Something I don’t think has yet been mentioned here is that nowadays parents are much less likely to be getting out of the house and going places without a car, either. Especially in the US (and that’s an article from 2007, since when AFAICT the problem’s only got worse).
Kids tend to follow behavior patterns that their adults model for them. If their parents never go anywhere except in a car, and never take the kids anywhere except in a car, then why do we assume that kids will instinctively take the initiative to go places by themselves without a car?
Yes, communities have become more sprawly and car-dependent, while work schedules and commuting distances have become more demanding. In consequence, both adults and kids default to the automobile for transportation, much more than they used to a few decades ago.
I don’t think we have to posit parents being “helicoptery” or “teaching” kids “to be as dependent as possible” to explain kids becoming less autonomous in their getting out and around. The built environment continues to become significantly more car-dependent (while the schedule demands of paid work within a household have become more time-intensive), and both adults and kids reflect that in their car-dependent behavior.
And the Internet environment means they don’t even necessarily have to drive. That’s the big difference with kids these days not getting out–they don’t need to to get their social interactions. The same is true for their parents.
I personally think it makes more sense to look at the changing environment rather than to assume that perennial claim of too strict/not strict enough parenting is to blame. Or another other usual generational conflicts. Those are just a constant cycle. And, besides, they tend to be self-correcting as the next generation grows up and tries to correct the mistakes of their parents.
I think it makes more sense to look at what is different that might create problems. But you also need to check your own biases, since it’s easy to assume “different” means bad. I mean, what if less driving and more online interaction is better? What if the problem is not that, but having enough money to get out of your parents’ home?
Or what if the psychological problems in the kids are why the parents become more involved, perhaps overly so?
My old burb had then and has now libraries, parks, all levels of schools, groceries, car dealers, restaurants, random retail of all sorts. It more or less has a “shopping district” within its roughly 4mi x 4mi (6km x 6km) footprint. So does every other suburban town of the over 200 distinct polities that make up the whole metroblob housing well over 20M people spread across almost 2,300 square miles (almost 6000 square km) of solid contiguous houses, businesses, and people.
The fact that the nearest 20+ story office tower was in a “downtown” 50 miles away when the house was built in 1958 and that skyscraper is still 50 miles away today has ZERO to do with how people in general and kids in specific live their lives.
What has happened in the 60 years since then is more “mini-downtowns” with clusters of tall office buildings have sprung up. The nearest cluster happens to be about 10 miles from my old house. But again this is irrelevant to a kid now, since there’s nothing there for kids.
No, it’s not like the world you inhabit. But that does not make it inherently evil; just very different. Your perennial judgmental provincialism is … provincial.
As expensive as gas is, and as even more expensive as it will inevitably get, I’m amazed that this is true. Nevertheless, I see what’s on the roads, and the evidence supports the assertion. If excess is a hallmark of American life, what passes for our “personal transportation” is certainly evidence of it.
There is a house about 300 feet from where I live with what appears to be the home of a mom and her two twenty-something sons. They each have a large sized black 4X4 Ram 3500 pickup truck in their driveway. They are brilliantly waxed at all times, and I have never even once seen a single thing in either truck bed. They are show pieces and obviously meant to be personal transportation and not business related vehicles.
I’m not judgemental . I’m just pointing out that the US, car-centric, approach to designing public space doesn’t produce very desirable outcomes for kids or rather for people in general.
And that it seems likely that the subject of this thread (kid’s happiness) is dependent on an environment where they have some freedom to move around safely on their own.
This. Show them that people who work hard and are good at their job get promoted, and they’ll give effort. Show them that Corporate capped everyone’s maximum raise at 2% and that there are no open positions higher than entry level, and they won’t. But can you really blame them?
I was able as a child to move around safely in that environment. Plenty of age-appropriate stuff for small kids to see and do within walking distance. Even more age-appropriate stuff for bigger kids to see and do once they could bicycle. And none of that required exposure to ginormous volumes of roaring traffic. And that is just as true in that old suburb today as it was when I was kid there in the 1960s. It’s similarly true in the later-construction suburbs I’ve lived in all over this country.
What is lacking now is the willingness for parents to let their precious sprogs out of their sight. For reasons that are mostly fear-based and mostly false. But which do have a self-perpetuating nature; once most parents refuse to lose sight of their kids, it becomes more difficult for the hold-outs to do the same for theirs. And, once said sprogs are parents themselves, they tend to raise their kids in the same paranoid style in which they were raised.
To be sure, in that environment moving beyond bicycle range requires a car. Back then most 16yos were itching to spread their wings by traveling farther than their bike can take them. So they promptly obtained a drivers license and a rattrap car as soon as family finances permitted. And folks freely shared cars and rides because not everybody could afford one.
Conversely, the kids now who’ve had their parents inadvertantly clip their wings, or leave the kids caged up until their wings have atrophied to uselessness, have no desire to move beyond walk/bike range.
