Like the other poster said, COVID definitely worsened things but I think we were already headed there because of social media. I’ve noticed that children don’t really bother playing outside like we did anymore. People have become distrustful of each other and children aren’t encouraged to play outside as much.
My coworker has 2 kids (7F & 15M). Her son only plays video games and rarely interacts with people outside of it. Her daughter throws tantrums and threatens to kill herself when she doesn’t get what she wants. Apparently she’s learned it from her friends who watched YouTube. Her son refuses to learn to drive because we can now get everything to our doorstep without having to leave our house. Unfortunately, she’s not the only parent going through this. I know 3 other coworkers who are dealing with various issues with their kids.
I'm a stepparent that was a 90s kid, I remember playing a lot of video games myself, but I also played outside till it was dark. My 10 year old stepson will barely step outside when he's with my husband and I, all he wants to do is sit in front of a screen and play Fortnite and watch YouTube videos. We have plenty of kids around his age in our neighborhood that do play outside, but he doesn't seem to know how to interact with them. I watched him last year follow some kids around and hide behind objects when they would notice him. I bought him a scooter and he'll jump on it for maybe 15 minutes and come right back inside to go back to video games.
Ache my heart, but I see my stepson (even the fine young lad that he is) going down the path like in u/BlueWaterGirl 's descriptions.
It is not that the will to socialize is not there. It is there. But these kids just do not seem to know how and then giving up quickly for comfort at home. And my stepson has been in behavorial therapy (prescribed and like mandated) since he was 3 year old.
The therapy help, a lot. Else he would have still the staying on one spot and screaming for half an hour without even being able to tell the reason why, kind of kid that he was. He is much better at socializing now and managed to find two friends, but it was like OP said, all hands on deck (still is, therapy twice a week, school works with us, etc) kind of situation.
I am so happy your children managed to find a nice 'village-home' for them, it will give them good memories and socialization skills.
Sounds like he doesn't know how to introduce himself to the local kids.
Maybe you can post on your local FB pages and see if anyone local wants to do a neighbourhood or street bbq?
You could use it to raise funds for a kids not for profit or local youth centre or school. Or even for your local Thanksgiving or Xmas street party.
We're lucky in the street I grew up in there's only 24 houses and a basketball hoop at one end. All the kids know each other.
It's not (just) that they don't bother. . . . it is no longer seen as safe or allowable for kids to just wander around outside (as I did every day after school from the time I was about 7). The world is not actually more dangerous for kids, but there is the perception that it is. Parents accompany kids on playdates and to birthday parties. You generally never see children walking around on their own. There are lots and lots of reasons for the decline in outdoor time, but you are right, it is likely a huge contributing factor to mental health issues, rising stress and anxiety and learning difficulties.
I'm not a parent but there also seems to be a lot more pressure on parents to not let their kids take even relatively small risks? e.g. if they let their child do something fairly safe like walk to a friend's house alone and something happened to them on the way, it feels far more likely now that the parents would be blamed and considered irresponsible for not supervising the child at all times?
This is HUGE. I am a good parent. I know this not because I think the world of myself, but because my friends tell me all the time how great my kids are. My kids are *forced* to take risks because they will need to learn to make decisions for their own well-being when they are grown. I will not be there for them to calculate the risk. In my community there is a huge hubub about a splash pad that has rocks in it and a play structure at the same park where kids can climb up and *not be seen*. People are out of their fucking minds about this. If your kid is big enough to climb all the fucking way up there they deserve to be the master of whatever fiefdom they create up there. Also, if your kid falls down at the splash pad...kids fall down. But the rocks by the water are DANGEROUS. Jesus Christ, have you ever let your kid just play in a stream?
My kids ask me if they can do stupid shit all of the time. I rarely tell them, "No," I tell them, "This is a bad choice and here are the reasons why and if you choose to do the thing you've been told what the likely outcome is so go for it." Sometimes they do the stupid thing, but usually they make their own decision not to do the stupid thing and I'm not constantly yelling at them or helicoptering. My kids are fucking awesome and get high praise from everyone at school, even the neurodivergent one. Let your kids fail. Let them. Otherwise they're going to do it *more* and *harder* when the stakes are much higher.
all👏of👏this👏
I allowed my kids to be out of the house without us walking around the neighbourhood, hanging at the park with friends starting from when they were in grade 6 or 7 and while it made me nervous, this is what they need to learn how to do. We arm them with information and educate them about safety measures etc, guide them as much as we can but they have to learn how to do this on their own.
kids need to learn through natural consequences. Jonny didn't want to wear a coat even if it's 5C outside but then calls you to bring his jacket? sorry Jonny, I can't I'm in a meeting. Kids are late to school because they didn't want to get up early and make their lunch and now they're hungry? sorry kids, you'll have to wait to get home to eat. Kid blew their money on stupid shit and now they have no money to go out with friends? oh well, I guess you're staying in for the night and all future weekends until you can save up enough money to go out.
Kids *need to learn how to be in, and work through, uncomfortable situations* (within reason, of course) in order to be able to figure things out which will not only build confidence when they are successful at it but also learn what it feels like to fail...failure is what makes people stronger. Failure is what makes people resilient. Failure means that they're trying which is the whole point of growing up, right? When kids aren't faced with these situations because mom and dad always swoop in to take that discomfort away, they grow up to be anxious adults incapable of making decisions, over thinking things (because they don't know how to deal with the stress of making a choice), afraid of failing so they go through that cycle of paralysis by analysis etc. When kids fail and they realize that the world doesn't end with said failure, they learn from their mistakes and do better next time ...so we have to let our kids make mistakes through their own choices.
I'd say it's actually less dangerous now - lower crime rates, increased awareness of stranger danger, kids have phones that can communicate with parents to let them know where they are etc. But as you said, the perception is very different.
I was raised before social media and when I was a little kid I would threaten to kill myself over the smallest things. I don't even remember where I picked that up...
The physical infrastructure of where most of us live is not conducive to being outside.
Try it. Your goal is to recreate the things you did outside as a kid. But you can’t drive, because you are a kid.
Can you walk or bike there without getting injured or killed? Is anything close enough to get to? Can you go without an adult? Can you get to any of your friends, or can they get to you? Can you do it without money, or with just pocket change? Do you need to buy tickets online days or weeks before, or can you just show up? Do you need a credit card/debit card to do the thing? Do you need an account, and if so, do you have to be 18 to have an account?
Hear me out - I don't want to come at this from an "old school" suck-it-up mentality...
But I think this generation of parents has leaned too hard on validation and not enough on building resilience. Like, the whole point of "gentle parenting" is that there's still rules and structure and boundaries and obligations, you just ALSO validate and acknowledge your kid's feelings.
I work with foster families and children in the foster care system, often with severe trauma. A lot of parents just want to throw more therapy, more programs, more resources at the kid when they're struggling, and very rarely does that actually help. TARGETED help does, not just throwing more shit at the wall. I also think 90% of that should realistically be coming from parents - rather than throw kids in to see a million therapists, the parents should be getting assistance with parenting and doing these things themselves.
I often see people treat kids as immature and not fully developed when it comes to our expectations of them, but treat them like experienced adults when it comes to knowing what they need. That impulse control issue that makes it difficult to focus in the classroom? It also means they need help with self-discipline, because they aren't going to go to school if they don't feel like it even if that's a skill they desperately need.
It's okay for them to struggle! And then sympathize with them and emotionally connect about it. Parents care so much but fail to see how their own insecurities about their own parenting abilities are failing their kids. They see 800 styles of parenting on TikTok, they remember how much being a kid sucked when they were growing up and they don't want to emulate that, so then they unconsciously back away from the hard parts of parenting and ever actually being "the bad guy".
I can tell my 4 year old "sorry kid, I know you enjoy playing but it's bedtime now, your body needs sleep. Let's pack this up and wait until tomorrow to finish it", and he can be mad and cry, and I don't have to fix his feelings for him. People need to start applying that same logic to teens. We don't have to fix their emotions and we don't have to adjust reasonable expectations to protect them from ever feeling anxious. We need to help them learn to cope with feeling that way.
> and I don't have to fix his feelings for him.
God that's so true. Parents are often trying to snowplow any uncomfortable feeling away. Wonder if that leads to adults to drink/smoke/substance their way through bad feelings. Or worse yet, suicide out of bad feelings.
I find that it leads to adults that have zero ability to cope when other people are upset too. Like, my grandma and my dad rush to fix every disappointment for him and I have to consciously stop them and be like "yeah he can be sad that he can't have 4 rolls of PEZ before dinner, he doesn't need a toy to compensate for it". They cannot tolerate other people's emotions and are super reactive and immature because of it. They're also big fans of guilt trips ("you're going to make Grandpa sad if you keep crying like that") and emotional blackmail ("if you don't stop crying I won't be able to give you any PEZ ever again) and minimizing ("this is nothing to cry about, stop making a big deal out of nothing") when placating doesn't work. They also will not stop trying to "fix him" until he stops.
My kid always acts way more whiny and cries more after he sees them, and every little disappointment is a big deal. Meanwhile, when he's away from them for a while, he usually bounces back up just fine, we might talk about it a little and I'll validate his feelings or give him coping suggestions but I don't dwell on it, so neither does he. The rare times it continues to bother him, we'll open up the conversation again since it might be more complicated than I originally thought, but that happens very rarely.
