Geez lay off the gamers… I can’t stand video games but i do think a lot of them get a bad rap… Though its funny to sit in roll call and see red eyes and yawning cause Madden or Call of Duty 54 just came out LOL
And breaking up a potential fight in front of the Best Buy for the new PS3 was funny as well…
I think this link shows what the hell the problem is… You can’t convince me that parents were attacking referees and other coaches in youth sports forty years ago…
News video - AJC
Well, Justin was pushing buttons and he deserved to be fussed at. Revenge has now been duly fussed at as well. Nobody got any official warnings! It’s all over and done with now. Y’all just behave, now, wouldja?? 
The trends towards people in their 20’s not getting full-time jobs began long before the current recession. This month’s Atlantic Monthly cover story says that the trend has been clearly downward since the 60’s. While the economy hasn’t exactly been fabulous in the past three years, overall my generation grew up in the richest and most prosperous society in world history. For most of the past 28 years, unemployment has been near historic lows. Anyone who wanted a job could get one, but the data show that many young adults, particularly men, simply chose not to. Since they weren’t even looking for jobs, they didn’t count as unemployed.
Besides which, the frequent refusal to get jobs is merely one sign of a general decline in maturity. The same thing is visible in surveys of employers being less satisfied with young employees, colleges showing lower graduation rates, more remedial classes being necessary, and so forth.
In truth, all of this thread has merely been going back and forth on symptoms. Concerning the main issue of whether adults are becoming more immature, there’s real evidence. Psychologist Dan Kiley already noted the phenomenon twenty years ago in his book The Peter Pan Symptom and other researchers have confirmed it.
Uh, that’s the point. No one enjoys doing laundry, or cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming floors, mowing lawns, and so forth. Adults do these things anyway, despite not liking them. Doing things one doesn’t like is part of being an adult.
That article doesn’t paint the picture you want it to. If anything it says that a variety of job slow downs since the 70s have pushed out non-college educated workers. The article states that if you have a college degree, you’ll likely do fine. And if you don’t, then you won’t. It furthermore points to Mark Zuckerberg as the only successful person to emerge from the college freshman class of 2002. Really? He’s the only one?
Furthermore, the idea that marriage is a sign of maturity in a world where marriage is more frequently seen as unnecessary is a poor predictor of maturity.
Oh, and Peter Pan Syndrome is a crock. The entire “theory” is based on the circular reasoning that immature people are immature because they’re immature. No definitions are given for immaturity other than things like not being married or not dressing like an adult and it’s never been recognized by a psychiatric body.
I love how a thread about childish adults had the following exchange:
Poster 1: Neener-neener-neener
Poster 2: Yeah? Nyah, nyah, nyah!
Mod 1: Poster 2, will you stop it!?!
Poster 2: What? He started it first! Why aren’t you picking on him?!?
Mod 2: :sigh: Poster 1, stop it.
Poster 2: See? Aren’t you meanies going to say “I’m sorry?”
The question of whether adults are “more childish” today than in years past is valid, but the question really has almost nothing to do with video games per se.
As others have mentioned, in another era, we’d all be independent or close to it by the time we were 14. Boys would either be working on the farm or serving an apprenticeship while learning a trade, and girls would be married.
Centuries ago, when a 13 year old Jewish boy stated “Today, I am a man” at his bar mitzvah, he meant it. Now? Nobody takes such talk literally, because everyone still thinks of the bar mitzvah boy as a kid.
That’s both good AND bad, of course. I’m GLAD I had a lot more money and free time than kids had in another time. On the other hand, we now excuse a lot more bad behavior than we used to. It’s ridiculous that people will try to claim that, say, a 23 year old miscreant is “just a kid.” He’s NOT just a kid- he’s an adult.
This just is not true.
I realize it’s commonplace to believe people were pretty much heaved out the door at 13-14 and prompty married, but it is false, or generally always has been. At least in western society, first marriages have typically always been in people’s 20s, not in the teens. “Romeo and Juliet” was an effective play in Shakespeare’s time in part because it was almost as unusual then for teenagers to get married as it is now; the impulsiveness of the young lovers is an important part of the story and theme and wouldn’t have worked if the audience had found nothing unusual about it.
