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Nice article,
I'm Gen X, and when I was a kid; our parents didn't even know where we were after school.
And they couldn't find out without physically searching, we trick or treated unsupervised; and our toys had some inherent risk of injuries.
We had to use our imaginations, become creative; and interact without the influence of social media peer pressures.
Same. Be home when the streetlights come on. And I still have my (banned) pointy darts.
Anecdotal, but I lived 4 short blocks from the elementary and high schools, so a very easy and quick walk. A distinct memory I have is my mom commenting when the two neighbours kids started school, their mothers drove them every single day for years, they never walked to school. That would have been starting around 1988, when I was 16. The beginning of helicopter parenting?
Same. Be home when the streetlights come on. And I still have my (banned) pointy darts.
Anecdotal, but I lived 4 short blocks from the elementary and high schools, so a very easy and quick walk. A distinct memory I have is my mom commenting when the two neighbours kids started school, their mothers drove them every single day for years, they never walked to school. That would have been starting around 1988, when I was 16. The beginning of helicopter parenting?
Lawn Jarts!
It seems we need to reduce the amount of fear being perpetrated in this country, as fear is how people are most easily manipulated. This is also taking its' toll on creativity, deductive reasoning; along with fortitude to overcome fear of failure.
When I left this country, and resided in a poor one; I noticed people there were happier in general.
Upon returning, 2 years later; I immediately noticed how miserable people were.
Perhaps it is due to our materialism, and the illusion it brings; as opposed to the community, hard work, religion, and family values I left behind in the poor country.
People here aren't getting married, having families, or even block parties anymore.
And the dumbphones are not making people any smarter, ruining social development.
Indeed. We retired to one of those countries and I have always noted how happy the people are, with an average income of $400 a month. Lots of married young mothers with 2 or 3 children (health care is free). Though they do have smart phones, lots of socializing outdoors on the stoop or street corners. Almost all businesses are mom n pop places. Multi-generational housing. No homeless that I've seen. Most don't have cars, just scooter-type motorbikes or public transportation.
Indeed. We retired to one of those countries and I have always noted how happy the people are, with an average income of $400 a month. Lots of married young mothers with 2 or 3 children (health care is free). Though they do have smart phones, lots of socializing outdoors on the stoop or street corners. Almost all businesses are mom n pop places. Multi-generational housing. No homeless that I've seen. Most don't have cars, just scooter-type motorbikes or public transportation.
Really makes you think....
It made me think of my childhood, born in 1948 in Baltimore. People lived in cheap row homes and sat on the front steps (aka stoops) talking to and socializing with neighbors. You could have your child walk down to a corner bar with a big mason jar and come back with a quart of draft beer for 50-cents or a buck. People painted their window screens with idyllic or religious scenes. Moms had 2-4 kids, or more, and stayed home to raise them on the income of the husband. My sister married an Irish Catholic boy who was one of 8 children and living in a small home. The only homeless were a few alcoholics downtown who largely stayed hidden. Every corner had as many as four tiny mom and pop stores: drug stores; groceries; eateries; bars; confectionaries with a snowball stand in the summer. Every so often a corner would have a dry cleaner or even a doctor of some sort. Occasionally a church, usually a Catholic one in white areas. Buses and streetcars ran on a regular schedule. Extended families often lived a few homes or streets over.
That's the world I was born into and remember well, like going out on Saturday with my father to a store-front grocer where everything was on tall shelves behind the counter and you had to ask for each item one at a time. The grocer penciled up the total on a sheet of butcher paper and his big manual cash register went cha-ching when he rang it up. A big shopping trip usually meant a trip to one of the big block-long city markets, like Hollins, Lexington, Cross Street and other. At those place a fish sandwich was 25-cents and the fish overlapped the two slices of Wonder Bread it came on. Teenagers were rarely obese and stayed out of trouble lest dad kick their butt. Older teens who got in trouble usually were offered a "plea deal" of sorts and ended up in the Army where many of them outgrew errant ways. Mental illness was unheard of save for a rare case here and there and we had state run institutions for the severely retarded and mentally ill.
My how things have changed. These days it's a case of You're On Your Own, or as I call it, a YOYO world.