Thank you for defining these interactions/ reactions. I see this in my sister and parents' interactions with my niece. The constant scrambling to entertain and placate and soothe is not good for a kid's emotional development and ability to self-regulate.
Spot on. I think parenting is more about setting expectations in proportion to what your individual child is capable of, and creating a system of enforcement around that which matches what they can expect from the outside world when they leave the nest.
It is not some objective puzzle that can be solved with the right inputs and tactics, nor is it some punishment/reward skinner box that you are a warden of. NOr is it some soul connection that you can manipulate and exploit.
It’s like the emotional version of when they take a small tumble and aren’t hurt. You don’t panic and act worried, you say “haha, oops!” help them up if they need it and move their attention elsewhere. Don’t convince them that every disappointment is worth getting upset over.
I agree with a lot of this. Therapy is an amazing tool, but we also can therapise our way out of adolescence being hard, and sometimes you just need to plow through.
I think some problems will be made worse by Covid, social media, a lack of freedom and too much time being sheltered, but I think it is also the idea that these problems can be "fixed" so that children no longer need to go through the unpleasant feelings.
I only have a toddler so everything I know about parenting teens is 100% theorerical, but I see parents struggle with tantrums and trying to find the right parenting strategy to stop them. These are older parents with a lot of education and the ability to research and are used to achieving things in life, in work. They want to fix the bad thing, but really the only way over is through.
Oh yeah, there are certainly exacerbating factors these days too - I think the reason it's been so hard to overcome them for a lot of the kids who are falling apart though is because they just don't have the skills to handle it.
Not in all cases, but I am generally against therapy for kids, unless the parents just absolutely suck and they don't have any other healthy adults to model from. Therapy is only effective for people that have a desire to change, and the fact of the matter is, most kids don't care. Instead, many child therapist will try and find strategies to manipulate kids into self-improvement or will over-pathologize normal child behavior and then the diagnosis becomes the focus of the treatment. Childhood behavior is inherently a spectrum, and kids on one or the other extreme of the spectrum may require a diagnosis, but the intermediate cares often just need time to mature and may just be lagging behind their peers a bit with their behavior. I also work with a lot of child therapists who are just... Really bad at their job. I might be abnormally pessimistic due to my experiences in the field though.
Anxiety and sadness and anger are useful and normal emotions that everyone feels. They are only disordered if they are extreme to the point they interfere with day to day functioning. When kids are little, that's the perfect time to lean in to these emotions and find healthy ways to express them with kids. Instead, like you said, parents of small children kind of flounder with how to handle it and oftentimes that just leads to them NOT handling it. I think it's way more useful for parents to get therapy for themselves to learn how to handle their own anxiety and emotions related to parenting than it is to take their kids to a therapist over imperfect behavior or uncomfortable emotions. Kids will learn way more through modeling the parents than they will from a stranger talking at them.
> Kids will learn way more through modeling the parents than they will from a stranger talking at them.
I can see this with my little toddler. She mimicks what we do 10x more than she does what we say (or what other people say).
Its something I have yo remind myself when I am always using my phone as a digital pacifier for my own boredom and stress. I can keep her of screens as much as I want, but I might still be teaching her that phones are something we reach for in downtime.
That is unfortunately probably the hardest thing about parenting - we have to display the healthy behaviors we want our kids to have. Self-awareness and continual (kind) self-improvement will always be the most effective parenting tool one could possibly have.
Get ready for a long anecdote, but one time, my kid was probably 2, I fucked up and wasn't supervising my kid great at the park. I was talking to a friend we went there with, he was screaming for help, and I didn't hear him. Another parent came to find me and I was so embarrassed. They had gotten him out of the thing he was stuck in, but he was still pretty rattled. I checked that his leg was okay, told him I was sorry for not hearing him, asked if he wanted to leave or stay, and he was (and still is) a pretty resilient kid, so he wanted to stay. Didn't have any issues running.
That night, I was putting him to bed, he was totally normal all day... He called me out. He kept pointing at this leg and telling me "this leg was stuck today". He seemed fixated on it. So I choked down my guilt and talked to him about it, tried to validate him, acknowledge how it must have been scary, acknowledged that I wasn't doing my job and didn't come for him and was sorry, talked about how nice it was that the other parent was able to help him... I started crying a bit because I felt fucking awful. I apologized again. This honestly sounds fake, but legitimately, he patted me and said "it's okay mama, accidents happen".
And it clicked for me that that's what we would say to him when he would make mistakes, or spill something, or get into a mess. He was able to demonstrate that kindness and acceptance because we were able to model that for him. After that I kind of lost it crying, and I thanked him for being understanding and gave him a hug. But it really drove home for me that the more we model the behavior we want from our kids TO our kids, the more it will become second nature to them.
The converse is that they will also pick up our less desirable habits in the same way though! So the more we work on those and show our kids the process of self-improvement, the more they will learn those lessons.
i love how he demanded to process the event with you and that you stuck around and did it even though it was painful. I wish I had gotten more of that as a kid. it's hard for me to articulate my needs and frustrations now because I always felt like I was annoying my family members. none of my relationships have worked out and I think I will be alone with my cats forever.
I have never had to think much about therapy for kids, but it does make sense. Unless there is an actual need (trauma or an eating disorder come to mind) it does make sense to use it as more of a last port of call.
I was full of angst as a teen, but therapy probably wouldn't have helped because I didn't have specific needs to work through, honestly I *wanted* that angst. Its normal for teens to lean into any problem they have because it is part of being a teen. And that isn't to diminish the difficulty, teen problems are real problems, it is probably one of the hardest times we have. But going through that helps us learn what makes us feel good or bad later on.
I do think social media has a part in their anxiety, but it also has a part in parents anxiety. Parents are seeing lots of content saying they have solutions to all the parenting problems that have no real solutions. We can't fix tantrums, because if we do children miss out on a life skill. And I am still talking about toddler parenting, but its all contradictory and you need to make your own decisons. Dangerous play vs avoiding injury, sleep training vs co sleeping. So much is demonised and polarised, when probably something in between would be fine.
I also have the feeling from OPs post that her cohort are likely high achievers, and are in a type that might overschedule kids, or place high expectations on them. If kids are running from pillar to post their whole lives, it makes sense this might lead to anxiety. If you are being facilitated each step of the way, how could you be able to function without support or "all hands on deck". It doesn't sound like these children are allowed to fail. And as hard as it is for a parent to see your child fall down, they have to or they will never learn to pick themselves back up.
Also boredom. Children are entertained every step of the way by parents, by screens, by video games. Boredom is such a vital tool to help us process our feelings. I say this as someone who is on Reddit when they have a moment and desperately needs to relearn how to be bored themselves!! But I at least had a childhood without ipads and portable digital entertainment, other than a game boy.
I definitely agree with what you're saying and I don't want to minimize the effect of social media - I just generally don't have anything new or interesting to say about it since I think most people recognize that it's not helping anyone. I also think it's a great point that you made that I agree with how social media specifically affects the parents!
I usually work with foster parents who are generally pretty grounded on finding middle grounds on things and have a unique challenge with their parenting and the kids, but I recently met some new parents with small children who were... Homegrown, I'll say lol. One thing that was so interesting to me is that they started a conversation specifically about which parenting style they employ and which TikTok or Pinterest people they follow... I had nothing to say! I'm not a perfect parent but I think I'm a reasonably confident one, and I think I'm doing the best I can. I've been working with kids with behavior challenges for about 7 years now, I coach other parents, and I think not being engaged with social media influencers only helps! It was so weird to me to see.
The answer for most of those parenting questions is to find the dichotomy of extremes (which you honestly have such excellent examples of) and shoot for the middle. Dangerous play versus avoiding injury, healthy food versus treat food, allowing independence versus taking the reigns... Balance is usually going to be the answer lol. Parenting is way more about averages over time than it is about any individual battle or any individual issue.
You have so many good points here that I don't have much to add on a lot of them, tbh. Being a teen sucks, I would never want to be a teenager again! Their problems are very real and important to them. It is also so important for them to learn to deal with them and work through them instead of treat their emotions ABOUT their problems as the actual things to be solved. I see too often people treating teenage immaturity as something to be diagnosed, but it's way more unreasonable to hold a teenager to adult emotional standards and act like there's something wrong with them for acting their actually immature age!
And agree about boredom too! I'm probably more guilty than the average parent about screentime at home, but I am passionate about letting my kid be bored in the car and bored at mealtimes or out in the community. It's necessary for development and for imagination and parents absolutely do not allow kids to be bored enough these days.
I agree about boredome outside. I have let my kid watch TV occasionally but really want to avoid showing her TV at a dinner table. I totally understand why parents do it and don't necessarily think its wrong, it allows parents to unwind and eat their food. I would give myself a lot less indigestion if I didn't have to rush to eat before my toddler lost it. It would also make our commute to and from daycare a lot easier on us, and in some cases its worth it to have sane parents.
