raised in such a house. This happened because my mother was an underachiever, and also because my father and grandparents were dead so she was unchallenged doing this.
But you are alive my friend. Don't let your child still have nightmares, regrets, and feelings of constantly not being enough in their 30s. If your child does'nt have a childhood she can never become an adult.
I obviously don’t know your specific situation but having brought up kids in a similar environment, I may be able to offer some possible explanation for what you are living through.
First, never underestimate the impact of your environment on your way of thinking. We all like to think we’re independent thinkers but really we’re much more influenced by the people we interact with than we could even realize. Once you have a kid, a lot of your social circle will consist of other parents so you will unconsciously absorb their values and motivations as well, including the desire to put your kids through all these hoops.
Second, many professional class parents believe that the key to future success lies in getting their kids into the right school. Hence, it’s never too early to start the kid on the path to great grades, background experiences, scholarships, etc. I’ve seen parents stress out about preschool enrollments because of the “advantages” these schools provided.
Lastly, this is very often the default path for parents. It’s just what you are supposed to do. Everything is set up in that direction. Defaults are powerful and govern our behavior much more than we all realize.
Final last point, the truth is no one knows what works when raising kids. For every story of a free-range kid becoming self-reliant, there’s a story of a latchkey kid that became a bum. Therefore, parents are generally risk-avoidant with their kids (there’s no do-overs) and tend to do “good” and “respectable” approaches in child rearing (like signing them up for sports, extra curriculars, etc)
> 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".
Hmm, I’m fairly certain the ‘having children’ part is what triggers total collapse of the previous worldview. My spouse was adamant that we wouldn’t force our child to study excessively, but we’re at 7 years old and we have a 50cm stack of extra activities books that need to be worked through every morning and evening, in addition to the homework the school sets. It’s madness. The class teacher told me he’s not even involved with setting homework.
I certainly wasn’t expected to do any homework at 7. It wasn’t until middle school we were expected to do some amount of homework.
Yeah, they definitely need time to look out a window and imagine.
But I think there is serious value in organized activities. From Junior high through high school I had a rule for mine to do one thing with school, and one thing outside of school. I would have supported more than those 2 things, but I'm so glad I didn't have to.
I'm thinking about enforcing the same rule in college, with a caveat that Gym and Girlfriend don't count, but it seems weird to make those kinds of mandates for someone that has a job.
What's striking is the helplessness that seeps through your message. As if you had zero control over what happens. You're just a bystander watching what happens to your children.
It's time for you to wake up, and start exercising your own authority.
My parents made me do everything, and were so fucking mean about everything, I ended up missing out on the things I actually enjoyed b/c I didn't want yet another thing to get yelled at about.
Specific: guitar and music
To be fair: part of it was to be rid of me and to not have to watch me.
Beauty pagents? Go take a good long look in the mirror. That is pathetic. Is that what you want your kids to value? Passivity? Whatever the fuck beauty pagents encourage?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
They are more aware but bad at putting it in perspective. This is the classic "fear leads to bad decisions".
Granted, depends on where you live, but statistically woods are probably a lot safer than a city with a lot of traffic. Sure, regionally that is not true, you might meet a Grizzly and/or Canadian.
> are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
Absolutely. A child has to grow up and detach from it parents at some point. It doesn't at all mean having a bad relationship, just being independent. Helps if you aren't a complete beginner by the time it inevitably happens.
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 situation and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
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.
Kids are in this weird position where they are placed on a pedestal (they’re sooo important! My little future leader!) but yet they have no real agency in their lives and are very restricted from making decisions, even ludicrously simple ones like can I take a walk outside by myself for half an hour.
I don’t have kids yet but I am thinking a lot about this, and I can only conclude that kids should be treated much more like adults. They should have jobs and real responsibilities, and also should face the same pressure that adults do.
Nobody expects me to be a CEO someday. If I want to, I have to push myself.
The irony is brutal: kids lose unstructured time and independence, parents lose breathing room, and nobody feels good about it. What used to be normal "being outside all day" now reads as neglect
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.
Most of us had parents that made mistakes. Some of those mistakes hurt us, stunted our development, or damaging our psyches. When we become parents, we try not to make the mistakes that our parents make.
But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.
In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.
Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.
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 it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...
I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.
Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.
Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.
Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.
My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
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.
I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.
"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.
The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.
If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.
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.
To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.
Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.
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 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
It's true that children in the first decade or so of the 20th Century considered work normal and not that unpleasant despite their often horrific work conditions.