People certainly WORKED young, but with due respect, they work now, too. Where are the vast, vast majority of 14-year olds going to be five days a week starting next week around here? In school. That’s nothing more than a modern version of an apprenticeship.
This idea that getting married in your mid-20s is weird will eventually disappear when people stop having (multiple) living relatives who married in their teens.
My grandmother was 16 when she got married back in the late 1930s and I’m sure she wasn’t the only one. But my parents and all my aunts and uncles didn’t get married until they were in their early 20s, at least. Lasy year, one of my cousins got married for the first time at 31. 16 is a much weirder age to get married than 31.
Maybe I’m missing something, but why is it immature to use a laundry service? It’d be immature to wear dirty clothes instead of doing laundry, or using rent money to pay for laundry service, but I don’t see what immature about using one. And I’m saying this as someone who does her own laundry.
I know I clean my apartment more often than my parents clean their house, but that’s because I clean my own apartment myself, and my parents don’t have to do any cleaning because they have a cleaning lady come in every week to clean their house. Does that make me more mature than my parents?
I think being an adult means taking care of adult responsibilities, such as bills, laundry, cleaning your living space, and on. But taking care of those responsibilities might be either by doing them yourself, paying someone else to do them, trading off with a family member to do them, or something else. As long as you are making sure the responsibilities are being taken care of, then I don’t see any immaturity.
The implication is that the parents are coddling their children by paying for a laundry service while they’re at school. There’s a pretty good argument to be made for the idea that college is a time when you should become self-sufficient and learn to at least run a household for yourself.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. I definitely agree that you should be able to do those things by the time you’re in college. But is it necessary that you do so? Certainly many students receive financial help from their parents. My parents told me that they wanted to pay enough of my expenses that I wouldn’t have to work a lot. They said that for the amount we were spending on college, it would be a waste to be harried and stressed and constantly working. I worked, but only around 10 hours a week. Not nearly enough to support myself (even without the huge tuition payments). People who work their way through school definitely have a different experience, and perhaps are stronger and more mature for it.
I did my own laundry in college, but didn’t make my own meals (dining hall), or find my own apartment (dorms). But I think the important thing is that I was able to do all those things because my parents taught me before I left home. Maybe kids who have a laundry service at school are being coddled, or maybe their parents are chipping in to pay for drudgery just like they chip in for tuition in many cases.
That’s the general idea that I was getting at. Fifty years ago, everyone involved with higher education understood that part of the reason why students went to college was to learn how to live independently. Regardless of whether students lived in dorms or off campus, their life involved a bit more frugality than the one they had when they lived with their parents. This was not considered an unfortunate side-effect of going to college, but a necessary part of the process of growing up. Things like doing the laundry, cleaning up after yourself, making your own food, managing your time, and balancing your priorities were part of the education your were getting at college. Of course it wasn’t the same for every single person, and I’m sure for each thing on that list you could find some college students who don’t do it and yet are perfectly mature. But the point I was making is that the overall trend is for colleges and universities to manage more and more of their students’ lives, while the student is expected to independently manage less and less. When I left Vanderbilt four years ago they had just completed a massive “Freshman Commons” where all the freshmen were required to live. The inside of some of the buildings looks more like a luxury hotel than a college dorm, and the amount of activity that’s run by the administration rather than by the students themselves is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
I can vaguely see somewhat where you are coming from here, but I think you are pretty misinformed about videogames. Using myself as an example:
-I used to work closing shift at a grocery store, we would usually get off work around 11pm and then of course, the only people who were up still were your co-workers. So we were very close and hung out together often after work. When I left that job, it’s SUPER hard for me to START going out at 11pm on a week night because I have to get up in the morning. What I CAN manage though, is playing Modern Warfare 2 over xbox with my co-workers for an hour at 11pm. We have headsets so we can talk to each other and hear each other, and we catch up on things. There is no way you couldn’t consider this “socializing with friends” just because we’re not face to face, and at 11pm this is as “social” as I can get with them.
-I play fighting games competitively and have travelled out of state to do so. You seem to think all gamers are living in their mom’s basement eating cheetos mindlessly shooting zombies in the face (though there is no doubt a lot of that). I probably know over 200 fighting game players in the northwest personally by first name and gamer handle, and whenever I travel to a new place I can instantly meet other people into the competitive hobby at a tournament and have common ground. When I was in the Philippines and my fiance was busy with work and I had nothing to do, I made lots of friends at the arcades because it’s rare to see an American in an arcade in Manila, and a lot of the locals were excited to play a foreigner.