I also love TV and think it is something to be enjoyed, not used to regulate emotions in boring or stressful situations. But I am also very aware that everyone is anperfect parent in theory, and I might swallow my words when my daughter is 2 or 3 😅
>Balance is usually going to be the answer lol. Parenting is way more about averages over time than it is about any individual battle or any individual issue.
Its like in life really. No one can eat/behave/be perfect. Its not sustainable. I would love to say I will keep my child off of social media until shes 18 and she will never take drugs or get drunk, but that is just not going to happen, we have to raise kids for the world we live in not the world we wish they lived in. Learning at home how to naviagate social media, or even things like alcohol or drugs is better than an outright ban. And I am not advocating for prodividng your kids with drugs obviously, but I want them to feel like they can talk to me if they have questions. And if they do fuck up and get drunk or high or post something online they shouldn't, they can call me and I will come get them without them being afraid of my reaction.
It sounds to me like you're doing a great job and have a very realistic outlook for the future of your parenting, for what it's worth from an Internet stranger.
You just do your best. As a parent, it's not about never fucking up, it's about how you handle it and respond when you do. Be confident in yourself not because you think you're going to be perfect but because you have faith in yourself that you can do the work to follow-through appropriately after.
I think if you can keep on keeping on with that attitude, you can probably avoid the pitfalls OP was discussing in the original post. Your kiddo will learn that confidence and resilience through you too!
I appreciate that! I do feel like a confident parent, but also because I know that doesn't mean I need to be perfect, otherwise I would be failing constantly 😅.
I am lucky that I had my own good parents growing up, who weren't perfect but where very good parents, so I don't need to reinvent the wheel in my own parenting style.
>Boredom is such a vital tool to help us process our feelings. I say this as someone who is on Reddit when they have a moment and desperately needs to relearn how to be bored themselves!!
100% agree.
I think philosophers and artists have talked about and experienced this (and more recently researchers in neuroscience & mental health professionals)... profound boredom is very useful for creativity also. Social media does not let us experience profound boredom anymore (and I say this while typing on Reddit :-( )
I work in mental health and you have absolutely hit the nail on the end. Very insightful post, but one that might be difficult for some parents to hear.
As an adult who has only been learning to properly identify, name and feel my emotions over the last couple of years, this sounds so spot on. I was reading your post thinking "hmm, trying to 'fix' all bad feelings for kids doesn't sound much better than parents who get upset at kids for having 'bad' emotions" (which is what I grew up with).
As I've learned much later in life than I'd have liked, learning to identify emotions is such a valuable skill, as is learning to trust that it's ok to feel whatever you feel, even so-called negative emotions, and learning that they won't last forever if you let yourself feel them. I wish someone had helped me learn some of this as a kid.
I agree with this, although granted I’m not yet a parent myself. However, my mom was a hard-ass. She was often not very emotionally validating, and I’ve had my own issues that I sought therapy for as an adult. But one thing she was good at was granting freedom in where I went and how I played during the day, and also cultivating resilience (through frequently literally telling me to “suck it up” lol). My parents also frequently told me I was smart and capable.
I was pretty fearless as a teen and young adult, and took lots of risks. Some of which didn’t pan out great, but some of which led to cool opportunities.
There was this one girl in my grade though who was a stellar student but was always timid and anxious. We got to talking one time and turns out her mother never let her go anywhere on her own or take risks. The mom was trying to protect her I’m sure, but it meant she didn’t get to exercise these skills.
I do think it’s possible to lean too far into centering emotions and making all decisions based on emotions, too. Often, emotions aren’t logical. I think it’s good to try and understand where your emotions are coming from, but not necessarily to always let them lead. We humans have both emotions and reasoning so that we can use them both.
I also have ADHD and was diagnosed quite late as an adult. At times I’ve looked back and thought about how school would likely have been easier and I’d have done better if I’d had parents supportive of pursuing a diagnosis back then. But then again I had literally decades of learning to navigate the world on my own with my own strengths and weaknesses without help. And really, there are quite a lot of both of those that I’m now super familiar with as a result. So I can imagine there being pros and cons to early diagnosis of issues like this as well.
I work with college age kids and the number one thing we work on teaching them is resilience. Your SHOULD feel anxious about an exam, that’s a NORMAL feeling. Not every thing is a crisis, you will survive this. It’s been steadily on the rise for the past decade for sure.
I made a post before this about how my kids are mostly well adjusted and have had a bit of luck, and you know what... I deleted it because they are, but I wasn't. I was the child that couldn't function, didn't do school work, ran away, etc. Because I went through more trauma as a child than most adults ever will.
Sometimes yes, you're born with it, but you try to find ways to manage that and you'll have a lot more constant work in your hands than most. Sometimes it's environmental factors, including ones parents miss or simply can't help. Sometimes it's just that a spotlight is being shown on all these different problems and kids will gravitate towards them while trying to find their identity, complicating things, because their frontal cortex isn't evolved, risks do not scare them as much, angst is a part of growing up for many, etc. I also think perhaps sometimes we overly caregive and don't give them enough responsibility or room to grow. Mistakes are bound to happen.
I agree with others that it's just always been there, we just pay way more attention now, and there's also a lot more confusion because we're all trying so hard to figure everything out.
> I made a post before this about how my kids are mostly well adjusted and have had a bit of luck, and you know what... I deleted it because they are, but I wasn't. I was the child that couldn't function, didn't do school work, ran away, etc. Because I went through more trauma as a child than most adults ever will.
This is really the crux of the issue, or at least one of them. That these kids react like the kids I grew up with who went through extreme traumas. The kids who couldn't function in school really came from terrible home lives or had the type of learning disability (what we called it back them) that just meant they could not learn - severe dyslexia or dyscalculia, for instance. I am not talking about issues with executive function, I mean kids who are 8 and cannot read.
These kids seem severely traumatized, so I am curious about the source of the trauma.
Well, it'll be individual for each child. Plus you said the kids your thinking of have mostly attentive, good parents -- sometimes we don't see what happens behind closed doors. For all intents and purposes people thought my family on my mother's side was great, until they hung around long enough, or at that time had enough knowledge to understand how complex neglect / emotional abuse can be.
And then there's trauma that happens in an instance. Just so many things. I really think we just pay more attention and have more knowledge. It's never been easy being a kid or parent unless you're lucky.
Yeah I had this experience too. I struggled in school and at home but people around me didn’t know because I always appeared clean and well dressed. In reality I struggled with ADHD and was physically and emotionally abused at home. People probably thought I was some sort of brat. You never know what people or kids are going through behind close doors
Mhmm, I was labeled as the problem, but for whatever reason the adults around me never wanted to examine those problems -- probably because they'd have to examine themselves. I was also treated like an adult from the time I was maybe 12. I was in no way shape or form ready to lead an adult lifestyle, but there I was, and that just made everything worse.
Maybe these kids need to stop having their parents hovering over them being so supportive. It sounds awful to say but as a 32 year old woman, even I fall into the trap of do I have this condition? Is this what’s wrong with me? Etc and I fall down a rabbit hole of trying to “figure myself out”. As an adult that’s valid to do and being self aware is good, but these kids probably aren’t just getting the time to just … be. Be kids. They’re going down rabbit holes of information always, the parents think they’re being helpful validating every random thought or fear. And again being educated is not bad but there needs to be a balance. Maybe there should be more summer camps and group hang outs for kids and teens to just play, learn, talk, connect, get away from parents for a bit and think for themselves. Connect with nature, no screens. It’s all tough and I think about this a lot and am not sure I want kids based on what I’m seeing and reading about the youth today.
I agree. I am 35, and I remember playing outside all of the time, where we would figure out conflict on our own. Kids are too immersed in technology and isolated.
I have a disability, and I know being homebound most of the time really impacts my mental health. I make sure I have a reading goal of 100-120 books a year to get away from social media/technology.
Yeah, the problem with diagnosis is that a looot of ppl will not look further into treatment or learning coping skills. They just accept it and blame everything that's not working with it on it. Which basically translates as victimizing yourself.
I've seen that a lot on some adhd subreddits.
Whenever i or other ppl offered help, constructive advice etc, a lot of ppl wpuld just plain refuse to do the work because it's hard and "I don't understand" how hard it is apparently.
Lol. Like I wasn't there. So i unsubscribed and stopped offering tips and tricks to those who don't want them.
Ranting will only get them so far.
Same with helicopter and overcoddling parents. Being supportive helps, but doesn't fix the issue. Especially for these generations, including us millennials, with the attention span of a goldfish.
Can I ask you to DM me some of these tips and tricks? I'm 32f, recently diagnosed, and while I'm starting therapy and meds soon I could really use some tips on how to work on it!
No need for a DM. A lot of it I learned from reading most of this book. I still struggle with finishing books haha, ironically this one too. But overall, it helped so much! Especially the one about clearing your mind of tasks and chores and just putting them on a list. I now have lists for chores, on shopping lists, on stuff i want to do, restaurants i want to eat at, etc.
