Maybe the kids don’t drive because they don’t need to. My youngest, at 18, has good friends in MS, VA, UT, AZ, CA, Norway, and Ireland. They have been hanging out with this group online for more than 5 years. They are tight. They “hang out” several times a week. I did make them get their drivers license, but they don’t use it all that much.
This summer, 3 days after their 18th birthday, my kid flew to Norway and spent 5 weeks with their Norwegian friend and traveled all over the country (including Svalbard!). Last winter, they flew out to UT and spent a week skiing with their friends from UT and AZ in Snowbird and Alta. They did this on their dime.
When I was a kid my social life was dependent on my car. Now, not so much.
Are they depressed? Sure, both my kids are (my oldest is a junior in college). More than I was at that age? Probably not. They have a very clear idea of the world they are being brought up in. They are cynical, angry, depressed and disillusioned, but probably no more than my friends and I were in the 80’s. I was pissed off about climate change even then (but more pissed off about acid rain). I think the kids are alright.
I was a teen in the 1970s. “Tune in, turn on, drop out” was the young folks’ nihilist motto a decade prior to my generation. It was a thing in the 60s because of the hopelessness of the nuclear shadow hanging over the Cold War, and the evil Establishment, and the heedless destruction of the environment.
My teen angsty era was perpetual hot war in the Middle East, terrorism and communism running wild in Europe, energy prices exploding with the fear it’d all run out soon, etc. ANd a revolution somewhere in Latin America nearly every year. Nothing was stable, except the implacable hatred to Soviets had for everything the West stood for. A depressing time to be sure.
Every generation has its issues to deal with. For me it was 9/11, followed by the 2008 financial crisis and the number it did on my long-term earnings potential. But I’m sitting pretty for a Millennial. It’s not really a personal complaint but it is to say, we can get pretty myopic about how much our generation specifically is suffering, without thinking about how tough times have been in the past. But my argument stands - and so far I’m the only one who has brought cites to this thread. Kids aren’t coping as well as they used to.
I have noticed the news media has stopped beating up Millennials and blaming us for everything as they have turned their attention toward Gen Z and their apparently inferior work ethic.
What cracks me up is complaints about “quiet quitting,” which is doing the bare minimum to keep your job… which is what most people do and have always done. It’s not enough any more for people to just do their job. They’re supposed to be passionate about it and happy about it even if there’s very little incentive for that. Low wages, no health insurance, no pension, and you dare not have endless enthusiasm for your work? And good on Zoomers for calling out that shit.
This is a useful skill in general and one my wife taught me. I’m sure there’s some psychology term for it, but I have no idea what it might be. Either way, I’ve used it several times to great effect.
My wife works in child support and as you can probably imagine, gets a lot of people ranting, crying, etc. What she does is interrupt them, which is what I believe you’re doing here. When people are ranting, at your first available opportunity, ask them a question that’s barely relevant to what they’re talking about and they’re forced to stop and answer and it breaks them out of their thought pattern. From there, you can shift the conversation by them directing them back into a more fruitful line of discussion.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with all this. Like, I definitely don’t agree with the other extreme that you talked about and that you experienced, where the kid isn’t assigned any personhood and is basically just a prop for the adult – but kids need to understand that everyone else has feelings and is a person too.
Weirdly, it was my mom who taught this to me (weird because in very many things I think she’s dead wrong about parenting). I was trying to do the gentle-parenting thing and my kiddo was growing up a bit feeling like yelling at me whenever she felt like it. Now, she is on the spectrum and there were obviously other things going on as well (and as I may have said before, it wasn’t until this year that she really figured out a big chunk of the emotional maturity bit and we got the yelling licked, and she’s 13!) –
– but at that particular point in time she also felt like it was okay to yell at me because I’d never actually pointed out that, hey, you know what? yelling at someone else doesn’t feel good to that person and it’s not okay! And my mom came to visit and was like, “how is it okay for her to treat you like that?” And I sat down and thought, huh, you know, it’s not okay for me to treat anyone else like that, and it’s not okay for my kid to treat me like that either.
So parenting her has been interesting, as one part of it has been “look, I know you have trouble with emotionally regulating, let’s put in all the supports we can to help you through this” and part of it is “but you really can’t melt down in public, it’s not fair to the rest of the family which has to coexist in this space, at least go to your room to melt down,” and part of it is “but you shouldn’t feel like a bad person because you can’t control your meltdowns yet, you’re not a bad person! we just need some boundaries here.”
Sounds like you are doing a great job striking that balance. I think because my son is so young, it’s hard to gauge what about his behavior might carry on into the future. He’s weirdly rigid and anxious about certain things, like his daily routines and the way he plays, but he seems in many respects like a typical three year old, so I guess we’ll see.
Have you seen the roads we’ve built and the places that are hostile to anyone not in a motor vehicle?
The mall was demolished 10 years ago, suburbs don’t have public squares, and parks are now “athletic facilities” at the end of a long road on the edge of town with no sidewalks, and there’s nothing for a kid whose aged out of playgrounds to do.
Because there’s nothing to go to. The bike path is likely either an abandoned railroad through barren industrial land, or it’s passing through untold miles of suburban housing developments.
Wait until she finds out the local zoning code or HOA prohibits clotheslines for being unsightly (i.e. they make it look like poor people live there).
We blame kids for being unable to navigate a world we have systematically excluded them from.
Wow, that looks less built up than the environment I grew up with in the late 50s and 60s. We biked on streets like this – with no bike lanes – all day for miles. I guess there’s just more fear these days.
Aww I appreciate that! I feel day to day (and sometimes year to year, like when my mom said that, lol) that I’m getting everything wrong. But we just try the best we can.
