Switzerland sounds great. Why move back? Ever?

...reminding those in attendance that after the first few weeks of school children should be walking with friends, not mom.

This is just one of many things that have changed since I was a kid. I remember walking to school with my brothers and friends, gangs of us. I also remember delivering newspapers after school, babysitting the neighbourhood kids when I was 12 (one New Year's Eve, when I was 14, I took care of 3 households worth of kids, got $50 for the night, and was happy with that!), and doing various other chores around the house and the 'hood before I got my driver's license and a real job. Nowadays, I see parents driving their kids to school (heaven forbid they should actually walk!), to the mall, giving them money for whatever they want, and not expecting any of them to take any personal responsibility. And it's true, that's what is crippling this country - helicopter parents buying into the media frenzy that the all children are "at risk" of everything from a scraped knee to molestation. I swear, the government, the media and advertisers of all kinds feed off of parents' every fear, real AND imagined. This is no way for people to live, yet that's how people have been conditioned now, for at least the past 2 generations. And our government encourages this by creating ever more laws and regulations designed to keep people from doing things for themselves. We are well and truly fucked if something doesn't change soon. Our children's children are going to be helpless before too long. No one is teaching these kids how to think for themselves.

One thing that has remained consistent throughout time is that adults think the kids born after them are going to hell in a handbasket. Not their kids, though. Their kids will be just fine because they are raising them right.

In 20 years, kids today will talk about how the new batch of kids just isn't being raised properly.

I hear what you're saying MonicaP, and I've caught myself despairing over "these kids today" and thinking it's time to get out the rocker and my shotgun and go sit out on the porch yelling "Get off my lawn"!

Then, after I've reloaded a time or two and my arms are tired, I have to wonder if things have ever been quite the way they are now.

Or maybe this is what you get after several generations of people saying "I want my kid to have it better than I did".

This will probably sort itself out, after the situation of the entitled children of their entitled parents (with no servants to do the actual work) comes to a head.

I want to live forever, just to see what happens next.

Trying to remember how old I was when I was allowed to use various tools. Mostly I don't remember, which means Iwas rather young. But I do remember helping my Dad and various neighbors building out garage, mainly as the gopher: go grab me a pocketfull of 10 penny nails, the roofing knife, roofing nails. Carrying things up and down the ladder for them. I was 8 at the time.
Another thing to note the garage is still being used 35 years later, have had to replace the door, and the automatic garage opener. But wouldn't be allowed today, no inspections, no liscensed electricians, no gov't interference.

In some countries, they let the kids swim with sharks.

(Threadwin: Cridmosaures!)

Then, after I've reloaded a time or two and my arms are tired, I have to wonder if things have ever been quite the way they are now.

Things have never been quite the way they are now. But then, 30 years ago, people could say the same.

My parents were overprotective. I wasn't allowed to cross the street until I was 9, and my father drove me to school every day until I started high school. Even then, my parents hired a private van because they didn't want me taking the bus. Still, I was babysitting my younger foster siblings when I was 9, and I was babysitting three kids at a time when I was 12. They left me alone in the car to run errands, too. They weren't overprotective in all areas of my life, so it worked out more or less fine.

I look at the "kids" (early 20s) who work in my husband's office, and many of them are pretty extraordinary: bright, resourceful and creative. They're also entitled, but some of the most outrageous sense of entitlement I witness regularly is from Boomers and Greatest Generation, who seem to think they deserve everything they want just because they managed to not die.

I swear, the government, the media and advertisers of all kinds feed off of parents' every fear, real AND imagined.

So don't buy into it, and damn the consequences.

Well, WE lived in a paper bag in the middle of the road! Every morning, after we were beaten out of the paper bag, we would wait for the school bus to come by and grab onto the back bumper, if we were lucky and the driver hadn't put axle grease on it that day, and after the teachers were done whipping us and damaging our self-esteem we would limp home, dragging the ones who couldn't walk on their own, have our dinner of luke-warm road kill, and lapse into a coma until tomorrow.

But we were grateful for what we had.

I'm on board with most of this. However, there are some places it really is NOT safe to walk to school. When I was little, I lived off a tiny street... right off the highway.

That said, my kids take the bus unless there's something special going on (like a doctor's apt right after school).

When my son refused to get on the bus one day (turned out there was a legit issue, but he wouldn't tell me) I walked him to school. It was only 2 miles, but it was too chilly for what we were wearing, although we were dressed fine for waiting for the buss. I didn't let him stop home to get something warmer. I didn't even stop home to get the stroller for his sister (not yet 2 - I carried her most of the way and all the way back). It sucked, but it forced his hand & he told me the issue.

Some people probably look at my kids and think they'll have the same problems, but while there are certain things I'm (maybe overly) protective about, my kids get chores at age 2. At age 6, I expect my son to do his own laundry with minimal help (I demonstrated folding).