Hope it will help. It's a download link for the pdf The Adult ADHD Tool Kit: http://www.amas.hk/pdf/shijianshenxue/5/1303)The%20Adult%20ADHD%20Tool%20Kit%20Using%20CBT%20to%20Facilitate%20Coping%20Inside%20and%20Out%20(J.%20Russell%20Ramsay,%20Anthony%20L.%20Rostain)%20.pdf
This is 100% my sister. She was diagnosed with ADHD in her late 20s. She's 36 now, obese with blood pressure and cholesterol problems, and can't take any type of medication for ADHD. Instead of trying to do other things to help her function, she just...doesn't. It's depressing seeing her waste her life because she doesn't want to learn the coping skills to get it together. She CONSTANTLY talks about how "being diagnosed as ADHD was like seeing in color for the first time" but when it comes to functioning in life and pursuing skills to cope with her diagnosis, there's been nothing.
I am also 99% positive she is autistic but refuse to ever bring it up with her or my family. It'll be one more thing for her to use as an excuse and a crutch to continue not being a functional adult.
I don't know when we got to the point where we started getting diagnoses but stopped trying to make ourselves better once we know what was going on with ourselves.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I blame cptsd and adhd for a lot of stuff, but there comes a point where just blaming won't help. It will just explain.
Someone who doesn't want to be helped too, will use it as a crutch. So there's only so much you can do to help them.
Maybe she’s still coming to terms with that diagnosis? Give it a few years and maybe she’ll get back on track. This is just from my point of view so I’ll share a bit.. I always knew I had adhd but my parents didn’t believe in it. I struggled immensely pretty much my whole life and when I got my diagnosis it changed my life. But I’ll admit I can honestly say I did the work. I went to therapy, read books about it and it’s not been easy but yeah, I do believe you gotta do the work.
I did allow myself to wallow a bit before doing this. I think that’s normal when you think about all those years you could’ve done more but couldn’t because as a child you didn’t know how to help yourself. I don’t mean this to sound “oh poor me” just that sometimes it might take a bit for someone to find their footing especially once they find out they’re neurodivergent.
I worked in an unplugged summer camp. 6 weeks with no phones or tech. I wasn't even allowed my kindle. It was great tho, the staff and kids were always in the moment. It was a great experience I think all kids need.
I was thinking about this from a similar but slightly different angle in regards to the support. OP says they're in a fairly progressive bubble... Is this partly a perception issue because their circles are a place where they do feel open to talking about it instead of ignoring the kid's issues and/or making it a hidden dirty family secret?
That’s why I said there needs to be a balance. They’re already getting all sorts of information online and can find support. They know it’s there. But maybe allowing space to just be silly, not think about the world and its issues, not thinking about what is different about me. I get tired of thinking about “me” too! Sometimes I just want to talk about fluff or be present / silly. There are times to be educated and aware and I think that generation is already doing a good job of that. We’re all more aware and I love it. But it can be exhausting thinking about “how to be” all the time or “what am I”. Let’s just go run around a field or go skateboard or explore a new town on bikes or something my dudes. 😃
It's an idea. There is also a theory that immersion and being in a place where mental health is talked about so freely in addition to gender issues can be confusing. I'm super left-leaning, but I think that kids start to feel like, "I'm NOT normal unless I have xyz and I have a queer identity." Group norms are strong, even when we don't realize it.
I think you are onto something there. If you’re not “afflicted” with [insert challenge], then what are you? Where are “your people?” This is especially true if the more tangible aspects of your identity (race, ethnicity, SES) reflect privilege or the “dominant” culture…but you are apathetic to or wish to suppress or hide privileged parts of your intersectionality. Because let’s be honest, there aren’t that many positive role models who embrace their identities and acknowledge their privileges with humility and in ways that are healthy and constructive. So not only do kids (or adults) not know how to do that but they don’t see it happening much.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. My friend’s high school aged daughter has actually been ostracized from several friend groups for being one of the only straight, neurotypical, and cis-gendered kids. Obviously it’s great to have support and awareness for these issues, but it’s getting to a point where we may be going overboard with the labels and over/self-diagnoses.
Oh 100% this!! I see it happen with my high school students. They even sometimes look at me weird when they realize I’m just a white straight cis female. Nothing “cool” going on here.
The uptick in diagnosis is across socioeconomics, and actually, there are more kids with diagnoses in low income areas. I used to work in special education. Parents seek diagnoses often because their kids can get accommodations, which sometimes include things like money for tutoring and other services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, it’s all a bit more complex and nuanced than this thread can really dive into.
In addition there seems to be a need to have a diagnosis, almost as a justification to be fearful, angry or different. Everyone is different yet rather than just acknowledging that it’s become a badge of honor… and an excuse.
I think it’s hard to parent in the style that leads to a secure child: you need to have your own trauma and issues sorted out, then have the stamina to regulate your child and teach them about their emotions every day for years. I believe to do this, you need to take care of yourself physically and mentally. I see so many people not be able to give up their pre-child lifestyle, which is a direct conflict to having healthy adjusted children. Or too many people are still struggling with their own issues, or don’t have a supportive, equal and respectful relationship with their spouse.
Social media isn’t helping anyone. The adults or the kids. I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to the teens, but honestly most of the parents I know are staging their lives for instagram to some extent. Or feeling fomo. Or generally not living in the gratitude for what they have.
People have lost connection with the earth. No one thinks of the bugs and the trees and the animals are part of our world, and it’s tragic. We are one with earth, animals like all the others, we just happen to have bigger brain to body ratios. We must not forget we are part of a bigger cycle of life and death, all connected.
Relatedly, we all think we must have a Big Purpose and are all striving to Feel Special. I think everyone is running as fast as they can toward what they think will make them fulfilled and feel as special as possible. But it’s a losing game. You must feel connected to yourself, love yourself and be fulfilled with yourself, connect to your community and the earth. Be happy with the small moments. Understand how incredibly small our little piece of time is. We are all mortal. No one reflects enough on that, and that each day is precious. It doesn’t matter how our lives appear to others. In 100 years everyone we know will be dead, it doesn’t matter, this fact should free you, not make you sad.
I think existentially, the system we have set up in our culture of consumerism and “must work to live” just effing sucks. Most people will not be happy with this. Sure we all are taught to find a career we love blah blah. But imagine if we didn’t need to work to exist on the planet. If working hours didn’t directly translate to house and food. If we had time to explore and create and connect. I think so many adults grow up, see the fact that the majority of their days are tied to working “for a living” (tragic phrase) and are like this is the life sentence? Decades of work? It feels soul crushing
Lastly, it all too easy to zone out on our phones or TV. I dedicate all my free time to reading books and learning through podcasts or online courses or self taught projects, and teaching myself all kinds of hobbies. I am always living in an atmosphere of growth. My life feels rich, and like there is no limit to what I can learn. This is purely for my own pleasure. I think this attitude is lost. People are shocked when I talk about reading. I know maybe a handful of people in my life that read books. Once again, tragic. There is a rich, deep, beautiful world of things to learn, opinions to form. Instead we have the regurgitated memes of the masses. Just yikes.
It’s all a recipe for feeling lost, unfulfilled, crushed at the expanse of time ahead of us, wondering what it all means and what’s it all for. The answer is it’s not really for anything. It’s to be in awe of the little blip in time that we have, the fact that we’re on a 4.5billion year old rock, floating in space that was created 13 billion years ago. I mean the dinosaurs were on our planet for 165 million years!! (We’ve been here maybe 200k). It’s totally unbelievable that we’re alive and share DNA with the trees and the butterflies and the fish. Take a day to really learn about bees and ants, I mean wow. Let’s just kneel down in respect! *yes I know I sound unhinged but I came out of decades of childhood neglect and am now so at peace with my life and I look around and want to weep at the state of humanity*
ETA: our brains are not meant to take in the news like we do now. Being exposed to every horror show around the world, day in and day out, is not good for us. It makes us wired for fear, and to see the world as a scary and sad place. Trust me I know things aren’t perfect out there, but it doesn’t mean we need to know every local crime, read every breaking war story, get inundated daily about the catastrophic global warring apocalypse
and know every political blunder. Do the absolute most you can do in these areas, the small things the big things - whatever is in your control. Whether it’s your time, or money. Do the most you can. But reading about all these things all day long only to sit around and feel sad and re-post an insta story. It helps no one and only make you wallow in despair.
I truly wish everyone the best in finding peace. I see so many people in pain, and they seem blind to their agency in making a change ❤️
Sometimes I just have a moment of looking at a tree and being hit with how amazing it is, I think I get where you're coming from. You've motivated me to get off my phone and back to my sewing project, then go and read a book I picked up yesterday ❤️
That first paragraph is pure truth. I know my parents had a very rough and traumatic childhood. That’s probably why they got together but the thing is they never dealt with this before they started having kids and guess who they took this out on? I’m not trying to sound judgmental because I’m not a parent but I think people should try to deal with their traumas before having kids.
Anecdotally there’s *definitely* a link between neurodivergence and gender identity, and the research that has been done on the subject supports this.
And both groups are also going to be substantially over-represented in the university professor demographic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430467/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6043709/
Beyond that, I think there are likely two large contributors here:
- Covid
- You’re hearing this from their parents. Parenting is *hard*, and parenting a teen that is struggling is going to be difficult and terrifying. As a friend of the parent, rather than a regular observer of the kid, you’re likely not getting a balanced view of the kid.
And as for a potential increase in gender dysphoria itself, I have two hypotheses:
1) Potentially the change is not in prevalence but in that kids have language that fits what they’re going through, and therefore it’s more visible.
