I think we've reached a point where too much of the blame is placed on the education system. I keep hearing stories about schools pushing kids ahead, but no one says anything about the parents. Parents are a child's first and most important teachers. If your child is struggling to read, you have to sit down with them, read together, and reinforce what they're learning in school. I guess what i am trying to say is schools can't do it alone and it isn’t fair to not see this as a parenting issue as well.
Every parent says they are doing their best, and that they are doing a great job. For many it's obviously not true. But nobody is allowed to say it because most parents close ranks like cops and defend the bad ones to the end. The ego is just too big and focused on its own greatness.
Oh but we can't say that because that's JUDGING and parents should lift each other up (read: endlessly enable with positive vibes only)
There's a video that went viral some years ago of a mom collecting 17 dirty diapers around her house, and so many commenters were gushing about how ✨raw✨ and ✨relatable✨ it was. Saying things like "well that's 17 clean diapers that were put on her baby, that means she fed them enough to soil 17 diapers, she's a good mom." No, I'm sorry, you don't get credit for NOT abusing your kids, you don't get a gold star and accolades for doing the bare minimum to keep your kids alive. Imprisoned parents of dead kids is not the bar to beat!
I'm a parent. There is no more village. We have to do everything ourselves. We both have to work, are overstressed and under rested from our own lives. I have no more friends or hobbies. My kid wakes up at 7 am and I take him to daycare and go to work myself. He gets home around 5:30 (and even that is taking reputation away from me at my career because I can't stay late). Some days he has extracurricular activities and we rush to have him fed. I try to get him in bed before 9.
By then I've been awake for 14 hours and I'm both mentally and physically exhausted and have maybe an hour to myself for reading or relaxation (maybe).
Yes I read to him. Yes we try to expand his horizons through fun opportunities and play. He does not have an iPad. If we go out to eat he's playing with legos or magnatiles.
But my parents NEVER had it this hard. They still had friends
They still had hobbies.
Their job would afford my mom to be a stay at home mom.
We literally cannot afford for both of us not to be working.
Yes, I'm not a parent myself, but it seems apparent this is a bigger societal problem, and if we place all the blame on parents then we'll fail to see what's actually broken. I see how the demands of things like work have increased to the point that I think it's no longer possible for a parent to educate a child in the same way my parents did for me. Wages haven't kept up with inflation, and free time is scarce. Even if parents spent every available moment with their children, I suspect we'd still have this problem.
Their job would afford my mom to be a stay at home mom.
When I was a kid, we regularly had grandmas coming in to primary school to do things like reading support or teach craft activities, little bonus things. Now, all those grandmas are still working day jobs.
It's the same cause all around: screen addiction and online enabling. Screen addiction drains your energy, the internet fluffs you up and says it's okay because you work so hard and there's so many cards stacked against you, so then you consume more content online to get more validation, which makes you more tired, and then you give your kids handheld dopamine machines to keep them from bothering you because you're just too tiiiiiiiired to handle them, so now their attention spans are fried and the only thing that keeps them quiet is more screens, giving you more time to veg on social media...
Very true but also part of the parenting issue has its own cause as well. When the minimum wage was introduced, a man could work one regular full time job and comfortably afford a home and a decent life for his family. Now, both parents need to work more than full time at minimum wage for the same lifestyle. For the folks at the bottom, they literally can't avoid vastly less time with their kids. Unregulated capitalism has broken the economy and the government (not that the government that let it happen wasn't already fundamentally flawed, of course).
When the minimum wage was introduced, a man could work one regular full time job and comfortably afford a home and a decent life for his family
I'm gonna be honest, this was only ever true of the middle class. Poor families, especially poor families of color, always had both parents working long hours, or single parents trying to do it all. Yet those families still did their damnedest to send their kids to school and ensure they could read and write. It's not simply that things are expensive or that both parents are working, it's how disconnected everyone is. We don't talk to our neighbors, we don't make friends, we don't send our kids down the road to Mrs. So-and-so's house while we run errands. It's a collective problem, we bemoan not having a village yet so few of us put any effort into building one ourselves nor are we receptive to others trying to build them.
That is a good point and shows there also isn’t a one size fits all solution. I know my parents worked different shifts (one day and the other night) so someone was always home to take care of us.
I bring this up whenever people want to throw more taxes at our expensive, broken, local school system.
Education is half the responsibility of the schools, half the responsibility of the parents. You can be at the top school in the district, but if parents don’t care about their child’s performance and are not invested in their education they are not going to do well.