I'm not sure how much help or resources are out there for teens with mental health concerns. As far as how to cope with all this the best I could tell them is to ignore what their friends think about them. Stick with a few BFFs who have your back, ignore the rest of them, they're just noise. A lot of teens obsess over trivial matters like who has the coolest phone, clothes, music, car, etc. I recall those days, wasted some time on that stuff but never again. My advice is to fuggitaboutit, none of that matters in real life. Focus on your education while in school, our society is handing an education to you on a silver platter, take what they are offering. Take it all. Ask for more. Do extra work. The harder you work at it the more fun you'll have with it, now and later in life. It's hard to get an education after you leave school; very hard, almost impossible if you have kids. After you leave High School you'll NEVER see 98% of those other kids anyway, so ignore them, don't spend even a moment trying to impress them. If they bully you, just say "thank you for sharing, have a nice day" and ignore them. Get off of social media and do your homework, if you do, you'll thank me when you're sitting pretty at 40. It's a long road but you have to prepare now by getting all the education you can.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-28-2023 at 02:01 PM..
A thought - how do you tell if a teen needs mental health help? A social worker friend once told me most teens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness as a norm. No wonder they say no diagnoses until after the age of eighteen.
I think that 16-17-year-old stage is pretty wacky. You add drugs or alcohol and there's little way to tell what you are looking at under the cocktail of social confusion, hormones and mood altering.
There needs to be some fine line discerning between mental illness and "it's just a stage."
Discussing feelings was not allowed when I was a child.
Expressing feelings would get me beaten.
When I was 8 or 9yo, my parents decided that I needed to face reality, so when any of our pets needed to be put down, it was my job to do so. And any whining or crying was justification for a beating.
Then I had to do it again, to make sure that I had learned the lesson, to kill without hesitancy, remorse, or emotion.
I never dreamed of being depressed about it, as I knew what would happen if I got depressed.
And yet you did not grow up to be a mass shooter! It is a mystery why some people who have had terrible childhoods resort to taking their anger on others, while others turn out to be good citizens.
Read "The Chaos Machine". Talk about sobering. And frightening.
Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for.
To me there are a lot of other factors to consider. How about parents? From what I have seen, and I have seen a lot during 70 years of my life. Parenting has changed a lot. In some areas for the worst. Others for the good. The one that I believe is critical is cuddling the children too much. Another one is the changes in society. Children nowadays are treated as little adults. They do not get treated as what they are, children. As such, they are not learning to hear "NO." Instead, I see countless of parents trying to convince children by trying to explain every decision or choice. There are times when "because I am your mother" is the answer they must simply deal with it. Children get so depressed when life finally tells them "NO" when they finally grow up. They get hit with the realities of life so hard because they did not handle the punches. Those difficult times developed on us a thick skin, taught us how to roll with the punches, and learn emotional survival skills.
So, it is unfair to say that Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for. He created a tool society can use. How we use it is our own responsibility.
My oldest daughter has worked with children for at least 30 years. He main comment is that a lot of the problems she has with children are related to how they are raised by their parents.
I share an example when I was stationed at Fort Bliss.
There is area in the city that is rented by the Army to house military families. In a townhall meeting the parents were complaining how they felt unsafe in the area because there is a lot of vandalism in the neighborhood. They put blame on people from Mexico for problems in the area. Also, they were afraid of people from Juarez, Mexico going around the dumpsters picking gathering things people dump that are useful to them. The police officer said that the main problem with vandalism was the parents' own children. They are the ones that destroyed the park and doing other things. He said he has received calls from them complaining of those teenagers. He told them they needed to police their own children during midnight time. As far as the people from Mexico, he said all he sees is they are simply going through dumpsters trying to find something of value to them and survive.
Also, some cities had implemented curfew hours because of the increased problems during the night by teenagers that are supposed to have curfews imposed by their parents at times.
Oh, by the way, I learned a term not too long ago, "adulting." Adults now act so much like children themselves that when even have a term to say when they are acting like adults!?
I had to look it up in Dictionary.com.
Adulting is an informal term to describe behavior that is seen as responsible and grown-up. This behavior often involves meeting the mundane demands of independent and professional living, such as paying bills and running errands.
Really?!!!! Doing those things is the norm in my life. I should actually say that those adults are actually "childrening" most of the time.
The crowd stayed quiet and said nothing against what the officer said.
To me there are a lot of other factors to consider. How about parents? From what I have seen, and I have seen a lot during 70 years of my life. Parenting has changed a lot. In some areas for the worst. Others for the good. The one that I believe is critical is cuddling the children too much. Another one is the changes in society. Children nowadays are treated as little adults. They do not get treated as what they are, children. As such, they are not learning to hear "NO." Instead, I see countless of parents trying to convince children by trying to explain every decision or choice. There are times when "because I am your mother" is the answer they must simply deal with it. Children get so depressed when life finally tells them "NO" when they finally grow up. They get hit with the realities of life so hard because they did not handle the punches. Those difficult times developed on us a thick skin, taught us how to roll with the punches, and learn emotional survival skills.
