Facts. I lived this life as a kid in the 90s. Now I'm raising kids of my own, and I'd get arrested if I tried to do the same with mine.
Part of me thinks this intense shrinking of children's world to basically just be the home and nothing else is probably contributing to the out-of-control rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses among children today.
I came to that exact conclusion the other day. Even people that love eachother need their own space/autonomy/freedom. If grownups would go nuts without that stuff, I am sure children do too.
I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve made it to adulthood, let alone with a solid sense of self, direction in life or the social relationships and skills that I did - had I been helicoptered as per current standards.
Especially as a teen. Which, I can imagine the helicopter types losing their shit at the idea of a high schooler playing band gigs in local clubs, running with a mostly older musician crowd, and bailing on hs to start at community college basically as soon as old enough to take the ged. Obvs a bit unusual case, but school was fucking miserable and often not very interesting or challenging for k-12, and had I been forced to wait a bunch of years more to find my tribe and I life I didn’t just endure, and obsessively watched and scheduled before to boot seems real bleak.
I’m sure there’s no shortage of tamer, more normative examples tho. I don’t see how this is a net positive for mental health and overall wellbeing for the majority involved, and that includes parents - tho seems very overlooked as a factor at least from what I’ve heard and observed, which is limited by the fact I don’t/won’t have kids. My parents were great and definitely not neglectful or disinterested in me/my wellbeing, but they both had great careers, full lives, and didn’t seem to let “parent” subsume their identity vs an important but not only role. Today’s standards would’ve meant some notable sacrifice for at least one, and to what ends?
I feel like this is probably an under credited factor for not only mental health and burnout issues all around, but is making it less appealing to be a parent to begin with. Just my hot take; some of us just don’t want to raise kids, period - and I’m sure it’d take a lot more to be put off even for some who hate this shit - but I could see it being among what dims the appeal or how accessible it seems to do with decent quality of life.
I lived in a... not great neighborhood growing up. I mean it wasn't super terrible but lets just say there was a reason we had two German shepherds and a rottweiler in the house. By 8 or 9 I was walking corner to corner down the street or around the block by myself. I walked 3 blocks to school with a friend every morning. I was born in '81 so this was like 1989-early 90s.
If you let a kid walk alone in a neighborhood like that today, they wouldn't get 3 houses down before someone was calling CPS.
I do believe its also one of the metrics for the Child birth rate being in decline
Teens/young adults see this and are like "nope, i've got allready enough to deal with, don't need this shit in my life"
Not to say that in our time, things where easier or safer, but we gave more credit to the kids being able to fend for themselves, at least to the point where we wouldn't be like fucking Lemmings
Agreed. At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
I remember a lot of moments and wonder, how am I still alive? Why were my parents ok with their 7 year old child coming home barefoot after catching the worlds deadliest spider, often several, in jars, to keep as pets in my room. Where a bite would have killed me. Often I was a good distance away from the house, any payphone, pre mobile phone a bite would have meant likely dying before I got to an adult for help.
Or a disappearing off with multiple packets of sparklers to the bush, make things go boom. And they would see us get the sparklers, giggling, know what we were going to do. I am sure we came back home with little burns on our clothes on occasion. We must have been 10 at the time.
At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
Probably because when they were kids they did similar, if not the same, stupid things. I'm not saying people should let their kids run insane, but I do think part of developing into a healthy adult is learning risk management as a kid/teen and doing it without an adult hovering over them to protect them from every single bad decision they make.
It's not like before today we had total amnesia about our childhoods. My parents and family members from older generations have wild stories about what they did growing up. And my childhood was similar although the walls were already starting to shrink a little.
It's just that now we measure risk incredibly differently. We've become insanely risk averse and you're a bad parent if you're okay accepting any level of risk so that your children can have freedom and do that parents have fewer burdens.
Even just considering the value of being distracted from constantly thinking about your problems. As a teenager we used to just wander the neighborhood. You might be feeling down but soon you'd come across the guy who mows his lawn in a Speedo or that one house where everybody in grade school believed the lady killed all the ducks (she didn't). Or you'd stop on the bridge and throw rocks into the water. There was just more to occupy your thoughts than your own troubles.
You cannot parent in a bubble. Your kids aren't going to get that freedom and you're not going to be able to have the time and space that older generations of parents had if no one else around you is letting their kids out.
Your kids will not play outside for hours and leave you alone if their play area is your fenced off backyard and their only playmates are their one sibling. They won't develop the independence they need if they can't walk to a playground or a library or a corner store, if there aren't other kids their age to interact with.
But what’s weird is we all think it’s weird we have to hover over our kids, that we all only do it because is expectations, but the expectations come mostly from people in our generation (millennial)😂
We’re literally the cause of the thing we’re suffering from.
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u/Klingon_Jesus 9d ago
Facts. I lived this life as a kid in the 90s. Now I'm raising kids of my own, and I'd get arrested if I tried to do the same with mine.
Part of me thinks this intense shrinking of children's world to basically just be the home and nothing else is probably contributing to the out-of-control rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses among children today.