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rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
It's not just riskier play. It's independence as a whole. Look at how many people let their young children go to school or the park or a friend's house on their own. Ours appears to be the most independent in the classroom - and by a good margin. That shouldn't be the case.
I don't want to raise someone that needs their hand held through their day. The skills we impart in the single digit years will last a lifetime. They ought to be versatile.
You want kids to take risks while playing? OK then, make it so that the medical bills don't bankrupt whole families.
Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance of uncertainty and confidence.
Uh, i thought this was common sense?
Being a millenial, I grew up with overbearing parents. I distinctly remember in 90s and 00s of pearl clutching moral outrage on video games and cartoons. Fast forward twenty to thirty years later, boomers accuse millenials of snowflakes. Whenever I hear that, I asked them "who raised us?"
To be fair, boomers experienced the media sensation of serial killers and spiked crime rate in the 70s and 80s and are understandably wary of their own kids going out. Going on a tangent here, this is why the nostalgia on the 80s is ridiculous because people back then complain of crime (hello, how many times big cities like Detroit and New York depicted as dystopian in the 80's???)
Tell that to legislators who read this and say "lol no let's buy more testing" and district leaders add more time requirements for weekly staff meetings where principals reread a bulletin for two hours straight, rather than let a kid get anything but recycled air in a building
Kinda makes sense, right? You learn a lot by making mistakes.
Especially when the mistakes hurt. I was a kid in the '80s when this was practiced.
All the stuff I played on now has softfall padding under it, the giant slide has had a dirt bill built up under it so kids can't fall off the ladder; the high up stuff was removed
Me and my friends would climb to the high cubby house and feel very daring. I think it was 10m up. There were three of them with the lowest being maybe 5m up - parents couldn't reach it.
We were not daring enough to try the Tarzan swing - a circle of tiered seats rising in the arc of the rope that hung above the centre, so you could take the rope to any point on the tiers and swing from there. I think there was a knot in the bottom of the rope, but the older boys swung with their feet loose, hanging on Tarzan style. That was the only one they pulled out during the '80s. Everything else survived to the late '90s
Especially when the mistakes hurt. I was a kid in the '80s when this was practiced.
The more important lesson is that the pain stops. Some consequences aren't as bad as you imagine them to be.
I was really astonished when some parents took a knife away from their kid after he had cut themselves. He already learned the lesson! Let him reinforce it!
I made many mistakes as a parent. But I'm very proud of my kids standing up for themselves or others even against adult authority figures. And they are not afraid of telling me about the stupid stuff they did with their friends. The friends' parents never even suspect the stuff. So we must've done something right.
Between the school system, parents and social media, GenZ is the wussiest, lock stepping, conformist, risk-adverse generation of all time.
"Gosh! What if I get in trouble?"
"Heavens me! What if I'm criticized on social media?"
"What if I'm told no?!"
Fuck me, asked one of my best friends (22) to do a thing with me. "What if we get in trouble?" "Uh, worst possible case? Someone says 'Stop that.'" Like being told "no" might involve cops.
There was an eye-opening reddit post about the whole thing. 12-years on reddit, that post still sticks with me. Read it. It's all honest discussion. (Yes, it starts about social skills, read on, you'll see what I'm getting at.)
TWO college professors chimed in saying their students would sit in the dark before class because no one had the guts to turn the lights on. "Uh, we didn't want to stand out or get in trouble."
You weren't allowed to take risks. Y'all have had the world stolen from you in 1,000 ways, ways you'll never know about.
EDIT: Reading those comments again right now. I'm 54, but my kids are 10 and 12, I weep for the youth. You've been fucked and think it's just normal life.
I am Gen Z and I don't really know what you are talking about but generally most parents are pretty strict and most kids have helicopter parents. I wasn't allowed to play outside as a kid beyond the porch until I inevitably started sneaking out on my bike. Parents generally try to monitor everything and are scared of anything mildly independent. Walk to the store? Get yelled at. Get to school by yourself by walking or cycling? Get yelled at. Take the city bus home? Get yelled at. I generally just ignore them but its tiring when I am just trying to live a normal life. Granted I don't have it as bad as some. I know kids whose entire internet usage is heavily monitored and restricted as well as the usual physical restrictions.
This seems like a really dated take, overall.
You grew up in a time when you could make mistakes because your mistakes would be forgotten. That is no longer the case. Everything they do and say is recorded and distributed for later scrutinization.
It's not 2004, being criticized on social media can be career ending. They constantly watch beloved celebrities get raked over the coals overnight because they said or did something 20 years ago that society has since decided is wrong. Who knows what society will retroactively demonize in 20 years?
The job market is competitive, good luck getting a corporate data entry job without a Bachelor's, and college is competitive. The wrong mistake can snowball into life changing inconvenience. Or life ending, police absolutely do get called for minor things, and if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time that can be the end for you.
They're living in 21st century reality, not an 80s comedy. There are more consequences than a curmudgeonly principal shaking his fist. Everything is being watched, recorded, and scrutinized, by everyone, all the time. A few laughs are not worth the possible consequences. Why stand out? The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
Uh, all of that is addressed, in depth, in the post I linked. Hell, I pretty much said it in this post:
You weren't allowed to take risks.
