alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
tldr: blame parents
> and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty
> We'd be outside all day long
> most of my peers have middle-class jobs.
>Their kids are barely outside.
wonder what the link is there then?
> 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.