Are we infantilizing young teenagers nowadays?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been diligently answering in this thread, despite not having any children of my own, and have found myself becoming quite invested in it. Having searched my feelings as to why, I’ve found that I object quite strongly to the idea that a group of 14 year olds are too young to be trusted with a task outside of the house late at night.

I wrote:

Leaving aside the question of this particular situation, are we overprotecting teenagers these days, or are my expectations unreasonable? As a 14 year old I was babysitting multiple small children by myself. (I’m 31, by the way.)

2

My two cents: I don’t know that we’re overprotecting them so much as not giving them enough responsibility. For example, I and most of my peers had a hefty chunk of chores to do every day when we were younger. Most of my peers had a job of some sort very early on (I have had at least part-time work since I was 11 or 12, when I first started babysitting) instead of relying on our parents for allowances or to supplement an allowance.

I know of few of my peers’ children who will consent to doing chores. I know of even fewer under age 18 who have jobs. To be fair, most of them haven’t had chores for most of their lives, and springing that on them after they’ve lived 12 years without that responsibility is bound to cause some pushback if not outright rebellion. Additionally, many parents are leery these days about having a teenager babysit or do other work that would have traditionally been done by a kid when I was young (I’m 32, by the way). Still, I think a lot of the “overprotecting” is more a matter of lack of responsibility than anything else.

3

Hmmm… I don’t know. My kids are 8 and 10 and are expected to do certain things around the house to help out. My 10 year old comes home to an empty house after school and unpacks her backpack, hangs up her coat, puts her boots/shoes away etc. She puts the dog out and knows she better be sitting at the table with the appearance of doing homework when her Mother gets home an hour later.

I think it’s probably a bit worse for kids nowadays since there’s this collective fear that the bogey man is waiting just 'round the next corner to molest your kids if they leave the house. Personally I don’t think things are different now than they were say 30 years ago. We now have 24 hour news channels that tell us about every single incident that happens though.

Most kids, that I’m aware of, have even more responsibilities these days, what with homework and chaperoned sporting events. I do not recall having to do anything other than an occasional special assignment now and again in elementary school in the 70s.

4

I think if anything it’s a function of the same “helicopter parent” phenomenon that kids of ALL ages are experiencing. Parents, even from when I was growing up, seem to have become WAY more invested in hundreds of potentially hazardous situations that seem laughable even to me growing up.

Not long ago, I read an article in the school paper about married housing being prevented from using clothes lines as they might pose a danger to children riding bicycles and skating in the neighborhood. How ridiculous is stuff like this?

So in essence, yes, i think children all the way up through their teen years are being babied so far as their supposed “safety” is concerned in a lot of situations.

5

I agree there seems to be a bit too much of a safety net, and suspect that Leaffan is right about the overproductive news media contributing to it.

Watched a documentary a while ago about some South American jungle tribe. Little children were allowed to play with sharp spears and knives (the knives were stone age things, not razors). The narrator commented how marvelous it was that the children didn’t cut themselves. But, I bet if the United States had only 3 or 4 children at any given time, as the tribe did, our children wouldn’t cut themselves, either. With 300,000,000 Americans to fret about, we can create the impression that shopping mall shooting sprees are a real threat.

6

My dad has pointed out repeatedly that the world isnt actually really getting any more dangerous to any particular person, just with the astronomically increasing population, the absolute number of people (and thus the number of stories needed for a news segment) hurt or killed by any particularly unlikely problem is increasing. That is, you still only have a .00001% chance to die by clotheslining yourself on a bike, but with 10000000 more people, that many more people manage to do it. So everybody else overreacts, thinking there’s a “growing threat” to people as a whole. It almost certainly contributes to the popularity of watching one’s child at every turn to make sure YOUR child isn’t the next statistic, but I’ll bet in the long run the average child who plays in the woods at age 8 and the child who plays in a 20 foot radius around the house at age 8 will turn out roughly equivalent.

7

Every young teenager I know has chores. Absent some real evidence, no, I do not buy the OP’s premise.

8

Yes, I think we are. You see it on this very board all the time, IMHO. However, the problem with arguments about parenting is that the spectrum of responsibility of your average teenager (or any kid, really) is HUGE. Some kids you don’t need to set any rules about what they can read, when they can go the bathroom, etc. Others need more structure. But, as a general trend, yeah, I think the OP is spot on.

9

FWIW I started babysitting a toddler and an infant every Friday night for three or four hours when I was twelve, and stayed with them for four years plus the occasional evening later, and now I’m 30-something. The two kids survived.

I have no idea whether the culture at large, or just certain segments of it, or not even that, are infantilizing teenagers. But the worry in that OP referred to in this OP does strike me as very odd.

10

My niece is 16. She’s been babysitting since she was about 10. She doesn’t do much in te way of chores, although she helps with the cooking. But she’s a straight-A student who babysits at least 3-4 nights a week. She has thousands in the bank that she’s earned. She’s dealt with her mother having 2 cancers an five surgeries this year. She’s not infantalized.

StG

11

I don’t think we’re infantilizing them. Heck, half the threads about teens are about how they are dressing like hookers now.

