In a sense, I can't blame them. Lately, we've been hearing that everything a parent does is wrong. I was a free-range kid, which nowadays would get a call placed to CPS and me in a foster home.

If I had attempted to take away my nine-year-old daughter's video game and she hit me in the face for it, she would never see that video game again.

Difficult to imagine that an industry that has spent many years and a lot of money hiring psychologists to design feedback loops with the explicit purpose of getting people addicted could have gotten a bunch of children addicted.

In other news, difficult to imagine that some people are bad parents.

The kids are not alright, and parents are hoping someone else will do something about it.

Who can blame them? Your 9-year-old smacks you in the face when you try to take her video game away and your subsequent disciplining of her could have you standing in some government bureau defending yourself and your parenting - even if you don't resort to corporal punishment.

The danger of the approach in this case is it turned rehab into punishment. Should the child later, as an adult, need rehab, her memories of rehab-as-punishment may hold her back.

You know, about once a week these days -- if not more -- I'm pretty sure I can see the end of civilization off in the distance. ~ Amy

Yeah, we're still far from the end of civilization, but we can see it from here.

Children have learned that they have viable threats to use against their parents - child abuse, molestation, gun ownership, drug use, etc. - and are increasingly less afraid to use them. That won't end well.

Although, one is reminded of the '70s when society was decidedly anti-child. Movies like Rosemary's Baby and The Omen taught us to fear our children. Cultural mores were oriented toward adult good times - Studio 54, Playboy, "the Golden Age of Porn," etc. Religion was in decline. We survived that - although some would argue that many of today's issues stem directly from that era's excesses.

"Although, one is reminded of the '70s when society was decidedly anti-child. "

Which is why a lot of us X'ers had to raise ourselves. We came out OK (those of us who survived it). But it was not easy. Even so, I think we got a better deal than helicopter-parented Millennials have gotten. We had to grow up. Millennials have been restrained from growing up.

"We came out OK"?

You're still part of a public eagerly seeking someone, anyone else to do the tough things, to free them from effort of any kind.

Raise my kids! Keep me safe from everything! Give me a do-over!

Just promise me these things, because I don't remember anything and cannot look up your voting record, and I WILL elect/re-elect you!

Don't make me work to keep my rights!

I have friends who went too far trying to be their kid's 'friends' rather than mean old parents. Now they've realized that they don't have any authority in the eyes of their children and no way to obtain it. This sucks for them because some of their kids are real assholes.

I am all in favor of parents sending their kids off to video game rehab so that I (a 30-something with dulled reflexes and a full-time job) have a better chance in Fortnite. Because these kids are RUTHLESS and way too good.

In all seriousness, though, I was playing Doom and similar games starting at age 10 because my parents were gamers. But they were also PARENTS. The gaming PC was in a shared family office, so playing for 12 hours was never an option. I could play games only after my chore list was complete and homework was done. Bed time was strict and my dad would literally hit the “off” button if I was playing past that time. Family commitments came first, and weekends were full of them (and more chores). My sister and I were required to take part in a sport or exatracurricular year round.

Granted, we didn’t have phones and tablets, but those are easily confiscated by a parent willing to do it. My cousin’s 11-year-old kid was permitted by his parents to play games during a family wedding recently until my uncle walked up and wordlessly pocketed the phone. The kid protested but got over it and the parents were like “hmmmm never thought about taking the phone away.”

Circa 1828, Goethe and a friend were discussing: why were women more attracted to visiting Englishmen than to the local German guys? Goethe thought it was mainly because boys in Germany were not allowed enough free play: try to do some sledding, or just running around, and the cops would put a stop to it. "Taming youth prematurely, and of driving out all originality and all wildness, so that in the end nothing remains but the Philistine" resulting, in his opinion, in growing men who were less attractive to women than were boys raised more freely.

The recent incident of the 9-year-old boy who got his town's snowball-fight ban removed inspired me to post about Goethe's thoughts and also some related thoughts from the infamous Kaiser Wilhelm II:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58545.html

Here's what I said in 2011:

"What Your Kid Needs At 17: An example showing why America's going to be owned by China in a few decades..."

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/11/25/what_your_kid_n.html

Me:

...Anyway, I can't understand why so many parents (who may be educated, but are clearly not smart) think they're doing their kids any long-term favors by allowing them ANY visual electronics for their bedrooms. You wouldn't let them eat candy every day, I hope, so what's the difference?

(Some idiot once said he was sick of hearing about how too much TV is bad for kids' academic skills - and said he wanted to see a study that focuses on kids whose skills BENEFITED from lots of TV. Um, maybe the old studies simply covered kids across the board and concluded that most kids just don't benefit, so there's no point in gambling on your kids' futures?)

Not to mention that even time spent on reading is time spent sitting down, so any extra leisure time kids have clearly needs to be spent on more exercise - not more screen time!
_______________________________________

And, from the 2011 thread "Have You ENRICHED Your Kid Today?"

