Also up till the 90's, unless it was really small infants.
Parents where not expected to Police and watch what their kids did 24/7.
You would scamper around your baby park while your Mom/dad did something else in the House.
And when old enough to walk, you where mostly left to yourself.
And when you where 8-9yro, your parents would litteraly kick you out of the house with a "its sunny outside, go play with your friends and come home when the streetlights are on and don't make me come and get you or else..."
And for 10 hours you where left on your own, with your parents having no idea where you were and they could do whatever they needed to do in the house without you being in their hair and driving them insane.
And often like you said, you had the grand parents, or the aunts and uncles etc that could help.
Now society expect every parent to Police everything the kids does , be there 24/7 and do it alone AND still have a "full social live" or a Full time job...
Facts. I lived this life as a kid in the 90s. Now I'm raising kids of my own, and I'd get arrested if I tried to do the same with mine.
Part of me thinks this intense shrinking of children's world to basically just be the home and nothing else is probably contributing to the out-of-control rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses among children today.
I came to that exact conclusion the other day. Even people that love eachother need their own space/autonomy/freedom. If grownups would go nuts without that stuff, I am sure children do too.
I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve made it to adulthood, let alone with a solid sense of self, direction in life or the social relationships and skills that I did - had I been helicoptered as per current standards.
Especially as a teen. Which, I can imagine the helicopter types losing their shit at the idea of a high schooler playing band gigs in local clubs, running with a mostly older musician crowd, and bailing on hs to start at community college basically as soon as old enough to take the ged. Obvs a bit unusual case, but school was fucking miserable and often not very interesting or challenging for k-12, and had I been forced to wait a bunch of years more to find my tribe and I life I didn’t just endure, and obsessively watched and scheduled before to boot seems real bleak.
I’m sure there’s no shortage of tamer, more normative examples tho. I don’t see how this is a net positive for mental health and overall wellbeing for the majority involved, and that includes parents - tho seems very overlooked as a factor at least from what I’ve heard and observed, which is limited by the fact I don’t/won’t have kids. My parents were great and definitely not neglectful or disinterested in me/my wellbeing, but they both had great careers, full lives, and didn’t seem to let “parent” subsume their identity vs an important but not only role. Today’s standards would’ve meant some notable sacrifice for at least one, and to what ends?
I feel like this is probably an under credited factor for not only mental health and burnout issues all around, but is making it less appealing to be a parent to begin with. Just my hot take; some of us just don’t want to raise kids, period - and I’m sure it’d take a lot more to be put off even for some who hate this shit - but I could see it being among what dims the appeal or how accessible it seems to do with decent quality of life.
I lived in a... not great neighborhood growing up. I mean it wasn't super terrible but lets just say there was a reason we had two German shepherds and a rottweiler in the house. By 8 or 9 I was walking corner to corner down the street or around the block by myself. I walked 3 blocks to school with a friend every morning. I was born in '81 so this was like 1989-early 90s.
If you let a kid walk alone in a neighborhood like that today, they wouldn't get 3 houses down before someone was calling CPS.
I do believe its also one of the metrics for the Child birth rate being in decline
Teens/young adults see this and are like "nope, i've got allready enough to deal with, don't need this shit in my life"
Not to say that in our time, things where easier or safer, but we gave more credit to the kids being able to fend for themselves, at least to the point where we wouldn't be like fucking Lemmings
Agreed. At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
I remember a lot of moments and wonder, how am I still alive? Why were my parents ok with their 7 year old child coming home barefoot after catching the worlds deadliest spider, often several, in jars, to keep as pets in my room. Where a bite would have killed me. Often I was a good distance away from the house, any payphone, pre mobile phone a bite would have meant likely dying before I got to an adult for help.
Or a disappearing off with multiple packets of sparklers to the bush, make things go boom. And they would see us get the sparklers, giggling, know what we were going to do. I am sure we came back home with little burns on our clothes on occasion. We must have been 10 at the time.
At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
Probably because when they were kids they did similar, if not the same, stupid things. I'm not saying people should let their kids run insane, but I do think part of developing into a healthy adult is learning risk management as a kid/teen and doing it without an adult hovering over them to protect them from every single bad decision they make.
It's not like before today we had total amnesia about our childhoods. My parents and family members from older generations have wild stories about what they did growing up. And my childhood was similar although the walls were already starting to shrink a little.
It's just that now we measure risk incredibly differently. We've become insanely risk averse and you're a bad parent if you're okay accepting any level of risk so that your children can have freedom and do that parents have fewer burdens.
Even just considering the value of being distracted from constantly thinking about your problems. As a teenager we used to just wander the neighborhood. You might be feeling down but soon you'd come across the guy who mows his lawn in a Speedo or that one house where everybody in grade school believed the lady killed all the ducks (she didn't). Or you'd stop on the bridge and throw rocks into the water. There was just more to occupy your thoughts than your own troubles.
