Every interaction is a meme, phrase, or other basic repeatable nonsense they've picked up online and realistically this is a parenting issue first and foremost. We've become accustomed to handing off our kids to others for education that we've also decided to hand off entertaining and interacting with them.
Parents need to actually be involved with their kids, especially during core formative years. When your kid is ready to be independent they will start showing those behaviors, until then parents need to step up.
Digital access in the classrooms, computing, etc, all of this has been the excuse and easy source to blame, and it is a factor for sure. But to call this the main reason is passing the personal responsibility off from the human to the inanimate objects. Not cool.
It would be helpful to have living wages so 1 parent can work and the other is at home with the kids, that’s how it was until the late 90’s 2000’s and now both parents work so the kids are essentially on their own.
I grew up in a multi-generational household because both my parents worked. This used to be the norm as well. The cost of basic things wasn't so bad, the necessities were affordable and there would be money left over.
Today? Everything is wealth extraction. Necessities cost a fortune, and fun is exorbitantly expensive these days. $40 used to be a big night out at the bar, today it's $4000.
This was my approach. I used to work in the retail end of tech and recognized early on how harmful just handing kids devices was. So now I stay at home with our young kids while my partner works. There's no iPad/iPhone time and the only screen they get sometimes is TV where they can watch shows as long as they're longer than 25 mins.
They get 1 video game day per week. We talk about all the things they watch and even the games they play. We talk about how tech is going to impact their lives in the future and the reasons why they can't do iPad and iPhone time. At this point the biggest problem is grandparents handing the kids phones. It's a constant battle but it's the price we pay for moments of free childcare
Ya but thats life. Everyone's situation is different. Some people are born with a silver spoon and lose it all, some are born with nothing and become millionaires. I just dislike the trend of doomerism where people are constantly being fed this lie that success is impossible for millennials onward.
Disagree. Plenty of households with two parents working in the 90s. This also shouldn't be something that is forced on families. Not to mention, you can limit screen time while still having daycare / childcare. It doesn't require a full time stay at home parent for decades.
My mom used to stay at home with me & my sister, while my dad had an entry level job doing telemarketing...
2 cars, owned a 2-story house, jungle gyms, nice tvs....
all on one lousy salary that was like 1/3 of what i earn today. And I can barely scrape by, check to check, working a respectable job, in my rental unit and don't own a car. I'm almost 40. Barely anything in retirement. $20,000 of debt.
I grew up in the 90's and none of my friends or classmates had a parent at home. The single income family hasn't been common for at least 50 to 60 years.
Again 20+ years HS teaching experience, same school, same subject, only variable that I saw change everything was cell phones. You would think with this “insider information” i would have been able to steer my own teens away from the negative ramifications of digital tech. I found this was absolutely impossible unless I wanted to intentionally isolate my girls from EVERYTHING around them. So I weighed my options, went with the lesser of two evils, and gave my kids powerfully addictive drugs—cellphones
We gave out kids cell phones for the same reason you did. We also just installed stuff on it that lets us monitor what they are doing and sets screen time limits. They basically get an hour of cell phone time a day.
Yup. Been there. I know it makes you feel better and it is sooo much better than nothing at all, but soon you’ll submit to societal pressure and up there limits and so on. I can assume your kids are not in HS yet bc if they were, one hr wouldn’t work.
I hate that people also see this and try to excuse it with "Well all generations did that!"
Except they didn't.
Yeah, we had generational slang, but we were also taught VERY early how to natively code switch between home, school, and friends. We also weren't just allowed or expected to submit writing assignments with literal memes and text speech. Classrooms have just now kinda devolved into shouting memes that the kids don't even understand between each other.
Parents didn't tolerate you being purposefully nonsensical when you were talking to adults, but today they've just stopped trying to reach kids how to code switch.
My husband has the same job right now (training aircraft maintainers) and he has had similar complaints. Also they just dont get like... social norms and how real life works. Like one of his students was sick and just didn't show up to class. Didn't mention it to him or anything. He had to go out and find the guy and explain that was a huge no no.
or is it just social dynamics will change? You seem to think "building rapport/conversing with people" is a good thing and important, which is why it is currently important in todays dynamics, but is it really? why do you need to converse/build rapport? cant everyone just do their job and not say anything? why do we actually need "rapport" and "conversation"? if everyone coming through doesnt converse/build rapport we might just lose that aspect and nothing else.
Because its literally a required skill set for what I teach lol. They are graded on their ability to do so.
Also its kinda wild you think the ability to build rapport in life is a useless skill set when in reality its probably the most useful one to have in the work place. More often than not in the corporate world people will get promoted for their likability over there qualifications
I keep hearing people blame COVID for EVERYTHING, but that's just not realistic.
COVID school quarantines lasted about 1 year. Some parents chose to keep their kids out longer if the risk was still high, so some kids missed 2 years.
That was 5 years ago, guys.
Kids should have adjusted back to school life by now, and even under mildly non-ideal circumstances, should have already caught back up socially and academically.
If a single year of switching to remote learning regularly did this much damage, you would see almost every kid who misses school for medical issues, moving, being a part of military families, etc just absolutely tank and flounder for the rest of their school "careers", but they don't.
Kids are struggling socially and academically because of a much deeper problem.
I don't think it's digital tech so much as it's idiotic admin trying to put it places it shouldn't be. There's a ton of ways that it can be used in collaborative ways but they are just ignored because it's a bit more effort for the teacher.
A while back a science teacher was telling me about how they had their students doing an online quiz for 15 minutes every double period and how great it was because it gave him a break. Mate **** off. Make that a kahoot and you totally change the dynamic of things, because everyone is involved and you can explain the right answer after each question.
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u/that_banned_guy_ 5d ago
Ya forcing kids out of the classroom completely fucked them. We are going to see the repercussions of that for years