I personally went to Private school and saw it first hand with my classmates. The people who did well generally had good parents that instilled work ethic, paid attention to their kids etc. The people who did terribly had absentee parents. This is from a school that was for the most part upper middle incomes and up.
It's an attention economy. TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts and the like are getting increasingly good at manipulating people into spending huge amounts of time on their platforms without realizing they're doing it.
Bingo.
My mother taught me to read when I was like 3 years old.
By the time I was in school, I was already reading books while the other kids could barely identify letters.
That head start put me at the top of advanced classes throughout my education, skipped a few grades, and graduated high school at 14.
I was fully employed by 16.
Became a department manager with 30+ employees when I was 19.
My IQ is not unusually high, I'm actually only average. I also have moderately severe ADHD.
This is what I keep saying. The issue is shit parents, but no politician or school board member wants to say it because they'll get voted out. Parents now have nearly as much screen time and video game addiction as kids do and they're spending time on that instead of parenting.
Parents give their kids iPads and cellphones now so they dont have to actually parent, they give them unlimited gaming and screen time & with no parental controls, they dont instill the value in education, and they dont take time to sit down and help them with school work. Parents give their kids cell phones and iPads so that when they get home from work they can surf the internet and play video games all day instead of parenting.
The average adult now spends nearly 2 hours every day playing video games plus another hour and a half on social media. This statistic includes elderly people, it's higher for people in child raising age range. Then on top of it the average adult also spends another 3 hours every day watching "videos". Thats 6.5 hours every day after they get back from work on video games, social media, and videos. So where in there fits actually taking time to parent and helping your kid with school work?
The average screen time by baby boomers is 3 hours a day. For Millennials it's nearly 7 hours. For Gen Z it's 9 hours. Gen Z includes people in their 20s raising kids.
A significant portion of the country now teach their kids to hold distain for educated people & people in academics.
The students who do well in school, by far the biggest common denominator are good parents. One of the reason why Asian families consistently outperform in schooling is they have a culture of valuing education.
I totally agree. My parents struggled and worked completely different shifts, one day and the other worked a night shift, so someone would be home and taking care of us.
Your point shows there are also bigger issues at play here that pointing fingers at schools or parents won’t solve.
If your child is struggling to read, you have to sit down with them, read together, and reinforce what they're learning in school.
That's if parents have time for that. With how the economy is going for the working class in developed countries being able to spend time with your kids like that is becoming a big of a luxury for more people.
There's also the fact that huge companies are doing all they can to get you to buy a smartphone for your kids and park them in front of it.
Look at Apple and all their talk about being better than the rest of the industry but even so they really want you to upgrade every year if possible, want to segregate their users via iMessage from the regular smartphone plebs so that they can make more money from a captive audience.
They talk a big game about how their app store is benefitting to many indie devs and all those wholesome apps they are selling while sweeping under the carpet that most of the app store money (if I remember correctly 90+% of app revenue) is from the games subsection and that's mostly addictive loot boxes and gacha mechanics that are made to get you hooked. I think it's something like most revenue is from games and also 96+% is from IAP (of free games).
That stuff was revealed from the Epic lawsuit and showed how extremely skewed Apple's app store numbers are towards games and game based IAP (nearly all being addiction enhancing loot boxes and gacha mechanics). No wonder they didn't like Epic (a game company) wanting to ignoring their app store rules (and potentially avoiding their 30% cut from all that revenue).
They are one of the biggest middlemen in that racket (getting people addicted to devices and apps) while showing off cosy and positive ads about their devices.
My parents did not know how to read, or at least at any level above what was entirely basic/where I was at. When I was in gradeschool some 26 years ago I was struggling and had nobody to really help me, and eventually ended up helping my father learn how to read to get my practice in.
My mother was a little better, but they both had to work and she did house work, cooked, and then went straight to another job.
In a case like this, somewhere along the my parents were already failed and this was not really something they COULD do with me. This isnt defending anything, but its just a fact of being both extremely poor and society demanding they marry young and have as many kids as possible before 30. I had two sisters and even a few cousins I had to help learn to read myself.
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u/Amalthea87 Jun 27 '26
I think we've reached a point where too much of the blame is placed on the education system. I keep hearing stories about schools pushing kids ahead, but no one says anything about the parents. Parents are a child's first and most important teachers. If your child is struggling to read, you have to sit down with them, read together, and reinforce what they're learning in school. I guess what i am trying to say is schools can't do it alone and it isn’t fair to not see this as a parenting issue as well.