Please don’t think I’m defensive about my gaming-I’m QUITE comfortable with it, and IMO I learned more social skills and gained more friends than I otherwise would have. To get people to practice with and get invited to gatherings requires networking and staying at least cordial even with people you don’t particularly like. But you have said gaming is “childish” a bunch of times now without explaining why, it reminds me of one time I was laughing and playing a card game with my friends in high school at lunch time, and one lone blonde came over and said we were nerds and had no life. I responded to her that I was having fun and spending time with my friends, what else is a life other than that? Don’t be that girl.
Tell me more about this. I have a high-school junior daughter, and I’ve been blithely assuming that college is more or less like it’s always been (I graduated in 1985.) What kinds of services do they provide? How are they coddled?
I’m not completely in the dark about this trend, though — I’ve watched friends of mine take their college-children’s cell calls all day long for years for advice on the most mundane of activities. And not long ago I read a story about parents shopping for a kids’ college supplies more or less without the kid’s input at all. Personally I couldn’t wait to get away from my parents so I could make all my own decisions without anyone telling me what to do! These sorts of things make me wonder why on earth today’s kids don’t feel the same.
People these days are more likely to stay at home longer, get into a career later, get married and have kids later; that was cited above but I think we all know it to be true as a general rule. This is not because people don’t want to do those things, but because they can’t. Where I live you’d need a $1600 deposit just to get a room in a shared house, and that’s a cheap room. And there are people with degrees and years of experience vying with 18-year-olds for shelf-stacking work. It’s really hard even for those who are self-motivated.
But there are some learning experiences that only come with living on your own and having bills in your own name, never having anyone reliable to take up the slack in house-cleaning, choosing where to live, and, of course, having kids, that you don’t get in other ways. So I guess those things do make young adults now more ‘childish’ than before. But it’s not like they choose for it to be that way.
Man, so I’m guessing my stuffed animal collection is right out. Seriously, dude, whenever someone starts talking like you, I want to grab them by the hand, drag them outside and lead them skipping through fields of wildflowers. We won’t come back until we’ve done at least 10 silly things. Life is just too short.
Nah. It’s because those things mostly suck.
I’d say almost everyone would like to move out of home, most people would like a career or at least a job which pays the bills, almost everyone would like a long-term relationship and a majority of people would either want kids or want the opportunity to have them. They don’t ‘suck.’
Things I’ve observed as a professor that are noticeably different from when I was a student in the mid-90s:
– More monitoring of students’ attendance and academic progress. E.g., at my campus we have a computerized “early alert system,” which we’re supposed to use to report students who are not attending class or turning in assignments to the office of academic support services.
– Mandatory “intro to college life” courses for freshmen. At many campuses, including mine, these involve a full semester of the sort of workshops we used to get during orientation week.
– More “dry” campuses (rare when I was in college except at religious schools) and a lot of completely smoke-free campuses (pretty much unthinkable fifteen years ago!)
– A big uptick in the number of students who receive academic accommodations for disabilities (often fairly nebulous ones – I have no problem with things like providing large-print handouts for visually impaired students, but I’ve known cases of students who have managed to swing things like unlimited extensions of all deadlines because they have an anxiety disorder, and I’m not at ALL convinced that this does the student any favors in the long run, even if the disability is legit).
– For a while, my campus tried to match freshmen with paid “mentors” from the community who were supposed to call them every week and check on how they were doing. (This was an amazingly ill-conceived idea, especially since they were hiring pretty much anyone who had a bachelor’s degree, regardless of whether they had any connection with the college or any expertise in advising students. It didn’t last long.)
But only because it was vital to the survival of the family, and they were right out there in the fields with their family.
Modern society has redefined work to include a lot of things that really are about anything but work. Basically, the great mass of us make our bread today thru careful adherence to the unwritten rules of office politics. You really want to entrust a kid with that?
But what you have to do to earn them today really does suck. Of course, whether you show high character or just a high level of suggestibility if you do what is required - that’s a whole 'nuther question.