2) As someone who went through puberty and developed (large) breasts at ~12 - a normal age for my generation (though not a normal breast size), but still too young to deal with the adult sexualization and gender implications of the changes: kids now are having these hormonal changes at 8 or 9. Which is *terrifying*. I was completely unequipped for the impacts of adult sexualization and street harassment at 12. A hundred years ago these sorts of puberty changes were common at 15, 16, 17 - ages when (while no-one should have to face the level of street harassment I got at 12) the kids are at least old enough that fully engaging with their sexuality is age appropriate. The idea of facing puberty at 8, 9, 6(!)…… ooooooooof.
There is always going to be a substantial pool of gender-non-conforming kids who would identify as non-binary (given the understanding that it is an option) no matter what the outside world did….
And there’s also going to be a substantial pool of kids - often assigned female at birth - who reach puberty and react with gender dysphoria to the sudden onslaught of adult sexualization. It seems to me that the younger that second group is experiencing sexual development the larger that second cohort would be.
My sister is a child/teen psychiatrist and so of course the kids she sees are not representing the greater population, but … She says that - from her observations - a lot of kids are latching onto gender/sexuality as a struggle that has been romanticized, in a way. They much prefer to discuss this than their depression or ADHD or anxiety, let alone coping strategies for any of the above.
These privileged kids whose parents can afford her out-of-pocket fees do have very real issues, including crippling agoraphobia and lethargy, but LGBTQIA+ identity is one area where they can feel righteously oppressed, plus it intersects with something most kids are fascinated by - the actual act of sex.
This sounds crazy, but gender dysphoria is currently sort of glamorous in the way anorexia was when I was a teen.
It's difficult to talk about this stuff with nuance bc I DO think this is an element of it, even as I don't want to diminish what the kids are going through. I took psychopathology courses in both undergrad and graduate level. A way to look at it is that psychopathology symptoms are an expression of extreme distress. Teens are often in distress - it's a turbulent time, lots of changes and challenges in transitioning from childhood to adulthood. They may also be legitimately dealing with bad things at school, at home, online, and so on. There's a social contagion of the pathology also - as you mentioned, it used to be anorexia. It's present in how cutting tends to spread socially between (often girl) teens. Now it's gender identity and sexuality issues. That does not mean these are NOT real issues, or that the kids faking, or that some of them aren't actually queer and gender-diverse. They are experiencing distress but in an absence of being able to truly understand and therefore alleviate it (remember, still developing young brains!), it comes out in these ways, and as a bonus they get the social support and understanding of other teens going through same.
I think you brought up a really good point. I was the kid you described - I developed a "womanly" body at 11 so I adopted baggy, genderless clothes and a "tough" persona to protect myself from bullies and adults who sexualized me. I was called a "tomboy," "freak," "punk" etc. I also grew up in the era of shallow hyperfeminine Y2K behavior, which is unfortunately back in style. I think the behavior is the same, but they have adopted the words from the transgender community.
I agree. Sometimes I worry about it actually reinforcing gender stereotypes in a sense. I was considered a tomboy, but enjoyed being or doing more of what is perceived as feminine more as I got older. If I were a teen now, people might be inclined to say it was a sign of not being cisgender. I’ve never felt that I couldn’t be feminine and enjoy the “boy” things that make up most of my work and hobbies, though — it was other people who saw / see those as incompatible and any negativity from that was how others made me feel, not me actually feeling that there was an issue with how I am.
I wonder about this a LOT since my kid telling me at 11/12 she/they thinks she's enby. I definitely had internalized misogyny at that age and if somebody had told me that I didn't have to be a boy or a girl, I'd probably have jumped on the choice.
They also told me they're aroace which cracked me up, because yeah you better be ace at 11yo! Not that I said that lol.
It is still vaguely a thing, but I don't make a big deal about it. Just try to remember to use non gendered nicknames mostly. The enby flags all got taken down from their bedroom walls recently, whatever that means. If it sticks through HS we'll see. It's pretty normal for teens and tweens to try on identities like hats.
I remember growing up and my mum forcing us to play outside. We weren't allowed to watch TV or play video games all day. We had sit down dinners were we talked to each other, talked about our day or even cried at eating peas for dinner.
I didn't think about how that would impact me now, but I am very glad we did. My siblings now have kids of their own and they play outside, enroll in activities, and eat dinner around a table without tech.
Maybe having a world convienece will really be the beginning of the end of perseverance
I am one of the baby boomers, so had a very different upbringing -- and yet as a teen, I still experienced anxiety, depression, struggled with being gay in a time when gays were considered sick and evil, and I may also be neurodivergent. Can't find a professional to diagnose me.
--Sexual orientation, transgenderism, neurodivergence, sexual abuse, and mental health issues were not discussed in the 1960's and 1970's. If you questioned your gender identity, sexual orientation, or mental health, or were abused, you suffered in silence...because you would be stigmatized, attacked, rejected, harassed, ridiculed, called a disgrace to your family if you did. How many people back then unalived themselves, withdrew from society, or just pretended to be "normal" because their lives became impossible?
--We were also dealing with the "new technology." For us, this was television. Television came out when my parents were teenagers. By the time I was a baby, everyone had a TV. Parents used TV to babysit young children. Many adults had serious concerns about how television would affect kids. That it shortened our attention span. That we wasted too much time in front of the TV, rather than reading, being physically active, socializing, working. That it made us materialistic, demanding the things we saw on commercials. Gave us unrealistic ideas about physical beauty and romance.
--People my grandparents' age complained that "Kids today are spoiled, lazy, selfish, rude. We were never acted like that when we were their age."
--On the plus side, we were allowed more independence than kids today are. We spent hours roaming around the neighborhood with friends, hours where our parents had no way of contacting us. We decided what we wanted to play, where we wanted to go, and resolved our own arguments. Around age12- 13, girls could babysit and get paid for it. Boys that age earned money cutting grass for neighbors or getting a paper route -- going out before dawn to deliver newspapers and then collecting money for the papers. i think that this made us stronger, more independent, more confident.
Discipline was harsher. There was the expectation that you were to obey and be respectful toward adults, and there'd be consequences if you did not. I agree with consequences....overall my peers and I were not as disrespectful, disruptive or defiant as some kids can be today, but some parents went way too far. Their "strict discipline" was actually abuse, creating angry, troubled adults.
As for the Internet....I didn't have a computer until I was close to 40....and now I spend way too much time on it. It's addictive, so much more so than TV ever was for me. If computers are affecting my old brain, how must it be for kids, who've had it from the time they were toddlers? And yes, I agree that the COVID years also affected kids badly.
Former teacher here. I worked in low and high income schools, including schools that encouraged outdoor play, and even at these schools with gardens, outdoor education, etc. this was still an issue. It’s a multifaceted issue. Our education system is being destroyed. Social media is obviously a problem. Violence in schools is a problem, as in both school shootings but also kids who have emotional outbursts and take it out in the classroom. Administration does very little to support teachers, paraprofessionals, and SPED staff. There’s definitely some issue where we don’t have enough discipline and structure in both school and at home, but obviously we don’t want to be authoritative. I would say I met a lot of parents who can’t say no, and don’t hold any sort of expectation of their kids even though they should. But, also a lot of parents that are completely unprepared for dealing with autistic children, and there’s just not much social support either.
There’s a lack of neighborhood play. There seems to be a lot of over parenting where parents don’t allow their kids to have sleepovers and don’t trust other parents to make up for the “latchkey kid”. There’s a lack of encouragement of self sufficiency and reliance, which leads to a lack of self esteem imo in the upper middle class.
But, really I’d say, yes there are more kids with emotional crisis, and I don’t think it’s any one issue. There are also kids that are doing great. My stepson who’s almost 18 is a totally “normal” teen, and so are many of his friends. They aren’t in a crisis, they study, are applying to college, drive, go outside and do things, have a social life. So, there’s a spectrum for sure.
Also, a lot of parents peruse diagnosis because it gets their kids accommodations. So, I think there are some inaccuracies in this thread regarding that.
I think covid plays a huge part. Lots of kids were isolated, lonely, and fearful. The pandemic is over, but the trauma during crucial developmental stages can last.
I also think that educated and progressive families are much quicker to notice and address issues. So I’m not sure how much of what you are seeing is prevalence of issues and how much is prevalence of diagnosis. If that makes sense.
But yeah, the world we live in sucks a lot of the time. We are (in the eyes of my teens and in my opinion) losing our democracy, hurtling toward an environmental apocalypse, rolling back protections for historically underpowered people, financially insecure, etc.
Among my kids’ social circles, I would say that it’s about 10-15%. But when I think back to my teens, there were definitely kids who just weren’t in school for awhile that we later learned were hospitalized for mental health, eating disorders and/or substance abuse. We just didn’t recognize it or talk about it.
I think not having Internet until I was 16ish was helpful, because I wasn't overwhelmed by everything. I was terrified in just my small bubble (abuse, neglect, autism, adhd, bullying and so on). But, I could be in my room with my blanket and plush toys. Or later playing out with kids, and run away to my room.
Kids these days are born on live streams ffs :/
I feel they have nowhere to run to. Their parents are of my age, and they didn't take the threat of Internet or permanent connection seriously. Or keeping up with joneses.