..."screen time" wasn't nearly as much of a time-consumer or threat to kids' health or brains (in the 1970s), simply because there was so little variety. In other words, if kids managed to spend 2 or 3 hours a day on TV, parents didn't worry so much as now because they knew the kids would soon come to realize that most of TV was predictable and boring and would happily move on to other activities with little or no pressure from parents. (I.e., video games weren't exactly a big temptation in the 1970s.)

However, NOWADAYS, most(?) kids would be horrified and outraged at the idea of parents' limiting kids' screen time to only 2 hours a day, because you have TV, endless video games, Twitter, etc. How horribly cruel can you get, they cry? Why don't parents realize that EVERY form of screen entertainment deserves at least two hours of worship per day (making a total of 8 or 10), if only because fast-paced entertainment "feels better" than reading or exercise? Besides, since the social scene is so tied up in screen time, how can adults fail to see that a child will NEVER have friends unless the child is allowed to be one of the druggie sheep? (One response might be that we don't call it deprivation when we only allow a kid one sugary dessert per WEEK, despite the hundreds of different junk foods that are available, so what's the difference?)

Not to mention that you can't just toss kids outside to play these days - NOT because of the grossly exaggerated threat of kidnappers or molesters, but because in all likelihood, the kids will simply find friends already outdoors...carrying video games, so they'll just hide somewhere and get fat, same as indoors. Yes, good kids should be able to stand up to temptation, but there's only so much they can be expected to handle without parental intervention.

(I remember some TIME Magazine parenting story from years back in which the parents joked about needing to find Amish families for their children to spend time with, since they despaired of keeping their kids away from materialism in general.)

Although, one is reminded of the '70s when society was decidedly anti-child. Movies like Rosemary's Baby and The Omen taught us to fear our children. Cultural mores were oriented toward adult good times - Studio 54, Playboy, "the Golden Age of Porn," etc. Religion was in decline.

Those were the days, my friend; I wish they'd never end(ed).

I have registered parents' distaste for others disciplining their children or explaining how they should be disciplined, and I am happy to let them stew in the pot with their coddled little dumplings.

And speaking of the need to keep kids occupied in good ways, in the recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on the lack of sexual behavior among young people, one reason listed was that parents are more desperate than ever for their kids to do well in school, so they overschedule them. Well, some do.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/

By Kate Julian.

Some excerpts (it's long, of course):

...So what thwarted teen romance? Adolescence has changed so much in the past 25 years that it’s hard to know where to start. As Jean Twenge wrote in The Atlantic last year, the percentage of teens who report going on dates has decreased alongside the percentage who report other activities associated with entering adulthood, like drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without one’s parents, and getting a driver’s license.

These shifts coincide with another major change: parents’ increased anxiety about their children’s educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what’s expected of teens. “It’s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion,” said a man who was a couple of years out of college, thinking back on his high-school years. He added: “There’s immense pressure” from parents and other authority figures “to focus on the self, at the expense of relationships”—pressure, quite a few 20-somethings told me, that extends right on through college.

Malcolm Harris strikes a similar note in his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials....

...I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a BAR,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life...

...And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.

As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward...

(end)

Every generation, parents have babysitters. In my parents generation it was older siblings, then it switched to tv 4 channels at adults except certain times. Then cable and tvs in every room, with channels aimed at kids. Kids don't get bored with tv. Parents told themselves, some is educational. Then enter internet, and computers, as babysitters. Latch keys, so self babysat. Better games, again parents told themselves it's educational. But these parents were raised by tv and came out ok, they expect some kind of sitter to exist. Then came daycare to babysit. Now it's screens everywhere, and utube is the babysitter.
Next generation will have never met real parents or seen them on tv, my guess is tailored meds will be babysitter, Ritalin plus.
Things can be educational, but only if you parent and make them educational.

A couple things not mentioned:

* Taking a device away is not as practical as it may sounds. School is all online now. The teachers post assignments on Google classroom and students are expected to hand in assignments online. Students photograph the assignments from their text books rather than lugging the books around. They photograph the teacher's notes on the board rather than taking notes. All homework is done using a device. Taking a device away essentially means no homework pr studying can get done.

* Likely half or more of these children are from separated or divorced homes. In a lot of these situations, parents compete to be liberal with their children. I've seen many teenagers simply move from one parent's home to the other's because of much less strict rules regarding devices. A court won't force a teenager to live with a parent if the teenager does not want to live there. So, there's a big incentive in the system to be a Disneyland parent.

She who will be President says -

https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1070735202031423488

I came late to this post of Amy's, but was instantly reminded of of of the saddest passages from the Colin Powell memoir... Wherein he describes the difficulty the United States Army had dealing with dope-smoking children of divorce in the 1970s, kids who'd never had a masculine authority figure in their lives.

Imagine a drill sergeant dealing with a "safe space" kid.

Being sixty, next year, is going to be great!

Not my problem... I'm old.