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.
Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though? I understand that it worked well for your friend and I am not knocking athletics, my own daughter is doing gymnastics, but that seems like either a post-hoc justification on the part of your friend or a strategy with a low rate of success such that it seems a bit odd to go for as a parent.
Personally, I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out and die in the last 15 years (I am in my mid thirties). I grew up in the Gifted and Talented cohort but without that Tiger Mom kind of parenting. I did fine, got a full ride to a state school, make good money and work a relaxed remote job.
Most of my cohort went on to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie, the Ivy Leagues. Of the dozen or so I really think only one made it through that pipeline unscathed and successful. Several dropped out to become bums at their parent’s house, one was homeless and became a stripper. Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers.
These are all “good kids” from stable middle class or even richer families. It’s a bit strange to have watched.
That's sad. There are so many factors at play. I would say that with my friend and his daughter, one of the reasons it worked out well was because they spent so much time together: traveling to competitions, driving to the mountains for skiing every weekend. They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences, and things like introducing her to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.
> Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers
Sorry to hear that.
Unfortunately I think we have way over indexed on "success" being tied to money and seeking these careers at companies that drive people to exhaustion and let the competitive environment drive everyone harder and harder with a ratchet effect.
These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago. Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing, there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen. When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right?
Your analogy is missing something. Not letting a child explore the world has an opportunity cost. They miss out on opportunities to develop independence and psychological resilience. The book "The Anxious Generation" covers this in detail.
I work at a college, and can tell you that (while everyone views their childhoods with rose colored glasses), at my institution, statistically kids today are less able to cope with difficulty than they were when I started my career.
When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).
For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).
In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.
We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.
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)
When I let my (grade school child) child walk on their own (dirt roads with side easements cars can't even reasonably drive on) , I get yelled out by almost everyone in the family. They know I'm a good parent so they accept the difference without pushing it further. But this mentality extends to people who aren't familiar with me.
My child has been interrogated by strangers for walking "independently" (I am actually within concealed but barely visible sight, but drivers-by don't know this) while on our own property. I have had to pop out of the bushes and explain ourselves to them, about our own business on our own property. At one point I tried walking about 50 yards from the bus stop, so she could walk 50 yards to me on her own. The bus driver would not release my child. I popped up and said I was there but just letting her walk some "independently" and I was looked at like I had 3 heads and refused.
They all have cellphones. It costs them 0.0001 seconds to call CPS, and 30 seconds to make something up. They can invest barely any energy at all and cause a shitstorm in your life that lasts weeks at best, maybe ever months. This is part of the difference from the 80s -- if a child was spotted in the non-residential wild it would cost anyone who wants to fuck with them at least 30 minutes to make a phone call, and what these Karens delight and thrive in is asymmetrical situations where it costs them nothing but a brief moment and you and your kid everything.
This leaves me feeling like an alien. I know pretty much all school kids in places like Germany and Japan walk to school. Yet every single person I interact with (in real life) has this paranoia, it is suffocating as a parent because they get to usurp themselves as the parent via the implied threat they can always use the government to make your life hell and meanwhile the child loses something they can never get back.
> Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them?
I believe that the person you were replying to was asking for empirically supported numbers, not some random number you invented in your own mind.
Also, "Do you have children?" is a ridiculous question, because we were all children once ourselves. I wouldn't trade my childhood of freedom and "risk" (in your mind) for the straitjacket of helicopter parenting. I wouldn't want to live in fear as a child or as a parent.
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 situation and general early adulthood outcomes for non-Anglo kids in other developed nations.
There's just no discussion that modern parents are more personally involved in their kids development than parents in the 70s/80s. That's just a fact, not an insult.
I never said you can't raise kids without all the overprotection and also be present.
The issue of over parenting seems to be a developed nation issue, I agree. I'm not in one and here kids don't do mountains of activities, but violence rates are very significant. There's just no point exposing my son to it in the hopes he comes out the other side unscathed, when even I don't want to be out alone at night. That's "vibe parenting", not an intelligent way of raising children.
No, it’s specifically an Anglo country phenomenon. It’s not really an issue in places like Denmark, France, Spain, Russia, China, Chile. There’s several books on the topic if you are open to recommendations.
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.
> 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.