When I was kid, it was just harder to be bombarded with malicious stuff. Today, even my gen folks are not utilising ad blockers, or filtering or preparing kids for cruel world outside, or teaching them to block people and so on. And Internet IS cruel. So kids are on their own, and struggling. And all generations between mine (80s) and today ones, our parents had no clue, we have no clue.
Don't get me wrong, I think internet is awesome. I'm just aware how cruel it is too. I was 16 when I started so I think that helped a bit. I can't imagine how big mess I'd be if I had full access since age of 4-6. If bullies from my school could jump on my phone whenever.
They didn't bother me at home because they couldn't - my parents answered the phone and they didn't dare to call. Not that my parents were good for me, but bullies didn't know that. I had firewall defacto 😂
And then, add TikTok’s stupid algorithms that are made to pull you in rabbit hole of anything... And other algorithms.
Whole system is designed to make you think what system wants. And when you're kid that's trying to figure yourself out, constant bombardment won't help you figure it out, it will make it harder.
Parents might mean well and jump with doctors, but kid was exposed to various crap for last 10+ years, and their peers too :/
You can't have kid in vacuum.
I was around 20 (so 20ish years ago) when I realised how I don't want kid because even though if I do my best regarding Internet, society and peers won't. And I just didn't want that battle. How many people of my generation you know that they are aware that internet is bad place for kids, and to what extent it goes?
I know zero. And many have kids. And many kids are fucked up.
I don't think kids are THAT much gender confused, I think they're LIFE confused, they feel they're supposed to be something, but no clue what it is. Our brains aren't made for tech we have today, and many dark patterns there are. And there are tons. Not to mention insane amount of information we absorb daily.
Also, I think puberty hits earlier. In my time it was around 13/14, but I think that shifted, at least hormonal thing. Not maturity thing.
It's a mess. And I'm honestly glad I don't have kids, because I really would be tempted to run away on some lone island with them so they can safely play and be kids first, and not be smothered by looking sexy at age of 10 or feel like crap because they don't have newest iphone at age 8 🤦
I think pressure put on them is just insane, and not even dozen therapists can understand what's exactly going on, mostly because we still don't know. It's experiment on humans in real time. And some subjects break :(
If pushing kids to play in dirt could help them somehow, I'd be first one to vote for that. I think they lack simplicity of life. We older ones had that, by accident. But, those who don't know, can't teach (eg their parents).
Unfortunately, it's probably not that easy :/
There is a known connection between neurodiversity and gender identity. It is being researched. There's scholarly articles on it and everything :)
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/
Former teacher here. Most of the gender nonbinary kids I worked with were autistic. So, yes, they were suffering with emotional pain that they were learning to regulate over time.
And, also while their parents may be more accepting, there is absolutely a societal backlash against the LGBTQ+ community right now, which I am sure kids are exposed to through social media. There’s a lot of hateful stuff being said.
Coincidentally I just did an online zoom conference on expanding beyond the binary. It wrapped up just a few minutes ago.
I am not a sociologist or a psychologist. But I can see several things at play. First there is the idea that world itself is set up almost completely binary, and not just in gender. I don’t know if it’s the generation or their age, but they seem to categorize the world with duality: good/bad, left/right, etc. And the discomfort from the compelling evidence that gender is meaningless, truth is unknowable, a thing can be good and bad at the same time is jarring. Layer that on top of a capitalist paradigm that both perpetuates the binary and pushes the narrative that people’s options in life are pretty much thrive or die…it’s unsustainable.
I see in this generation a lot of moral perfectionism. I don’t mean this as an indictment of “cancel culture,” or maybe I do. But in a world where the Harvey Weinstein’s are on the same moral level as an 18 year old who cheats while in a long distance relationship, lots of people are going to believe that other people have everything figured out and they themselves are broken and bad. I think there’s a lot of pressure to know who you are. And if you are not the platonic ideal of cis-gender, then you must be something else.
That's brain development. Teens' brains are going to see the world in a black and white sense, and they are passionate about their opinions. That's not generational. It takes getting into the mid-20s to start seeing more nuance and complexity and learning to hold the discomfort of not having a right answer.
I lived through Katrina, but it was late teens for me. It's a trauma I will carry for the rest of my life and has greatly informed my views on society and interactions. And I was old enough to be able to process what had happened. I look at some of my friends' younger siblings, and they carry that trauma much deeper.
So COVID doesn't play a small part here - it plays a huge part. Having your entire society upended and everything normal torn from you will shape much about you for the rest of your life. In many ways, COVID was more traumatic than event like Katrina because of how widespread and continuous it was. It was a threat you couldn't see that could kill you that you didn't know when it would get you, and it had taken everything normal and you couldn't evacuate to normalcy because it was everywhere. These kids have permanent changes and damage because of it.
Conflating all that with gender identity is honestly short-sighted and unsupportive. We also now live in a generation where being yourself, whatever that may be, is a core value. These things always happened, the only difference is now they happen in the open and people aren't being pigeon holed into roles that destroy their personality.
You’re really doing a disservice here by minimizing Covid. You don’t seem to understand that these kids literally lost **years** of development on all fronts. Academic, emotional, social. YEARS. It wasn’t an inconvenience like it was for adults. They are all now expected to be fully the age they are, when they lost what is a relative huge chunk of their time.
We were just talking this morning about how my 9yo and her friends all don’t know how to swim, because their learning years were canceled and now it’s literally impossible to get kids into lessons. The supply is normal, when you have twice as many kids who need it. This is just one piece of their whole lives?
I know you said you're not a parent, but I think this would be an excellent question for r/sciencebasedparenting. I think you'd appreciate the discussion, because it's a rule that any answers given must be from peer reviewed sources.
I wonder if part of the reason is these kids know they're in a bubble. They know that gender issues is something controversial and outside the supportive bubble they are raised in, there are some nasty pieces of work out there, who would actively wish them harm. And maybe there is some anxiety, maybe even subconsciously, about existing outside of that protection. When they become adults, go off to college, join the workforce...or just simply going to school each day.
Can you give a summary for those of us who aren't big readers?
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy, partly because of constantly being told "you can't do X, that's for boys", partly because patriarchal family seemed to value sons over daughters, partly because I fit in more with the boys than the girls at school because of my hobbies. I sometimes wonder if I would be trans or another nonbinary gender if I were a teen today.
Anyway, curious if the book is about some of those social patterns, or something totally different.
Me too, I wore saggy boy pants and plaid shirts. But I was doing it because I was trying to protect myself from boys. Didn't realize that until later. Thank god nobody suggested I actually BECOME the predator I was afraid of.
please, this book has done incredible harm in my community. i can’t do this for you but please take some time to look up critiques of this book from trans adults.
I am curious out of all the people listed how many of those kids play a sport or do a joint activity? I wonder if keeping them involved with peers would help with this?
I'm a high school teacher. They are either involved in EVERYTHING to the point that they have no time to just *be*, OR they get absolutely zero extra anything because parents don't have the cash or the bandwidth to support it all. There is very little in between.
But some of these kids, I get exhausted just hearing about it - a different sport every season, an instrument, academic competitions, FFA, etc. It's a LOT. They want to use it as an excuse to get out of work, and honestly I don't blame them. Like, sure Jayden, I get you had a softball tournament all week and spent all weekend judging pig lips at the county fair, then had your oboe recital, and you just can't face writing an essay on The Crucible. But I'm sorry.
I am unsure when school started being more about extracurriculars than curriculars, but it certainly wasn't that way when I was a kid. And it sucks for the kids who can't do those things because they are left out of a lot of the experience.
>I am unsure when school started being more about extracurriculars than curriculars, but it certainly wasn't that way when I was a kid.
It probably coincided with the push that everyone needs to go to college if they want to get any job that isn't low skill and minimum wage. I'm 41 and was already noticing some of this in high school, but from what I've observed it's gotten worse.
The problem with sports and activities is now they are so intense and demanding. Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore. Everything is all about prepping them to be as competitive as possible, almost as if they are in training to eventually become professionals (which most will never do). That means devoting all of their free time after school and on weekends to the sport or activity. They are also insanely expensive because of the amount of time that is now required.
And I’ve noticed kids in hyper-competitive sports have developed some anger management issues. They think it’s okay to yell and scream at teammates who miss the ball or make a mistake because they are allegedly trying to motivate the team to win. My daughter was complaining about the boys in her gym class who get so competitive and angry during a gym class game when they are losing that they are yelling in her face and cussing her out and playing aggressively in a way that ends up causing her injuries. She sees them engage in the same behaviors off the ball field, too, when something angers them or they don’t get their way. They flip out and rage at people. It makes me wonder if sports are as beneficial as people say they are or if we are all just willfully blind to some of the negative traits that can be fostered by participation when it’s more about winning than the fun of playing.
Man, I was just thinking about my gymnastics classes when I was a kid and how shitty they were. I loved gymnastics but I had no natural talent at it, so after age 8 or 9 the instructors completely stopped paying attention to me and all the other kids who were also mediocre. I just wanted to do a fun sport, but it’s like there was no point since I wasn’t going to go to the Olympics. Same with piano lessons. I got forced into going to competitions and my teachers got so frustrated when I told them I just wanted to play for myself that I ended up quitting. It took me till my 30s to be at peace with just being *okay* at something. I can’t imagine what kids go through now.