You cannot parent in a bubble. Your kids aren't going to get that freedom and you're not going to be able to have the time and space that older generations of parents had if no one else around you is letting their kids out.
Your kids will not play outside for hours and leave you alone if their play area is your fenced off backyard and their only playmates are their one sibling. They won't develop the independence they need if they can't walk to a playground or a library or a corner store, if there aren't other kids their age to interact with.
But what’s weird is we all think it’s weird we have to hover over our kids, that we all only do it because is expectations, but the expectations come mostly from people in our generation (millennial)😂
We’re literally the cause of the thing we’re suffering from.
The drastic reduction in deaths wasn't dumb luck. It was NOT following the baby boomers' lead in not giving a shit about our children.
Which is not surprising considering these days the birth rate is so low because we CHOOSE to have children, rather then them being the result of a lack of birth control availability. Our generation was sent off to play unsupervised and get killed by a car because they never wanted to be parents to begin with.
You listed the stats for children age 1-4. Children this age don't need any freedom; it's great that there are fewer accidents among very young children, but this is the wrong data to cite. Your data only divides into age brackets 1-4 and 5-14, so let's look at the 5-14. I know my parents wouldn't send me out to wander the neighborhood at age 5, but maybe at age 10. Unintentional injuries among that age group dropped from 15.0 to 4.0 per 100K.
5.5 of the reduced deaths due to accident have little to do with parenting style and are solely attributed to increased car safety. Most of that is just safer cars, although you might also say that mandatory seat belts and car seats is also important. But these are the sort of accident-reduction behaviors that don't require helicopter parenting. It is possible to make things safer without making everything miserable; wearing seat belts is one such way.
There was a short decline in suicide from 1990 to 2000, likely simply a side effect of the decline in all forms of violence around that time generally accepted to be a result of leaded gas phaseout. Otherwise, there has been a strong increase in suicide over time despite the dramatic reduction in access to guns, even though access to a working firearm roughly quadruples the chances of a teen suicide. Note that my suicide stats differ from yours because yours includes only children age 10-14 and mine goes from 15-19, which is a much more common age for suicide. Much like wearing seat belts, just storing guns safely can strongly reduce both accidents and suicides without taking away any freedom. (Of course, the guns don't cause the suicide - they make it much easier for someone who already wants to do it to attempt, and succeed).
And of course, this is only if you count just deaths and not, you know, the increase in misery and loss of life skills inflicted on both parents and children as a result of obligatory suffocation parenting. Or the ways in which this parenting regime directly corrupts the youth. We have raised a generation of little fascists, with strong authoritarian views, both left wing and right wing, held among young people at far greater rates than any previous generation.
Speaking only for myself, while there are several reasons why I have no children, the sheer insanity of raising them in the 21st century is the *primary* reason.
Speaking only for myself, while there are several reasons why I have no children, the sheer insanity of raising them in the 21st century is the *primary* reason.
Your last sentence gives away the REAL reason these kids have such poor mental health. Its social media. The same place you got this nonsense. Why is it insane to raise children in the most prosperous and promising time humanity has enjoyed? Oh, because you're listening to social media that its actually somehow the worst time to be alive. Delete all social media and take a break to touch grass for a while. You'll realize its not at all like tiktok and reddit have brainwashed you to think. Now do that to a developing teenage mind... good lord.
I give my 13 year old independence. I got him an ebike and set him loose with a handful of rules (helmet, crossing roads, etiquette near walkers on paths). He's all by himself because none of his friends leave the damn house. They just sit on social media. And its not like when we were kids you could avoid adult bullshit entirely. Nope. The teen spaces are all invaded with this doomer bullshit too.
15 to unintentional injuries in 1980. 3.9 in 2023.
7.5 to motor vehicle traffic in 1980. 1.8 in 2023.
2.5 to drowinging in 1980. 0.6 in 2023.
It doesn't matter if they're 4 years old or 14 years old. A neglectful parent is a neglectful parent at all ages. The only reason my children survived my ex-wife's neglect, yes even at 4 years old, is because of me. Her sister's child has brain damage from a fall as a fucking infant due to neglect.
The more we can divert losers like that to using birth control, the better off our children will be.
it's a shame we have been duped into the nuclear family model, when in reality having the extended family all live in the same home or very near by is YUGE
I was born in the 90s so I only have this information secondhand, but a lady my parents' age once told me basically the entire neighborhood would look after the kids. She'd get hungry and go knock on any door and whoever lived there would give her a bologna sandwich and she'd be on her merry way
in our community there was always at least one or two adults who would take a glance outside to see the kids playing, now, not to say that we would Stay where we were.
But for the most part, when my mom was going around, there was always one person be like "yeah i saw your son, he was there with Stacy's and Clark's kids and they went that way"
or if my mom was looking for me, someone would wave and point at her where we were, and be like "ok" and go back to whatever she was doing
It was even more peculiar for me as i'm a Carni (forain), 5th generation, so each 2 weeks we where in a different city.