Sure, but in addition to everything they learn at school (and get tired of), do they really need 3x2 hours of violin, 3x2 hours of tennis and 3x2 hours of spanish weekly? + weekend tennis matches. (my coworkers kid taken as example, 12yo)
I like my job too, i learn a lot of it, but that's basically half-time of a second job (if you include commute) for a 12yo kid... that's just too much, both for the kids and their parents.
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.
You can't compare late 90s/early 2000s internet with what kids have access to today. It wasn't a weapon aimed at your attention back then, and certainly not as easily accessible. There isn't much in common between the two, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively
We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/
> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.
Current version:
> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.
We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?
Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.
That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.
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
old enough to have stated short form content for a very specific reason - things were absolutely not the same prior to infinite scrolling. if you're twenty and here that's cool , it's also markedly below the median HN user age from what I gather
Then complain about short form video (which, I should add, is probably more culturally relevant than whatever we were consuming on the Internet growing up)
Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.
I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality and at no point complained about the internet in general , since you're out here commanding me I command you to consider that commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour
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.
> 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
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.
It is true that people have wildly incorrect understanding of crime rates and that this causes them to make strange decisions both in their personal lives and in the policies they support.
Child abductions are amazingly rare. Data for them is strong because they are consistently reported.
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.
So many of the issues in the US stem from an isolating car (instead of people) oriented infrastructure. Everything from social breakdown, obesity, aggressive brodozers, insane utility and insurance expenses - the list goes on.
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.
The 30 year fixed mortgage is an insanely good deal, and I say this as a guy who has one. The monthly cost can only stay the same (and decline due to inflation) or decline if interest rates fall and you refinance or adjust the loan. If interest rates go up, you're completely protected.
A mortgage may be more than rent for a similar place now, but I suspect it won't be that many years before the lines cross.
I have six young kids. This attitude is absolutely prevalent (and it's insane). I've been chewed out by a cashier for sending an 8 year old into a store alone. I've had a person run out of a restaurant, panicking, and grab my 2 year old because she was walking too far ahead of me. I've had people tell me it's unsafe to let me 10, 8, and 5-year olds bike together in the park ahead of me while I walk.
Just giving my kids space when I'm nearby, in sight of them has terrified countless onlookers.
No one has actually called CPS on me, thankfully, to my knowledge. But the general atmosphere is absolutely crushing for people who want to try to safely let their kids learn independence.
I was 10 in '72, in a big metropolis. I'd take off on my Stingray bike on all day jaunts all over. The only comments I got were from my mom who made sure I had change to phone home in case I got a flat. I started a 4am paper route on that bike two years later, nobody batted an eye. It was the best of times.
Loads of things, but the big thing that changed in past decades is the media. A case of a child getting abducted or killed goes nation- or worldwide now, which makes everyone feel less safe in letting their kids roam free.
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.
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.
The tragedy is that we responded to the real dangers of the past by trying to eliminate all risk, and in doing so stripped away most of the texture that made childhood feel real
> 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).
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_.
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
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).
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.
That data shows a local minimum in 2009 and suggests that pedestrian deaths were higher during the "golden age" the commenter is referring to than today, and that is in spite of many more cars on the road today
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.
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.
> 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.
What really stuck with me is how delayed the correction was. You didn't get immediate feedback that "this is not how people actually relate to each other" until college, and by then the social debt was already there. That's a brutal way to learn norms
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.
I wish we had a neighborhood island. The road we live on is a quarter mile long (so, short) with few houses. It ends in a road where cars go 40+ mph. That road is awful - not only are there no sidewalks, but it twists and turns, and the road is cut into a hill with steep unwalkable slopes on either side. At any point a car could be coming downhill around the bend and your options as a pedestrian are to hope they see you or to just get run over.
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
It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today.
Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.
I feel like there's a sweet spot of wealth that is generationally sustainable, which I would say is in the middle and upper-middle class brackets. Just like with any human activity, the amount of work required for the payoff has to be in the sweet spot. Too rich, and not enough work is required for the offspring to stay engaged enough to surmount the hurdles all human face. Too poor and the opportunities just aren't there.
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.
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.
Personally, I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out and die in the last 15 years (I am in my mid thirties). I grew up in the Gifted and Talented cohort but without that Tiger Mom kind of parenting. I did fine, got a full ride to a state school, make good money and work a relaxed remote job.
Most of my cohort went on to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie, the Ivy Leagues. Of the dozen or so I really think only one made it through that pipeline unscathed and successful. Several dropped out to become bums at their parent’s house, one was homeless and became a stripper. Two have sadly taken their own lives despite seemingly good FAANG careers.