The post you linked was primarily about the direct fallout of COVID. They very directly said what they were talking about was a basically overnight charge.
My point is about societal change. The kids aren't "wusses", they're reacting rationally to a changing world. You grew up with much lesser consequences for the risks you took. Those are no longer justifiable risks. Even flipping a lightswitch can trigger a devastating chain of consequence if you have a crazy power tripping teacher, so why bother? Phone screens are backlit anyway.
I take opposition to the way you're framing this. Are you a wuss because you didn't work 16 hours a day in a coalmine as a kid? Every generation thinks the next is too soft. The world changes, and the skills and techniques to successfully navigate it change.
I am a late 90s Gen Z and I am so glad that social media didn’t exist like it does now in the 00s. I am probably the last generation of kids that had the more traditional childhood where I was able to be left alone and do my own thing. My parents always encouraged me to be outside and hangout with friends. That’s what I did. My neighborhood friends and I were dicks though. We ding dong ditch houses and shit.
i'm not going to reddit, just copy it for us.
College professor here: we've all seen a major decline in social skills over the last 4+ years, rather sudden and precipitous, so clearly not just the "normal" changes we'd been seeing over the previous two decades. Loss of basic functionality is the most glaring, like students who simply cannot bring themselves to talk to a professor face-to-face, or speak in class, or make a phone call, or make a decision about their own education, etc. etc.
The most glaring last fall was an entire class of mine that would arrive early and sit in the dark...despite my explaining how to turn on the lights (i.e. the wall switch by the door). When pressed they collectively said they were "afraid they'd get in trouble" for turning on the lights (despite my telling them to do so) and were afraid to "do anything that would draw attention to them" like being the one person to turned on the lights. So next month with my next group of freshmen we're going to have a talk about basic life skills on day one, starting with turning on the classroom lights when they arrive.
Tbf, the kids aren't wrong here, some "authority" needs you to walk on eggshells like this or else they'll authoritize all over you like they've been waiting for some idiot to stick out their necks and do something innocuous they deem a crime just so they can lop your head off.
I got in trouble for laughing at work on wednesday, boss said he heard us across the warehouse, even though that's because we were all at our desks working while talking a little loud so as to hear each other from our desks over the din of the air compressor. Evidentially "no other departments are like that" except that they are, about 15min later a similar cacophony arose from shipping, but what do I know I'm just out on the floor more often than that manager who is always too busy sucking up to his boss in the head office.
So yeah I'm not doing a goddamn thing beyond my "duties." If my job wants people to do that they need to treat us like humans, nit get mad over every little thing. The problem isn't the kids walking on eggshells after the abuse they endure, the problem is those in power abuse their authority in ways that make the kids walk on eggshells. And it is much the same mechanisms at work here as an emotionally abusive partner, btw, and produces similar results.
You reminded me I wanted a PDF so I never lose it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q4wY8zPmSHK6Vx4JhfZ53E8t9JXDiO4b/view?usp=sharing
Is this a virus?
I had so many neat adventures growing up, in part because we just got out and explored the woods behind my parents house and the neighborhood. Kinda glad I got to have a Goonies / Stranger Things existence.
Basically they're saying to use those childhood invulnerability powers while you have bad knees
While you the the powers, before you have bad knees, yes.
I think I got a lot out of being a boy scout (not going to go into all of the very valid criticisms of the organization)
I spent a lot of time out in the woods with other kids, making mistakes, getting hurt, patching ourselves back up, making and executing plans, solving problems organizing, teaching and learning from those other kids, with relatively little adult oversight. The adult leaders were there if we needed them, they'd round us up and point us in the right direction when it was called for, but by and large they mostly just kind of told us what needed to be done and sent us on our way.
Part of the underlying philosophy of scouting is boys (or I guess kids now that they allow girls, which I'm fully in support of) teaching and leading other kids.
My circle of friends includes a lot of eagle scouts and guys who didn't quite make eagle but were still very much a part of the program, both from my own troop and from other troops. They are, overall, some of the most well-rounded and competent people I know, the ones who always have some idea what to do in a given situation and can figure out the parts they don't know on the fly.
You can probably quibble over whether we learned to be that way because we were in scouts, or if we gravitated towards scouts because we were already inclined to be that sort of person. I tend to think it's a mix of both, but leaning slightly more towards the former.
I won't say that scouting is necessary the program for everyone, or that all kids necessarily even need some kind of official structured program to develop that kind of resilience, but I do think all kids would probably benefit from some sort of safe environment where they're able to run a little wild, make their own decisions, make mistakes and figure out how to fix them, etc.
When I was a scout we put lighter fluid in a coffee can, lit it, and kicked it around the forest. But at least we all learned how to stomp out a fire. We learned a lot of good stuff too. One time I got genuinely lost with my friend. We figured it out together. Things would terrify parents but we learned a lot through our independence.
We 80's kids know the benefits of risky play well.
Yeah, was so great to get routinely picked up and thrown down the stairs as a kid. Really helped me become the cold, calloused, untrusting man I am today