The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920.
These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article.
If you remove physical autonomy and replace it with algorithmic spaces optimized for engagement rather than growth, you shouldn't be surprised when teens struggle with agency, goals, or mental health...
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.
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.
I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?"
He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's now so good at tennis that wherever she goes she'll be in demand to join the ladies team."
Looks like he was right: she got into a good university with a sailing scholarship, she is athletic, has a good relationship with her parents and is an all round happy and pleasant person.
But you are alive my friend. Don't let your child still have nightmares, regrets, and feelings of constantly not being enough in their 30s. If your child does'nt have a childhood she can never become an adult.
First, never underestimate the impact of your environment on your way of thinking. We all like to think we’re independent thinkers but really we’re much more influenced by the people we interact with than we could even realize. Once you have a kid, a lot of your social circle will consist of other parents so you will unconsciously absorb their values and motivations as well, including the desire to put your kids through all these hoops.
Second, many professional class parents believe that the key to future success lies in getting their kids into the right school. Hence, it’s never too early to start the kid on the path to great grades, background experiences, scholarships, etc. I’ve seen parents stress out about preschool enrollments because of the “advantages” these schools provided.
Lastly, this is very often the default path for parents. It’s just what you are supposed to do. Everything is set up in that direction. Defaults are powerful and govern our behavior much more than we all realize.
Final last point, the truth is no one knows what works when raising kids. For every story of a free-range kid becoming self-reliant, there’s a story of a latchkey kid that became a bum. Therefore, parents are generally risk-avoidant with their kids (there’s no do-overs) and tend to do “good” and “respectable” approaches in child rearing (like signing them up for sports, extra curriculars, etc)
> 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 certainly wasn’t expected to do any homework at 7. It wasn’t until middle school we were expected to do some amount of homework.
But I think there is serious value in organized activities. From Junior high through high school I had a rule for mine to do one thing with school, and one thing outside of school. I would have supported more than those 2 things, but I'm so glad I didn't have to.
I'm thinking about enforcing the same rule in college, with a caveat that Gym and Girlfriend don't count, but it seems weird to make those kinds of mandates for someone that has a job.
Deleted Comment
It's time for you to wake up, and start exercising your own authority.
Specific: guitar and music
To be fair: part of it was to be rid of me and to not have to watch me.
Beauty pagents? Go take a good long look in the mirror. That is pathetic. Is that what you want your kids to value? Passivity? Whatever the fuck beauty pagents encourage?
At least dance is a skill.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
Granted, depends on where you live, but statistically woods are probably a lot safer than a city with a lot of traffic. Sure, regionally that is not true, you might meet a Grizzly and/or Canadian.
> are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk?
Absolutely. A child has to grow up and detach from it parents at some point. It doesn't at all mean having a bad relationship, just being independent. Helps if you aren't a complete beginner by the time it inevitably happens.
What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.
Another one of those things that aren't allowed now.
I don’t have kids yet but I am thinking a lot about this, and I can only conclude that kids should be treated much more like adults. They should have jobs and real responsibilities, and also should face the same pressure that adults do.
Nobody expects me to be a CEO someday. If I want to, I have to push myself.
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're making that up.
But the problem is, there's more than one set of mistakes. In fact, they often come in pairs. If you move too far away from one mistake, you may not wind up in the sweet spot. You may be doing the other mistake.
In Zion National Part there is a hike called "Angel's Landing". You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot dropoff on one side and a 500 foot dropoff on the other side. If you move too far away from one cliff, you fall off the other.
Parenting is like that. Take permissive vs. discipline, for example. If you avoid discipline too much, you may damage your kids by being too permissive.
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
I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.
Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
> 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?
Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.
Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.
My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.
The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.
If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.
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.
Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.
Then again, this seems US centric.
But this comment just seems cruel, making people think it is their fault if they have bad feelings.
In France kids are still free to roam around, or stay alone at home at 10yo (sometimes younger).
In Japan kids start commuting to school, sometimes taking the train alone, at 6.
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
The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of photographs taken at the request of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) by photographer and psychologist Lewis Wicks Hine from about 1908 through to about 1920.
These remarkable photographs shouldn't be missed and should be viewed in conjunction with this article.
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/
(Probably some culutral reference I am missing in this video?)
In the 90s/early 00's 10pm was like a weekday, school night curfew.
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
https://youtu.be/sDyxyRcZWBA?si=sqDnodWQ-jWKCdCH
(I know the song came long after the PSA)