In an ideal world, maybe different decisions about provision of public transportation and development density would have produced a different outcome. But to assert that kids can’t exist happily and freely in a suburban environment is simply inaccurate. Certainly some don’t. But I lay that at the feet of crappy parenting, not crappy environment. Those same parents are certainly terrified of letting their sprog take a public bus or train.
Rose-colored glasses much? The kids who weren’t able to move around safely in that environment aren’t here anymore to speak up for themselves. How often do you walk or bike to a store today? Do you know what it’s really like or are you just observing it from behind the steering wheel thinking it doesn’t look much different? I bike around the city and suburbs plenty, and it’s not something that’s necessarily enjoyable nor entirely safe. In fact the suburban areas are the worst places to bike because while the city has many interconnected streets and alternate routes to choose from, and rural areas have little traffic, the suburbs have a hierarchical street network that flings you from the dead-worm cul-de-sac subdivision to collectors and arterials, and those are usually high-speed traffic-choked roads with no sidewalks or shoulders.
Newer suburbs (like post-2000) tend to have some multi-use paths but they’re poorly interconnected just as the subdivisions themselves are. This is done deliberately to reduce through traffic and any interface with “those people”, which can be as absurd as walling off those whose homes cost $350K instead of $450K. There’s a famous (though not the most absurd example) of two homes that share a backyard fence and requires a seven-mile journey to legally visit one another. And on that whole trips there’s just a Walgreen’s, a gas station, and a couple of fast food restaurants. And this is a place that even has sidewalks and bike lanes, but it’s just an appendage to the street network and doesn’t provide any improved connectivity. No kid is going to bother with that.
LSLGuy, I think you’re still glossing over some significant issues here, and just filling in the lacunae with sweeping assumptions.
I really don’t know, and don’t see any evidence that you really know, to what extent this claim is factually true.
ISTM very plausible that the main driver of increasing car-dependency (and consequently less childhood outdoor autonomy) for parents and kids alike may be just habit and the path of least resistance, rather than “paranoid” fear and overprotectiveness per se.
Another categorical assertion about a phenomenon that might well have other explanations. For one thing, have you noticed how much more expensive it is to buy and maintain an old rattletrap (which I think is what you meant by “rattrap”) automobile these days than it was 45 years ago?
Not to mention the fact that kids nowadays have a lot more options for virtual socializing than back in our day when talking to a friend elsewhere meant trying to chat on the household landline, usually in a high-traffic area of the house and surrounded by eavesdropping siblings and annoyed parents telling you to stop tying up the line.
While I personally as a non-car-owner am ardently in favor of kids and everybody else using public transit more, have you paid any attention to how public transit options in the US have deteriorated over the past 50 years? It’s easy just to sneer at “crappy” parents for being too clueless or “terrified” to “let” their children use transit, but the fact is that communities have been doing a shitty job of keeping transit usable.
Again, everybody’s just been going down the same path of least resistance in the form of defaulting to car use for all their transport needs. Which means that the needs of car users get prioritized at all levels, above the needs of users of other transit modes. Which means that people are even more likely to rely on car use. Which means that car users’ needs get even higher priority, and round and round the vicious circle we go.
That’s not just contemptible parental “paranoia” and kids’ “atrophied wings”. That’s a systemic, structural problem in US society.
All these things contribute. Along with the loss of ‘third places’ where people gather to do something or just socialize – church activities, bowling alleys, stoops and porches on streets not dominated by cars, parks where people play checkers and pick-up ball games, bandstands, promenades – the list is long, and generally they are gone.
Parents are nervous because they don’t know their neighbors, and they don’t know their neighbors because they are all working, by and large, and the only time you see them is when their car is backing out of or driving into their garage.
The more we exalt ‘freedom’ and ‘choices’ the fewer we have, and the less we seem to even notice it.
The world’s always been on fire. When I was a kid there was acid rain and terror of nuclear war. Crime was much worse. General pollution was worse. It sucked.
I think it’s an open question as to whether kids aren’t dealing with this stuff as well.
I can’t speak for the current generation of kids, but from middle school in 2008, Mom dropped me off at the bus stop like twice before saying “screw that”. Also the bus route timing was wildly inconsistent depending on how many kids decided to ride that day, meaning it was very rare to see a parent picking up kids. We had crossing guards for the highway, and I lived ~2 miles from my high school meaning when I missed the bus, I would run from my neighborhood to downtown then take a right to get to the school.
My record time for that run was 15 minutes some odd seconds, with my thirty-pound backpack. It was actually faster to run than to take the bus, but also, you know, hot humid Florida ugh.
Neither of my siblings did the run to school. Part of the reason was me driving them.
Going back to the OP, permissive and enabling parenting are on the other extreme of authoritartion parenting, which was another major cause mental health disorders.
I wonder how the pressure to conform to societal expectations compare to how it was when I was growing up and how that affects reporting of mental illnesses. I know when I was growing up a zillion years ago, all of that was swept under the rug.