It's hard to just say "go out and play" when abduction stories are on the news every day. Also, since there are fewer parents around than there used to be during the day, there's less "through the window" supervision.

This is the one reason I'm tempted to buy a new home. We're in a townhome, so we have almost no yard. If we had a yard, I'd kick the kids outside ALL the time. Here there are cars all over, and lots of people who don't live here cut through to the train & stores. Maybe I'm unreasonably protective, but I don't coddle either.

we would limp home, dragging the ones who couldn't walk on their own

This sounds like enabling behavior. Those kids could have made it on their own if they were motivated enough. If they don't make it: more room in the paper bag!

Yeah, but what if there was no roadkill? Mm-hmm...

People like to tut-tut others who talk about "kids these days" and say it's just a cycle.
They're not necessarily wrong, but they're ignoring the problem.
The problem isn't the kids but the parenting.

You had a paper bag? You were lucky. We had to sleep under the stars, in the snow, 12 months a year, and fight off the feral ballerinas before we could had the road kill.

We also had to be careful we weren't run over by the people who drove their pirates to work.

Ermagard, don't even get me started on the feral ballerinas! Squatting there in their little tutus, moaning on and on about how THEY had it ROUGH!

It is becoming increasingly difficult not to agree with Maria Shriver that we certainly live in a "woman's nation."

Security over liberty (and the risk associated with liberty) every time. Looks like we are headed for the "get and deserve neither" situation Ben Franklin talked about.

"You had a paper bag? You were lucky. We had to sleep under the stars, in the snow, 12 months a year, and fight off the feral ballerinas before we could had the road kill"

Yeah, well back in my day, we didn't have stars or snow because there was only hydrogen; the other elements hadn't been invented yet. And the damn universe was expanding so fast that any time you put something down, when you went back to find it, the place where you put it wasn't there anymore. Not to mention that whole neutrons and antimatter thing, which we don't talk about in front of the young folk.

Yep, there we were, just parameciums waving our flagella all over the place--but try telling kids that nowadays, they won't believe you...

In some countries, they let the kids swim with sharks.

I've heard that, in some countries, they let the kids play with puppies.

If I EVER have an employee's mother call my office to complain...that employee is fired.

Switzerland is a nice place. A very nice place.

You can't say that about all parts of the US.

Sharks vs. Puppies! Yeah!

When you're a Pup, you're a Pup all the way...

"just parameciums waving our flagella all over the place"

And that's why diapers were invented. The End.

So I'm watching TV, and I see a commercial featuring tiny untethered babies climbing up on things! Like wooden chairs! What kind of an example is this for our cherished infants? Is anyone thinking about the chilllldren?

When this woman wants her child to be truly well educated and compete against the best, she will likely send him to the U.S., whether that be college, graduate school, or his first job. He may grow up feeling superior and it's more than likely he'll end up licking his wounds. Kids today may be victims of helicopter parenting but our young hires are smart and work really fucking hard. Getting a good job has been their purpose since they were preteens.

It's true risk is sometimes absurdly curtailed here but not always. Sometimes less so. I'd certainly not let my daughter live the life I lived as a child; circumstances are different (metropolitan area/quiet suburbs). She won't get to ride her bike for miles as an 10-year old like I did. It's a tradeoff. I think the better schools, higher expectations, and exposure to things that didn't exist within hundreds of miles of where I grew up are worth it.

And giving saws with real teeth to 3-year olds is dumb. Even our grandparents didn't do that.

When this woman wants her child to be truly well educated and compete against the best, she will likely send him to the U.S.

Wow, just wow.

Guess what, the schools in the US are not any better than those in Switzerland, either on average or looking at the top schools. I'll happily put the Zurich Institute of Technology, or the St. Gallen School of Business up against the best American universities.

There are reasons to visit the US. These are two: international experience is good, and so is learning really fluent English. Of course, one could also visit England, or Canada, or Australia...

There's a reason people from all over the world who aspire to great things for their children send them to top U.S. schools, and that the majority of the world's great innovations happen here. The intersection of capital, human talent, excellent education, and culture that encourages people to strive for great achievements as individuals does not exist anywhere else.

"There's a reason people from all over the world who aspire to great things for their children send them to top U.S. schools, and that the majority of the world's great innovations happen here."

But how much longer will it be that way? I got some stats from the Department of Education's Web site, on college degrees awarded in 2009, by field of study. We find:

* Biology: 80,756
* Engineering: 69,133
* Computer science: 37,994
* Physics/chemistry: 22,466
* Mathematics: 15,496

By comparison, we have:
* Social sciences: 168,500
* Education: 101,708
* Psychlogy: 94,271
* Visual and performing arts: 89,140
* Language and literature: 55,462
* Liberal arts/"general studies": 47,096
* "Interdisciplinary studies": 37,444
* "Recreational and leisure studies": 31,667
* "Family and consumer sciences": 21,905
* Communications and journalism: 78,009

The social science and visual arts degrees, by themselves, outnumber all of the degrees awarded in the natural sciences, computer sciences, engineering (all fields), and math combined. The psychology degrees, by themselves, nearly outnumber all of the natural science degrees. The social science degrees far outnumber every other field except business.

