Posted on 01/19/2015 3:34:59 PM PST by wtd
In a fascinating article in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin reveals how much parenting, and therefore also the childhood experience, have changed since we were kids.
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower."
Walking to school by the third grade? We were walking ourselves to school by the first grade. To be sure that we remembered correctly, we checked with mom, who confirmed it.
Another change is that the parents we know seem to spend a lot more time with their kids than our parents spent with us. Rosin confirms that parental contact hours have in fact increased, even though parents work more than they used to. So parents both work more, and spend more time with their kids. That can only imply that the adults have less time to themselves. The life of a parent has gotten tougher, which perhaps explains in part why fewer people these days want to do it.
Rosin’s own experience is typical of modern practice.
"My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years."
Not 10 minutes without adult supervision? That’s just sad.
When you ask today’s parents why they are so much more protective, they reply that today’s world is more dangerous, and in particular, that children today face an increased risk of being abducted. The problem with that view is that it simply does not square with the facts.
"David Finkelhor is the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the most reliable authority on sexual-abuse and abduction statistics for children. In his research, Finkelhor singles out a category of crime called the “stereotypical abduction,” by which he means the kind of abduction that’s likely to make the news, during which the victim disappears overnight, or is taken more than 50 miles away, or is killed. Finkelhor says these cases remain exceedingly rare and do not appear to have increased since at least the mid‑’80s, and he guesses the ’70s, although he was not keeping track then. Overall, crimes against children have been declining, in keeping with the general crime drop since the ’90s."
All of this extra time that parents spend with their children is supposedly for the benefit of the children. So children must be doing better than they used to, right? Well, not so much.
[Kyung-Hee] Kim has analyzed results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that American children’s scores have declined steadily across the past decade or more. The data show that children have become:
“less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
The largest drop, Kim noted, has been in the measure of “elaboration,” or the ability to take an idea and expand on it in a novel way.
We wonder if this generation, when it reaches adulthood, will be able to match the achievements of previous generations.
Finally, Rosin writes about a research study from the 1970s that filmed children playing unsupervised in ways that today seem unthinkable.
"Andrew and Jenny, a brother and sister who are 6 and 4, respectively, explore a patch of woods to find the best ferns to make a bed with. Jenny walks around in her knee-high white socks, her braids swinging, looking for the biggest fronds. Her big brother tries to arrange them just so. The sun is shining through the dense trees and the camera stays on the children for a long time. When they are satisfied with their bed, they lie down next to each other. “Don’t take any of my ferns,” Jenny scolds, and Andrew sticks his tongue out. At this point, I could hear in my head the parent intervening: “Come on, kids, share. There’s plenty to go around.” But no parents are there; the kids have been out of their sight for several hours now. I teared up while watching the film, and it was only a few days later that I understood why. In all my years as a parent, I have never come upon children who are so inwardly focused, so in tune with each other, so utterly absorbed by the world they’ve created, and I think that’s because in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched. (Emphasis in original.)"
Exit question, and a chilling one: Will people who grow up accustomed to constantly being watched feel comfortable with, or complacent about, being watched by a Big Brother surveillance state? Can human freedom survive overprotective modern parenting?
Of note in recent discussions is the universal lack of trust.
Parents now check for and become aware of local pedophile and ex-felon locations near where our children circulate.
Urgent notifications from our schools advise increased awareness when a predator or abduction attempt is reported in the vicinity of our schools.
Society is not the same as it was in the late 20th century. These predators have rights which limit or extinguish the trust and freedoms we once enjoyed as children.
Contemporary "Helicopter parenting" and the limits on time which today's parents have to share with the children competes with time required to maintain their responsibilities to their jobs, mundane tasks of the household, meals, shopping...it's not surprise these generations struggle with fitness and obesity as well.
My how times have changed. I walked to 1st grade more than a half mile. Never wore a bike helmet.
Oh yeah, we drank water right out of the garden hose!
Isn’t that the best place to get it?
It’s really sad ...
It’s not the parents and this is not new.
My youngest is 21 and I raised my own children with the same hyper-parenting that I’ve always hated.
But I didn’t have a choice.
Take your son to the ER for a basic head-bashing accident and they call CPS.
Let your kids go to the park at ages 6 and 8 and somebody calls the police.
I had the police called because my son and his friend were sitting, 15 feet from my front door, 5 feet off the ground on a tree branch.
I had the police called because my son was digging in the dirt with a spoon. (That call was out of concern for the... I kid you not... welfare of the grass.)
Child Protective Services was called when my daughter went to the ER with a broken arm at the age of 15. 100 witnesses saw her fall and break it rollerskating at the rink. But I was still called on the carpet for child abuse.
It’s not the people want to parent their children in an overprotective way. It’s that we live in a Nanny State government that picks and pokes into average lives and threatens everything that we love and hold dear.
And why do they poke the average mom and let kids die in foster care?
Well, we’re the easy marks. We’ll go with their program as far as we’re able. We’ll bow and scrape for them not to take our children. The real abusive parents won’t cooperate as nicely. They’re a hassle to deal with.
But Jane Smith on Bayberry Lane will do anything to appease. They can check a hundred blocks on their sheets if they mess with her.
And there you have it, in a single sentence. And not only do they have rights, they trump yours, mine, and our those of our children.
I don't understand how it is that every sort of pervert/criminal degenerate have managed to seize control of our society. They have black robed fools issuing Fatwa's on traditional America. And the SCOTUS will issue another sodomite supporting fatwa, regarding gay marraige in June.