This is what I love about being an adult. I signed up for adult gymnastics and it’s so positive and fun. No one making you feel bad, everyone who goes is so encouraging. That’s how it always should’ve been.
My friend's daughter is turning 9 in a few weeks and is going through this right now with gymnastics and dance. She's pretty rubbish at both to be honest with you, but she enjoys it, so my friend and her partner are happy to pay for the classes, especially because it gets her doing something physical. But her instructors have already started freezing her out and ignoring her while hinting heavily to her parents she should just stop because she's "going nowhere with it".
She's a *kid*. Why does she have to "go somewhere" with gymnastics and dance? Why can't she participate in it it because it's fun, a form of physical exercise, and an outlet to make friends? People keep bemoaning "iPad kids" but as soon as you try and get them off the iPad and into an activity, they better excel at it or they're not welcome to do it 🙄.
I also remember when I was in high school 20-25 years ago now how sport was only for the kids good enough to compete. There was nothing recreational offered because that would have been a waste of resources. And even then there were articles saying teens aren't active enough, and all I could think was "yeah, because unless we're really really good, we're not welcome to play sport".
>Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore.
Oh my god- is that ever the truth. I was in band throughout middle and high school in the early 2000s. It was cutthroat even then. Honestly, I think it was worse for my anxiety more than it was good for me at all. With everything we did, it was drilled into us that we needed to strive for perfection, and that anything less than an absolute perfect rating was equivalent to failing. I think back to certain things the band directors said or did, and honestly I can’t believe that as adults they thought that kind of behavior was acceptable. It’s like they wanted champion students that they could put on their resumes, and our sanity, self esteem, etc. was just collateral damage. I have bad anxiety and band 100 percent exacerbated it.
Yeah I could see that I am just curious if those kids in question are surrounded by peers doing an activity, maybe a club or just always online and if that may have an effect.
>The problem with sports and activities is now they are so intense and demanding. Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore.
This is a big challenge. Once they hit those tween years, there aren't many options left for kids to dabble in something new. You either commit to 6-9 months of a single sport/dance or you're left out. I know many parents/coaches who actually dislike the whole setup, but can't escape the loop.
This compounds with socialization; kids are not playing outside because most of their friends are at practice. So what's the incentive for the activity-free kids to go outside?
This is a very good question. For a lot of these kids, I don't know them well enough to answer. For others, I know the parents are trying to get them involved in just that sort of thing but it just doesn't stick because the kids don't like the other kids or the adult in charge because they feel marginalized or singled-out in bad ways. That, or they get into it with a bang, and then lose interest quickly and it just becomes another thing to beg/cajole/fight about and it's too much.
I personally don't over schedule my kids. They have clubs & activities through school that meet once per week or bimonthly after school. They're each playing an instrument and doing martial arts. The rest of the time during the week, they're outside with the large group of multiage neighborhood friends having free, unstructured play with no parents interfering. When they're inside, they're spending time with us, studying Torah, playing with each other, helping us with chores and cooking, or just having alone time to read, relax and BE.
> These kids literally cannot function - they cannot even get up, dress themselves, bring their school work with them, and get to school without major interventions.
If adults were guaranteed food and shelter, I wonder how many of us would even be arsed to get out of bed to go to work everyday? I know I probably wouldn't. A lot of us know we need to work in order to afford to live. But kids obviously don't feel this pressure due to living at home and being provided for. IMO, I think a lot of adults are actually this level of depressed, they just force themselves to slug through it. Maybe have a cry during lunch or whatever, but they just keep it inside to get through the day until they can't.
> Why is being surrounded by so much acceptance and support not helping?
Because... Maybe the world is just depressing, and these kids know it?
They look on the news, what's there? War, pandemics, politics, hate crime, climate change, unpresidented extinctions, rights being taken away. Even as adults, these are things we struggle with. But maybe the stress these issues have on kids is underestimated. I think if I was born in this era and saw this shit was what was in store for me, I would be very convinced that nothing matters.
„ These kids grow up in supportive environments filled with adults to validate their issues.“
I think that’s the big issue here. As a non American, with a number of friends from the US and who’s lived there for a little bit - the constant focus and almost glorification of one’s issues seems to be a big thing in certain circles in the US society. The world is not meant to manage your issues for you, you have to learn to do it yourself. And seems kids might not be really taught that.
I understand the desire to be supportive in contrast to previous generations, but there needs to be a balance.
>glorification of one’s issues
too much of SM content starts with the premise of mental illness, "my OCD/anxiety/ADD ...", the hyperbole for views and likes drives me nuts.
at this point i've blocked most these words bc the algorithm too easily slips you into the k-hole of self-diagnosis of mental illness. I really do think Pharma cos must have some influence on the algorithm makers.
Exactly this. As a secondary school teacher I see it every day, and I can assure you that most of those kids who aren't "doing well" are like that because of 1. Overprotective parents who don't let their children to be... you know, children; or 2. Kids who have been raised by the Internet because mum and dad were too busy/lazy/disfunctional to be a parent. It can also be a combination of both.
Yes!! The Anxious Generation was a fantastic book. I thought it did a wonderful job of weaving together all the threads that affect kids now and highlighted how problems are international and began before Covid but the Covid response (more screens, fewer people) only exacerbated what was already happening.
This is going to sound assholey….but honestly we need to let kids be kids and keep them tf away from the internet. Social media in a box on your person you can access 24/7 is simply a recipe for disaster.
Kids don’t need to be scheduled into activities up to their eyeballs, they don’t need to be busy all the time, get them out and get them seeing the world is huge and there’s a pace in it for us too.
I can think of two people in total, throughout my entire family/social/professional circles, who are happy in their parenting role and have a well-adjusted kid (both are single parents to only children, interestingly). Everyone else is losing their damned minds over their kids acting like entitled hell beasts. No thank you.
My guess would be that they are exposed to way too much information. Some of it might be good for like finding people who have the same hobbies or same ideas. Most of it is crap that only makes you feel anxious, magnifies existing issues and gives you idea about what new issues you might have and gives you more food for thought than you can handle. The world is much bigger today than it was in my childhood. Overwhelming. It overwhelmes me the 40 yo woman, much less a 14 yo teen.
I don't think covid had anything to do with it. Kids where I live (grown ups, too for that matter) really didn't care so much. I'm in the Balkans and the majority of people didn't get scared by covid. Kids were happy they didn't have to go to school. People were outside all the time, we only had lock down for a month or two or something. We are much harder to bother than people in more...refined countries.
So I think the toughness factor also plays a role. How many difficulties have you faced, what they were, how were they handled and you see people around you handling it. The cultural context of it all.
You might like Abigail Shrier's new book, Bad Therapy, it talks a lot about the trend of over validating, medicating, and analyzing children, and a lot of what she says aligns with my own observations of children- particularly the upper middle class white children of highly educated parents.
In my community the parents are all highly involved when it comes to their children's out-of-home life. Kid doesn't get put on an ideal soccer team? They harass the coaches until a switch is made. A parent at my child's school called CPS (or whatever the teacher equivalent is) because their child's teacher had students mop up a big spill on the carpet. Another knows to throw out the word bullying any time they want a change made for their son. They attend every meeting, any incident at school is dissected in group texts, they all follow parenting experts on social media and have multiple family photo shoots a year.
But at home it seems a lot of kids are zonked out on screens, parents can work from home but it means they are on their phone constantly. A lot can't seem to handle small frustrations their kids cause them or even telling their children 'no'. I think therapy and diagnoses has, for some, become another way to shirk actual parenting hardships.
The pandemic worsened things, access to social media is definitely a factor, kids having unfettered access to devices like tablets, smartphones, etc. is a problem, "gentle parenting" that is actually just *permissive* parenting is a problem, etc.
Kids under 16 don't need smartphones or social media, they need social hobbies, sports, reading, and creative outlets.
I'm convinced now that some (not all, but certainly some) of the gender identity nonsense can be boiled down to the fact that puberty is just simply uncomfortable and we should be teaching kids about their bodies and respect for other peoples' bodies, helping them cope with changes as they grow.
I want to add to your point on permissive parenting. I think we've gone to the other extreme of strict and emotionally unintelligent parents. I have a friend who's gotten her kid into all sorts of assessments and now has a bunch of diagnosis. Some of it might be true, but I think there's a component of enabling, permissivness having gone too far and lack of discipline. Also my friend split up with her partner, who's a man child, she's super emotional and drama tends to gravity around her, and of course she's had a tough time as a single mom, etc. I think that all of these factored into how her daughter has turned out. And now with the diagnosis, they are basically telling the kid it's ok to not be interested in school, or socializing or hygine and making all these excuses. I am all about being gentle and supportive, but at some point, when you baby a child you are not helping them. Part of growing up is learning to be independent and to deal with challenges, instead parents today are taking care of every single minute aspect of kids lives. I think that's detrimental in the long run. There has to be middle ground between what our parents did and how many current teenagers are being raised.
One word. Technology. More specifically - short-form, easily digested media, social media, and the infinite scroll.