I definitely feel like my kid has changed a lot between age 3 and now! Like, more than my NT kid, who has obviously changed but maybe because he’s more NT it sort of follows what I expect, so I don’t think of it as changing quite as much?
(Just a note: the hardest years for us were 4-6, where she was doing things like learning to write – which she really loved and really wanted to learn, but it set off allllll the rigidity issues!)
A few years back, prior to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion becoming the thing to talk about, articles about how to work with Millennials or with different generations in the office were quite popular in the HR world. About the only difference I ever noticed between Millennials and Generation X, when I was their age, is that some of them spend a little too much time on their devices. For the most part, I found Millennials to be fine employees and those articles perplexed me.
The same is true of quiet quitters. The majority of employees are fine. They do the work we ask them to do with compentance but they’re not exactly shining beacons. That’s fine, not everyone is a rock star. If they’re doing their job then the company isn’t in a position to complain. If you want them to rise above and beyond then you need to motivate them. And, no, a pizza party isn’t going to cut it.
shrug I grew up in miles of suburban neighborhoods. Still had fun messing around, figuring out which streets went where, the secret path to the local country club, checking out which neighbors had which flowers planted in the spring, checking out the site where they were constructing a new house and seeing it go up month after month. There being “nothing to go to” is a state of mind which I think is common these days but which didn’t exist in the same way when I was a kid.
And also: during the pandemic we’d do this, I’d go out biking with the kids and we’d check out different neighborhoods and parks. There are actually a lot more parks here than where I grew up.
So I know it’s possible and there are places to go. But the kids won’t do it by themselves. And I know that a big part of it is because I’m not willing to push them out of the house the way my parents did, even though the rational part of my brain knows that it would be good for them.
Yeah. @jjakucyk is mistaken. Suburbia is about like it always was, commercial districts are about like they always were. Except for the model year of the cars, that pic could have been any of several arteries in my 60,000 person middle-class 'burb in the mid 1960s.
I suppose if somebody grew up in a small town of 700 people which has now ballooned into a suburb of 50K people which has slowly expanded until it merged with the rest of the expanding once-small towns that are now the collective exurb of the ever-spreading metroblob of whichever big downtown is 50 miles away they could legitimately claim that they idyllic environment where their small town used to be has been rendered kid-unfriendly.
But that’s about growth, not about any fundamental change between eras.
That same small town experience is still available for your kids. Just move 30+ miles away from the edge of suburbia again. Just like your parents did for you.
One thing that has changed is the number of kids out playing. When the park is full of kids, there was usually a SAHM or three there. So any solo kids had some mild degree of chaperoning and the safety in numbers of being part of a herd. Nowadays if you send your kid to the park, he/she will be the only one. The rest of the parents are afraid to do that, so you and your kid become an outlier. No more herd for protection, even if the “protection” is much more psychological than actual.
Helicopter parenting and permissiveness to the extreme teach children from an early age that they are going to be insulated from frustration and failure. They expect to get what they want and, because of public education’s absurdly low expectations of their behavior, they expect to act how they want and get a pass. Suddenly, they aren’t kids anymore, and they have to deal with the real world and it’s real expectations.
I grew up in a rural area from about the age of nine onwards. Of course there was more space there. But prior to that I lived in a lot of places, and I found a way to play in all of them. We once lived in a duplex with a driveway that exited right onto the freeway, but we had a bit of a yard. I spent a lot of time pulling frogs out of the storm drain and collecting four-leaf-clovers, and filling up buckets with potato bugs. It was a long narrow drive so I would also pretend I was a motorcycle cop riding my bike up and down that drive, and when I was seven I got in BIG trouble when I missed the bus and tried to ride my bike to school by, um, driving my bike down the freeway in the middle of winter, and getting really lost, and getting into a car with a stranger who did end up helping me get to school. Okay, that last part is a bad example. When my Mom nearly had a nervous breakdown when I relayed this story to her (for which I can’t blame her at all), I said, “But Mom! I checked the air in my tires before I left!” Clearly I was taking every reasonable precaution.
I live in a manufactured home subdivision right now, a pretty nice one, and it’s good for kids. There are two playgrounds and a pool, and there are always kids outside playing unsupervised, but they are generally older. My kid still doesn’t know how not to run out into traffic, otherwise I’d probably at least give him a tricycle and let him ride around my little low-traffic street. I was determined not to be that parent who hovered around my kid all the time, but he’s just not developmentally ready.
Which I bet at the time were at or near the edge of town. Now the edge of town is another 10, 20, or more miles farther out. The scale of suburban development has exploded in the last half century, and traffic has increased precipitously aside from a blip in 2008-ish and during Covid. Schools especially have been moved out to the edge of town so kids can’t even get there without being driven or bussed.
I’m not so sure. I was in Southern California, Orange County to be specific. A place that exploded in population and land area continuously from the mid 1950s just before I was born until now.
By the time I was 5 or 6 and riding my bike around our tract, the rural “edge” was 80 miles north of me, or about 10-15 miles south of me.
My first elementary school was about 1/2 mile away, the second was more like 1 mile across a high speed 6-lane boulevard, while my middle school was 4.3 miles across two such boulevards. (I had a speedo / odo on my bike and that ginormous(!) number has stuck with me ever since then). The HS was closer ~1mi, but that was luck of where our house was; the HS’s catchment area was about 5 miles in diameter. I graduated HS in 1976, over 45 years ago.
Suburbia being big and busy is not new. It’s only kid-and-bike unfriendly for people who were taught to be as dependent as possible, not as independent as possible…
Are you trying to argue that “suburbia” hasn’t grown a bit? Look at Google maps and try to find the home you grew up in. Then imagine biking to town from one of the further suburbs.