Over the past two decades, my kids used to “dig to China” and then hose off before coming in several hours later. They used to “follow the creek” for miles and take apples and sandwiches, then come home not too long after dark. By third grade, they knew how to deal with busybodies so they would not lose the privilege of roaming on their own, and they never ran into trouble. They also knew how to deal with predators, and I’ve always been pleased with how well they handled those problems.
I ran into trouble a couple of times with the busybodies, but I learned how to be diplomatic enough or intimidating enough that nothing ever came of their desire to ruin childhood for other people’s children as much as they had ruined it for their own children.
Reality bites, physics kills. You can’t have freedom - whether you’re an adult or a child - without the risk of harm. We live in a society which believes the risk of harm can be eliminated through constant supervision and a readiness to sue.
It can’t. The harms avoided by supervision, helmet-wearing, and cushioned playgrounds are obvious. The harms accumulated due to the absence of freedom are invisible.
My favorite call-the-cops incident (among several) was when my 4-year-old son had a crush on a little girl up the street, but couldn’t remember where she lived. He was going up the street knocking on each door, asking, “Does Maggie live here?” A middle-aged lady deputy showed up on the doorstep with him, “He says his name is Frank, and he lives here.”
One day there’s a thread berating parents for being too lenient. The next, a thread scorning our “overprotectiveness.” It’s a no-win situation for most parents of young kids today. Try to explain or “defend” yourself — well, there will be no shortage of people ready to tear you down and let you know you’re a failure.
FWIW — I don’t think the world was necessarily much safer, back in the day. I think there were plenty of pervs and predators out there. The difference is that now, people talk about it. And I say this because I know of incidents with older members within my own family, and they basically shrug and say “who would’ve believed me?”
Yeah, me too, but one time (as an adult) I turned on the hose and a big spider washed out. SCREAM!!!! Never again, never, ever again.
My wise friend maintains that the best kindergarten education a kid can get, is spending a summer in and around the creek in the back pasture.
Oldplayer
Reality bites, physics kills. You can’t have freedom - whether you’re an adult or a child - without the risk of harm. We live in a society which believes the risk of harm can be eliminated through constant supervision and a readiness to sue.
The issue up until now is that our entire society, from top to bottom, has taken it for granted that "safer" is always "better." The fact is, life has always been about balancing risk vs. reward, and people who are not raised around a certain degree of risk won't be able to understand it or take advantage of it (or even accept it) when they get to be adults.
How do you decide to start a small business, for example, unless you have learned to live with some risk?
That's a statement of philosophy with which many disagree. They would say that "once," people had to live with the risk of catastrophe, but "now," we can prevent every bad outcome if we only try hard enough.
It's hard for parents. If you watch your children closely, you get one batch of critics saying, "There's something wrong with them! They never let their children out of their sight!" If you let them go out and play unsupervised, you get another batch of critics saying, "They don't care about their children. They aren't paying any attention to them!"
If the children kept inside for "safety" get fat, the parents are blamed for that. If the children outside get hurt, the parents are blamed for that.
Yeah, but that's because people are stupid.
I mean, there were such things as helmets in the 1920s, but if you suggested that children be required by law to wear one to ride a bike, people would have thought you were crazy. Risk vs. reward is a fundamental of life for ALL of us, though, not just parents and not just children.
What kind of reward to you want to earn? What are you willing to risk? This calculation takes into account both the magnitude and the odds of the potential reward, and the magnitude and the odds of the risk. People live within this calculation all the time, although they don't know they're doing it.
And, lacking imagination, they fail to understand what they're giving up by sliding the dial all the way over to the safety side of the equation.
You know why I think people are so interested in safety today? Because the media pushes fear on us wholesale, that's why. We're taught to look for the next terrible thing that will happen, and because that makes us stop and consider for a moment, in that moment we get a Department of Homeland Security foisted off on us... we get an EPA determined to mitigate climate change when they have no evidence to indicate that humans are a major contributor to climate change... we get OSHA, who can require a company to make all their employees perfectly safe without any consideration to what it costs.
The costs of this mindset are far higher than most people know.
That's the kicker. The harms of living in reality are obvious. Children fall and get hurt. Sometimes they fall and get killed.
The costs of risk-avoidance are much more subtle. The children don't die, they just ... don't. The businesses don't fail, they just ... don't. The harms are averted, the costs are covered, and everyone settles in inert sameness.
Jeeze...I feel vindicated. We tugged a bit hard on our kid’s arm and dislocated it (when he was very small). We didn’t know what happened, and he was in terrible pain. But I knew one thing - a case file would be opened if we “took him in”, so we did not. After a few hours, it finally went back in itself. Then it happened again while we were playing (likely weakened from the first time). Still didn’t know what happened, but knew it would “get better”. Then again a third time - but at school. We had the alibi that we needed and took him in. They diagnosed it and immobilized it in a cast for 6 weeks. Never had the problem again.
It’s TERRIBLE that children are forced to suffer like that, just to keep their own parents, but that is TODAY’S SOCIETY. And as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t set the rules but I will RESPOND to those rules, and if the rules say that I’m ROLLING THE DICE when I take him in, then he’ll have to wait until I really no other choice. It is MUCH BETTER that he suffer a few hours of pain than have to possibly deal with the trauma of getting a new set of parents.
(by the way, he’s forgiven us...LOL)
You were quite the daredevil. ;^)
Families were bigger then, too. Most of my friends had 4-5 kids in their family. There was a definite separation between “kid stuff” and “adult stuff.” Our moms just told us to go outside and play. If no friends were around, we had our siblings. Nowadays parents, often mothers, press themselves into every little aspect of their kids’ lives. I think a lot of them are living vicariously through their kids.
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