But I do think something has dramatically changed in terms of how parents are expected to protect their kids. I don’t think that other thread would have been posted if it were a situation of the teens being given responsibility if it weren’t also associated with the kind of risk that would have been splashed all over the news had something gone wrong. Because if something did happen to those girls, there would have been a lot of people saying “OMG, what were those girls doing out alone at that hour? What were their parents thinking?” I guess you could call it CYA parenting. But I don’t necessarily blame the parents, because I can relate to not wanting to have it splashed all over the news how I am the parent whose kid was out at 1 am and got abducted/hit by a drunk driver/ raped/ whatever. People make risk decisions looking at probability x severity, and I think the media has upped the severity and the perceived probability of a lot of risks.

12

It is perfectly possible to assign chores to a teenager, yet still coddle them to the point of making them utterly incapable of handling themselves properly in the real world.

13

So show me the evidence. I see no evidence being presented that teenagers are less capable “of handling themselves properly in the real world” than they were 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. What I’m seeing are anecdotes and the usual “kids today blah blah get off my lawn blah blah and their damned music” that were said of you when you were a teenager and of all teenagers since the dawn of civilization.

14

Hear hear.

15

I’m not sure I go along with “infantilizing,” but I do think there are some respects in which parents of older teens/young adults delay their kids’ assumption of adult responsibilities.

I have long decried society’s belief that kids should not be allowed to walk anywhere beyond the end of their block for fear they will get hit by a bus or snatched by a perv. Just recently my wife and I were talking about when our youngest daughter insisted that we let her walk home from kindergarten (maybe 4 blocks, no busy streets) alone. And it would piss us off when he had our kids walk to their friends’ houses, and then the other parent would drive our kid home because they thought walking was not safe/responsible.

But I see some weird dynamics taking place. The “dressing like hookers” meme is consistent with the fact that at a very young age kids are bombarded by “mature” influences. Style, music, movies, vidgames, internet… One of the most common issues many parents have is what type of movies to let their kids watch at what age. And - whether true or not - parents hear of ever-dropping ages for sex, drug use, smoking, drinking, etc.

But this is not the same as to say kids “mature” or take on responsibility earlier. It seems to me that kids’ activities are directed by their parents more than when I was young. One example is sports leagues and such other than pick-up games. With a league, parents do the scheduling, enforce rules, resolve disputes, etc. Kids learn a heck of a lot by having to do that kind of thing themselves.

Personally, we sensed that our kids were not in a great hurry to “grow up.” So we were willing to shield them from somesuch influences, to allow them to enjoy being kids and playing and imagining longer than some of their peers. We always assumed that their maturing would be an inevitability, and that by the time they reached their late teens they would naturally mature in response to societal influences.

But we’ve been surprised that that hasn’t been the case. I think that a lot of the societal influences that appear “too mature” for young kids, don’t really convey the responsibility and ethics I find desireable in adults. So we have found ourselves in the position of sorta seeking out situations and opportunities for the kids to gain experience. They all had to get jobs when they were 16. They had to establish their own bank accounts, etc. Of course they had chores, and their main job was to excel in school. And we didn’t just give them cellphones, complete free access to the car, etc.

We find ourselves vastly in the minority, however. Many kids attain college age with very little experience as to what things cost, and the implications of their actions. Little distinction between earned privileges and luxuries, as opposed to necessities. A datapoint - my wife teaches business law in a community college. One section deals with contracts. She has been unable to identify any area in which she can assume her students all have experience with contracts. The majority of them live at home, so they never paid rent or utilities. They all have cellphones/internet - paid for by mommy and daddy. They are carried on their mom and dad’s insurance.

One reason we encourage our kids to go a way to college, is that at a distance they need to become more independent - even if they start in the supportive dorm situation.

So, I think it is a little more complex than the OP suggests, but I think there is something to what she suggests.

As far as “proof” re: this generation, I don’t have it but would look for it in terms of percentage of high-schoolers who worked, age at which people held full-time jobs, established bank accounts, bought their own cars, moved out of the house, extent to which kids contributed to the cost of their education, etc.

16

[QUOTE=Napier]
Watched a documentary a while ago about some South American jungle tribe. Little children were allowed to play with sharp spears and knives (the knives were stone age things, not razors). QUOTE]
begin hijack/
Stone age knives are far sharper than anything the average person has in their house today. Many surgeons prefer obsidian scalpels because they do far less damage to tissue.
/end hijack

On topic:
I think the answer varies considerably with the environment. Here in a rural environment, kids are still expected to help out around the house, start working early, and are pretty responsible. My impression of suburban and urban kids is that most have no responsibilities and are more often either coddled or ignored.

17

One change that might account for differing intergenerational attitudes is smaller family size. One generation ago, people regularly had 2-3 kids; now, 0-2 is the norm. People are probably more protective of a single child than one of three.

18

Exactly.

I got my first job at 15 and my Grandma was telling my great Aunt about my job and she refused to believe that anyone would hire “kids these days” for a real job involving a real paycheck. She thought I was doing chores for my mother and I had somehow exaggerated that into a “real job.” And this was almost 15 years ago.

19

Sure. When you have 3 or 4 loosing one or two is never a problem. :wink:

20

The ever increasing number of kids who just live at home with mom and dad until 20 then 25 then 30 then 35 etc. is evidence of it to me.