These are all “good kids” from stable middle class or even richer families. It’s a bit strange to have watched.
Sorry to hear that.
Unfortunately I think we have way over indexed on "success" being tied to money and seeking these careers at companies that drive people to exhaustion and let the competitive environment drive everyone harder and harder with a ratchet effect.
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
It's just a zero insight use of numbers.
When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).
For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).
In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.
We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.
When I let my (grade school child) child walk on their own (dirt roads with side easements cars can't even reasonably drive on) , I get yelled out by almost everyone in the family. They know I'm a good parent so they accept the difference without pushing it further. But this mentality extends to people who aren't familiar with me.
My child has been interrogated by strangers for walking "independently" (I am actually within concealed but barely visible sight, but drivers-by don't know this) while on our own property. I have had to pop out of the bushes and explain ourselves to them, about our own business on our own property. At one point I tried walking about 50 yards from the bus stop, so she could walk 50 yards to me on her own. The bus driver would not release my child. I popped up and said I was there but just letting her walk some "independently" and I was looked at like I had 3 heads and refused.
They all have cellphones. It costs them 0.0001 seconds to call CPS, and 30 seconds to make something up. They can invest barely any energy at all and cause a shitstorm in your life that lasts weeks at best, maybe ever months. This is part of the difference from the 80s -- if a child was spotted in the non-residential wild it would cost anyone who wants to fuck with them at least 30 minutes to make a phone call, and what these Karens delight and thrive in is asymmetrical situations where it costs them nothing but a brief moment and you and your kid everything.
This leaves me feeling like an alien. I know pretty much all school kids in places like Germany and Japan walk to school. Yet every single person I interact with (in real life) has this paranoia, it is suffocating as a parent because they get to usurp themselves as the parent via the implied threat they can always use the government to make your life hell and meanwhile the child loses something they can never get back.
I believe that the person you were replying to was asking for empirically supported numbers, not some random number you invented in your own mind.
Also, "Do you have children?" is a ridiculous question, because we were all children once ourselves. I wouldn't trade my childhood of freedom and "risk" (in your mind) for the straitjacket of helicopter parenting. I wouldn't want to live in fear as a child or as a parent.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
I never said you can't raise kids without all the overprotection and also be present.
The issue of over parenting seems to be a developed nation issue, I agree. I'm not in one and here kids don't do mountains of activities, but violence rates are very significant. There's just no point exposing my son to it in the hopes he comes out the other side unscathed, when even I don't want to be out alone at night. That's "vibe parenting", not an intelligent way of raising children.
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
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.
I like my job too, i learn a lot of it, but that's basically half-time of a second job (if you include commute) for a 12yo kid... that's just too much, both for the kids and their 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?
"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.
edit: ah finally; through another HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944) I was able to find the original link to the article (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html) and an archived version of the first version (https://web.archive.org/web/20031008160117/http://www.randsi...). Notably, the list of activities changed:
2003 version:
> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.
Current version:
> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?
Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.
That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.
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
Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.
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/
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?)
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.
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
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.
Child abductions are amazingly rare. Data for them is strong because they are consistently reported.
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.
A mortgage may be more than rent for a similar place now, but I suspect it won't be that many years before the lines cross.
Just giving my kids space when I'm nearby, in sight of them has terrified countless onlookers.
No one has actually called CPS on me, thankfully, to my knowledge. But the general atmosphere is absolutely crushing for people who want to try to safely let their kids learn independence.
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)
Because it was just him. His friends couldn't go anywhere unless a parent went with them.
There's no unsupervised time, and then we're all confused when 18 year olds can't cope with life.
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.
That's what I call as rich childhood.
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).
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_.
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
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.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so-many-pedes...
Kids playing on neighborhood streets show continued improvement.
"Deaths of children under 10 are actually down significantly (167 deaths in 2009 to 98 deaths in 2023), and deaths for ages 10-19 are down as well."
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.
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'm so glad you got out man. Seriously. You climbed out of a hole that many can't even see.
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.
> 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
As there isn’t a way to walk to the strip mall across the road.
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.
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'
Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
Most of America (at least west and east coast) is at this stage now. Look no further than startup culture were people have convinced themselves that repeated embarrassing failure is actually a sound investment strategy. This is the environment children are growing up in, of course they will all grow up to be embarrassing failures.
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.
It's very easy to be a parent when you have no children.