Or maybe this is what you get after several generations of people saying "I want my kid to have it better than I did".

Posted by: Pricklypear at July 18, 2012 7:27 AM
____________________________

Why can't parents like that grasp that there are some things that no kid LIKES having, but all kids very much NEED them?

I.e., if they must give kids "things we never had," how about giving them an appreciation of working for any money they want, the joy of delayed gratification, little or no junk food in the house so they'll have an APPETITE at dinner, even for the spinach, and no video games at home so they'll be more likely to appreciate the chance to kick a ball around outdoors with a parent - or even just take a walk?

Not to mention an hour every day for reading aloud, even if that hour gets split into four pieces or so?

I mean, even if some adults DID have those "things" and never learned to be grateful for what their parents were trying to do, they need to rethink their attitudes. (This is the trouble with Dr. Spock's message "trust your instincts." Too many people have STUPID instincts. Clearly, he didn't realize that. Another version of that is "raise your kids the way you wish you'd been raised." Too often, that's not smart.)

Yes. Kids need to learn risk assessment. Super-low plastic structures with smooth rounded corners do not make a kid safer in the long run.

Useful skills and hobbies should be taught and encouraged, too. How many kids can text like fiends but can't cook a chicken or wash a window or mow a lawn or change the oil or sew a hem or a button?

Plus, they never had a saw in their hands at any age.

Dave, how much have those stats changed in say, the last 20 years? I don't know but guess the hard sciences have always been a smaller group because they are, well, hard. Gotta work every day; difficult to cram for a linear algebra final if you haven't been normalizing your vectors and c, all semester.
I plan to encourage my daughter to take a healthy number of math, science and comp sci courses - I think it's important for people these days that those machines not be black boxes, even if they are not experts.

Also: visual arts stuff these days can be lucrative and valuable. Web design, graphic design, 3d effects... Some of my best paid friends were art students and now work in UX, design, video games, TV and movie production.

Chicken: The numbers from the chart I used have numbers going back to 1970. Since that time, the total number of bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. has roughly doubled, from 840,000 to 1.6 million. Of the five degrees in my first group, the only ones that have exceeded that rate of growth are biology and computer science. That last one is deceptive since in 1970 there were few schools offering coursework in computer science. (There still weren't many in 1980, when I got started in that field.) Computer science peaked in the early '90s with about 50,000 degrees awarded (I suspect that a lot of those were information systems degrees), and has declined pretty substantially since then. As for the other three categories: Engineering is up about 50% altogether, but the peak for that field was in 1985 with about 77,000 degrees awarded. It dropped sharply in the 1990s and has grown slowly since then. The natural sciences also saw a very sharp drop in the 1990s and are just now getting back to the numbers they were at in 1970, so the growth there is zero. Mathematics has declined about 40% since 1970.

As for my second group, communications/journalism and liberal arts/general studies have increased by a factor of 7x since 1970, way exceeding the overall growth in total degrees. The latter flattened out some in the '80s but has seen a lot of growth since 1990. Multi/interdisciplinary studies has grown about 7x. Education, surprisingly, dropped by almost half between 1970 and 1980. It had some ups and downs between 1980 and 1995, and has been flat since then; it hasn't gotten back near the 170,000 degrees awarded in 1970. (This is probably a function of the school-age population; the baby-bust decade of the '70s sharply decreased the demand for teachers.) Social sciences also had a big drop, in the 1980s; it only got back to its 1970 numbers in 2005 and has grown about 10% since then.

Psychology has grown about 2.5x, somewhat exceeding the overall degree growth rate. Visual/performing arts has grown 3x, and recreation/leisure studies has grown an amazing 19.5x, most of that since 1990. (I can't help but wonder what percentage of that is scholarship athletes...) Family and consumer sciences, whatever that is, has doubled (same rate as the overall growth). The interesting case here is English language and literature, which awarded 63,914 degrees in 1970 but has never gotten back to that number; it dropped sharply in the decade of the '70s and only begin to recover around 1985. It has grown slowly since 1995.

I should have mentioned gender/ethinc studies, since those get mentioned so often in the context of the higher education bubble. Although degrees awarded in that field have grown 4x since 1970, in 2009 it awarded only 8,772 degrees, about 0.5% of all degrees awarded. So at least in terms of the number of degrees, it's not a significant factor. (Its influence over the campus and the curriculum of other fields of study is another matter.)

> Guess what, the schools in the US are not any
> better than those in Switzerland, either on
> average or looking at the top schools.

USA = 54, Switzerland = 3, appearing first at 27th, at which point the USA has appeared 18 times.

Dont eff up the narrative, dude, he was making claims on a blog comment. Now you want to introduce facts?

Exactly, right?