So, it is unfair to say that Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for. He created a tool society can use. How we use it is our own responsibility.
My oldest daughter has worked with children for at least 30 years. He main comment is that a lot of the problems she has with children are related to how they are raised by their parents.
I share an example when I was stationed at Fort Bliss.
There is area in the city that is rented by the Army to house military families. In a townhall meeting the parents were complaining how they felt unsafe in the area because there is a lot of vandalism in the neighborhood. They put blame on people from Mexico for problems in the area. Also, they were afraid of people from Juarez, Mexico going around the dumpsters picking gathering things people dump that are useful to them. The police officer said that the main problem with vandalism was the parents' own children. They are the ones that destroyed the park and doing other things. He said he has received calls from them complaining of those teenagers. He told them they needed to police their own children during midnight time. As far as the people from Mexico, he said all he sees is they are simply going through dumpsters trying to find something of value to them and survive.
Also, some cities had implemented curfew hours because of the increased problems during the night by teenagers that are supposed to have curfews imposed by their parents at times.
Oh, by the way, I learned a term not too long ago, "adulting." Adults now act so much like children themselves that when even have a term to say when they are acting like adults!?
I had to look it up in Dictionary.com.
Adulting is an informal term to describe behavior that is seen as responsible and grown-up. This behavior often involves meeting the mundane demands of independent and professional living, such as paying bills and running errands.
Really?!!!! Doing those things is the norm in my life. I should actually say that those adults are actually "childrening" most of the time.
The crowd stayed quiet and said nothing against what the officer said.
You have a great day,
elamigo
One issue that I started to see when I was a teenager in the 90s, is that young people really do need for there to be places other than home and school where they can go and just...be. During those times, kids and teens are supposed to be learning how to socialize, how to navigate the world, having small adventures and dodging trouble. Building confidence.
When I was a child, I was able to wander at will through "the woods" which in fact was land that surrounded most of the housing developments in the area and typically had creeks that fed into the Potomac River. There was nothing better than picking my way through the brambles and getting to the creek and then following it for miles. I was like...7, 8 years old? By myself. A girl. I also jumped neighbors' fences and dashed through yards for shortcuts, avoiding dogs. Strayed into front yards chasing fireflies.
Now, no one wants the kids anywhere unsupervised. As a parent, I could not abide the idea of my children being a bother to anyone, made sure they stayed on our property or I was with them, CPS can be called if a kid walks a block to a playground without an adult. Wandering around in the woods, which was in fact trespassing on someone's property...unthinkable! And the kids don't want to since they would rather sit in front of screens being entertained. Well, what else is a parent supposed to do with them? We can't spend every second focused on interacting with them or making them do chores, and they need their own independent time.
But I recall that when I became a teenager, suddenly if I was anywhere with other teenagers, every adult looked at us like we were certainly about to go on a crime spree at any second. No matter where we were. I think that a lot of actual bad behavior by teens is because they feel defensive against this. A kind of, "if you've got such a problem with me, then the heck with you" thing.
So I don't know, I think that there's a lot to it, and while the parents' behaviors are a big part, it isn't like any of us knew better. I felt neglected and abandoned by my parents and I did not want my kids to go through what I did. So I tried to be a better parent. I did not believe that I was "spoiling" them at the time...but I think I grew up having to learn a ton of practical things and I was too eager to apply my problem solving abilities to every one of their problems. Which meant my kids did not really learn some things they should have, I guess, because they did not learn from my example nor from my words...they really needed to just be left to figure things out? I don't know.
What I do know is that I never made the mistake of thinking that my kids were angels who could do no harm...I remember being a kid among kids and I know better.
I blame the parents… no responsibilities little self respect
Where is the nurturing of positive energy… believing that all kids have a gift… a passion they are good at ..
It seems all we do is wallow in pity about the world’s tragedies
Anyone who watches the nightly news while getting news alerts all day mid on edge
Overload of stress … need to filter the negativity
Also what I see in the workplace- kids 17-20 have very little
Adversity coping skills …. When hit with a situation to diffuse… they often freeze up or run hide and cry….
Remember the old saying…. If you hold a bird so he doesn’t fall, he’ll never learn to fly … and eventually die
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