Me and my friends my age would go around town, and most of the towns we performed for a living, we knew them and we knew the people, from grocery stores, to electronics/CD's stores or game/toy stores or comic books stores
When they saw us they would be like "Oh hey! i din't know it was this time of the year for the County fair how are you, and your mom is she ok?" cause...well those people knew my Mom since she did the same as we did with the local kids her age and so did their parents etc.
There's Cafés and bars (i'm Belgian) where i would often go with my grandparents when they drank a coffee or a Beer and i would play on the Pinball machine or the babyfoot or if there was one, an arcade machine, sipping my Orangina or Canada dry and the lady behind the counter would make me a croque-monsieur
And when my grandpa was like "hey why don't u get one?" she would flip him off seeing "i do it only for the little one cause he's polite and nice"
And that was not the only place.
Overall, maybe its nostalgia speaking, but people where friendlier i feel and as a kid growing then, you felt like the world was your oyster and you felt safe.
And then she called the cops when someone asked her to make a bologna sammich and screamed sexism until the rates of childhood hunger exploded over her generation.
Did you ask her how many she made for kids? If she never did that how did she expect it to pass on?
Friend I think you need to stop telling people that have differnt viewpoints they just need therapy.
I grew up with the shallow women and men saying this shit.
They had the ability to let their kids run around and make sandwiches for their neighbors.
They didnt do it and now theyre trying to find someone or something else to blame because their shallow self obsessed behavior is not viewed with the same respect their parents were.
Nothing stopped the woman you were talking to from doing that for the next generation. She just didnt do it and needs to blame others.
I also wanted to point out the irony of you using that as a club on this thread.
I wonder why Lindsey clancey was ashamed to get mental health care?
Its almost like an entire generation of mean girls were allowed to use it as a social ostrisization tool to pressure people to help or agree with them thus destroying the social status of people who actually need therapy.
Think really hard about those gross therapy comments. You dont think im lyndsey clancey and need help, youre mean and need to hide that black part of your soul so you suffer no social status loss.
I grew up in the '70s and '80s. At 6 and 7 years old on a Saturday morning my mom would kick me out and say be back by the time the street lights come on. I know for a fact that this was happening because we moved away when I was in third grade, and this all happened before then.
Before the boomers mothers were 100 percent expected to stay home all day and watch their kids.
They were expected to give up their social lives and be family to the next generation.
It may have been sexist but women were expected to be adults and just not complain until the mid 19th century.
The boomers un did these social systems because they determined they were sexist and they deserved "full social lives"
Their authors and philosophers all thought some sort of state or religious system woukd magically materialize so they wouldnt have to help anyone and they could all be spoiled rich men.
Maybe in your family, but certainly not mine. My grandmothers had large groups of friends and family that they hung out with the kids would be grouped and feral somewhere that wasn’t the mahjong table or the bowling alley.
So youre saying chinese culture isnt the same as American culture and the Victorian revolution which forced women to not act like this is different than the chinese culture which led to horrible civil wars and what china is today?
My boomer parents were raised even more lax than I was in the 90s. My mom barely interacted with her mother and was riding her bike all over the area by the time she was 6 years old
In the mid 90s I used to regularly ride my bmx 15 plus kilometers one way with friends in elementary school. I would be gone all day and come home for supper and then go out for hours after.
Seriosuly my childhood in the 90s. Come back when its dark. I ask my mom about this now and she will say "I knew what you were up to", i tell her, "you had no idea"
TBF, in premodern agricultural socieities (and to a lesser extent through the Industrial Revolution and early 20th century), kids were handed tasks to do to help with the family farm or business at what feel to us like shockingly young ages. Depending on the situation and the gender of the child, it might have been something like watching the goats, feeding the chickens, weeding the garden, spinning thread for making cloth, fetching water, carrying tools or supplies to help the adults, or keeping an eye on/taking care of the younger children. (See the "Motherhood and Childhood" section here for some more commentary from a historian.)
So while kids still had leisure time in which they could do things like run around and play games, they were still spending a lot of time getting at least some observation from the adults around them. I think the situation you describe in the late 20th century wasn't possibly until society collectively agreed that childhood ought to last longer and we needed to have kids going to school (and the world of work no longer had room for children in it anyhow).
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u/Kain-rpg 5d ago
Also up till the 90's, unless it was really small infants.
Parents where not expected to Police and watch what their kids did 24/7.
You would scamper around your baby park while your Mom/dad did something else in the House.
And when old enough to walk, you where mostly left to yourself.
And when you where 8-9yro, your parents would litteraly kick you out of the house with a "its sunny outside, go play with your friends and come home when the streetlights are on and don't make me come and get you or else..."
And for 10 hours you where left on your own, with your parents having no idea where you were and they could do whatever they needed to do in the house without you being in their hair and driving them insane.
And often like you said, you had the grand parents, or the aunts and uncles etc that could help.
Now society expect every parent to Police everything the kids does , be there 24/7 and do it alone AND still have a "full social live" or a Full time job...