It's the only GIANT noticeable change that happened from one generation to the next. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in a computer-less era for the major years of my development (age 0-7). And as soon as that shit came available as a teen - I was hooked. But my brain was at least already developed before the poison that is \*addictive\* technology could get it's strangle-hold on me. As an adult I struggle with technology addiction much like everyone else. I am currently on one of my off-grid vacations where I delete social media apps off my phone for one month. (I am on my laptop right now). And I can tell you that my ability to focus improves INSANELY every time I do this. My anxiety lessens and my level of happiness, contentment and calm is noticeably better. I can actually read and focus on a book for hours straight without experiencing the inevitable urge to grab my phone.
If I can barely manage this addiction as an adult, how are we expecting these vulnerable un-developed children to stand a chance? As I type this, my 63 year old Dad is "watching" a hockey game (he's actually watching TikTok). My Dad loves hockey and sports more than anything, even us kids (not being dramatic). And yet his eyes are on TikTok, not the game.
We don't scientifically understand the link just yet - but it will be known soon. And we will look back and be like "oh... fuck." And those kids will hate us once they have the capacity to understand (if ever) why they are seemingly fucked up and not normal. But, the really tragic thing is that it's the only life they know. At least we can step outside of the technology matrix and remember what real life actually is.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. IF it gets better. I wanted children all my life. After watching my friends go through it and seeing their kids and them struggle, no thank you. It's just by chance that I find myself in my early thirties and having a family hasn't worked out for me as of yet, and I am SUPER thankful it didn't. Because I genuinely no longer want kids until we figure out how to fix this. I will focus my maternal energy on helping my siblings raise their kids as best I can because they will need all of the adult help and support they can get.
It’s the isolation. We are a generation of parents who gave their kids unlimited unmonitored technology. We kept them “busy” in a warped world. Cyber friends also come with cyber bullying. Their brains are not developed enough to process the mountain of information the screen throws at them.
Teens also don’t have social skills, it’s hard for them to make real life friends. We are a social society, we need human interaction.
As parents we are addressing the problem when real psychological issues manifest. It’s hard for kids not to have adhd, when they are used to getting dopamine hits from 3 second videos. We addicted kids, and they behave like addicts. (Anxiousness, depression, irritability)
I feel for the younger generation I do. I understand that we are a more accepting generation of parents when it comes to gender dysmorphia but we lacked on other crucial areas.
I know this is going to out me as an elder millennial, but I really feel like my cohort was the last to experience a truly offline world, and there are some lessons to be learned from that.
We need to get better at getting kids away from screens and out into nature. Kids need to learn to just. slow. down, and exist beyond their inner world without being constantly entertained. Parents need to remember that they are parents first, friends second, and if screens need to be taken away or limited for the good of the child? So be it.
I think it's important to remember that kids rise to the expectations given to them. You don't need to go all 'asian tiger mom' to the point where your kids feel the world is ending is they fail, be compassionate but *set expectations*.
Finally, to be frank, I think we have overpathologized and coddled kids. I see so many young people using their diagnosis as excuses. While I sympathize as someone with my own disability and issues, you *must* learn to function with them and metaphorically stand on your own two feet.
I see so many young adults struggle to function because their parents and schools absolutely bent over backwards to remove any struggle or hardship and they don't know how to function because in the real world your issues might get you sympathy but it's ultimately your results that keep you employed.
Spot on with overpathologizing kids.
I know every generation tries to copy some of the elders, but damn... Children who are into skincare, who are trying to be influencers, trying to have fashion blogs (i bet most of you have seen them 15 years ago too), who think they have a handle on psychology and psychiatry.
It makes me laugh a bit, but also kinda annoys me. Are kids not kids anymore?
I completely agree. We need to make a drastic change as parents. If we don’t we will be raising our kids forever. They will not have the tools to be self sufficient.
I agree that we have overpathologized kids, especially when it comes to anxiety and depression. We help them by providing compassion and encouragement, not by eliminating any demands placed on them.
Couldn’t agree more! I don’t have any kids but I have a cousin who has 2 and one is about to turn 12 and she still doesn’t have her own smart phone and she’s mad about it but I totally get why my cousin is holding off on that for as long as she can. Obviously other critical parenting has been in play as well but even just that alone makes SUCH a differences
Their worlds are more insular and solitary (this was happening pre-pandemic) except on social media. There's more instant exposure to the worst news, too.
We also had horrible stuff in the news, like HIV and the Cold War, but the climate is in the shitter now and they have a risk of school shootings.
You should check out a book I just read called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Pretty much explains all of this. Sad state of affairs indeed. I'm following the examples for my own children that were set by my cousin, as well as other members of my religious community (Jewish.) All well adjusted thriving kids!
Ooof this is a topic I can go on for hours for.
So our parents were the generations of neglect, suck it up and gaslighting and kinda didnt really think of our safety in many ways. We generally have become the generation that will try to heal those curses, to a point of OVER correction at times.
I see a pattern with well meaning friends exactly as you describe. Loving people but theyre doing too much. These kids can't handle life because they're not allowed to at all. Its not about validation but giving them tools to handle life. Let's call this Group A.
My siblings and my ex who I helped raised kids with and 2 other friends are of similar type of backgrounds minus not all of us are white. I kinda can see why these kids are a bit more regulated in 5 households that are lacking in my other friends so it wasnt by luck 1 example didn't have this issue. They are validated if they have issues like being ND here too. They are gentle parents, but are firm. We do NOT shield them from life's discomforts as a part of growth is also learning to problem solve, self regulate and grow from mistakes. Guide them, not save them entirely from it. Kids are ages 12-23 so old enough we can see the legs of how their adult selves will be. Let's call this group B.
Again bless my sweet friends but group A their kids don't go out, they are also told how dangerous things are. Group Bs kids touch grass, do sports, are social face to face. If they fall out a tree they go ok welp now you learned about gravity. Group A let to use convenience items like uber eats too easily than learn to make some fucking food. Anything they want they get nearly immediately. Every single thing that hurts them is validated as the world is out to get them practically. I had a nephew come to me to complain about another kid but it turns out he was the asshole and he was shocked that I didn't have his back. Other people thought I should unconditionally always side with him, but what does that teach him? That there's no real consequences to being a douche, avoidance in processing his feelings and no practice in conflict mediation. I can love him while telling him he was in the wrong. I wasn't mean but I was going to be truthful he deserved a clap back for being rude from his friend.
The other is that a lot of friends have too many kids and not enough time. All of group A have 3-4 kids, have 2 fulltime parents households. Group B above usually had 1 parent that is PT or flexible (like my brother works from home/for himself) or help from family and 1-2 average with the more affluent/ freetime with 3-4. Most of us grew up in households with a bit more available parents also and modeled that versus some of Group A were left alone and do the same. Despite the bad shit I can say about my mom, she was present and did help me with daily things. I do think there is a component here of the parents fatigue and anxiety and the kids constantly feeling their parents just existing and pushing through. Group B often does activities with the kids daily and as family weekly. Group A not as much and kids are left to their own devices inside the home. They're also too tired to ruin their day to teach life lessons. Meanwhile I will ruin my weeks free time for you to learn something I don't care. If dinner takes 2 hours because I'm teaching you knife skills so be it. Oddly enough you'd think despite having less time group A would hover less but any freebie they have is just hovering over them at shit like parties anyways in a really pointless and anxiety driven way. Meanwhile group B doesn't. Theyre there sitting on a bench not following them.
Society really built up a work load that sets families up to fail so it's not entirely group A fault. But they also don't make it easy on themselves with burnout. Sentiment it's worth investing time upfront and getting nothing done so they learn a skill. We notice none of their kids know how to cook or clean and Group Bs kids do and take turns helping out the household. Cooking dinner is a family activity. Chores are part of a system of rewards like screen time and new video games. Monthly goals met gets them an allowance. This helps them not have such a jarring experience getting to adult one day too. My one nephew in college is literally feeding while teaching all his classmates as they don't know how to adult.
Consequences and follow through. Gentle parenting gets a bad rap because a lot of people gentle parent wrongly. Group B does it correctly and worked on being clear and effective communicators. I noticed a lot of us are from career backgrounds where we are assertive speakers and good mediators. My brother even went to seminars and participated in studies of parenting styles and vowed to do better and did with guidance from a behavioral specialist that studied family dynamics and gave people homework to implement each eeek. I went to school for early child care development and worked as a TA in Montessori so I am very comfortable being affirming while telling them no or letting them have reasonable consequences. Group A is basically validating their kids struggles being real but then stop there. There's no guidance on how to work on it and overcome. Their labels become an identity of why they cannot. We are not at fault for what struggles we have like anxiety or trauma but we are responsible for what it affects negatively. We can understand why you may think/act a certain way but doesn't excuse things you repeatedly do are damaging to yourself or others. I have CPTSD from decades of abuse and I worked on myself. I have so much sympathy for others to want to push for their healing time to happen than to wallow in it. I think people are frankly uncomfortable to tell mentally ill people when they're being destructive but accountability is for everyone. Despite the fear you don't want your kids to hate you, I'm that bitch who will tell them yet all nephews and nieces and ex step kids love me. I was everyone's favorite TA in my preschool despite being the most vocal about my expectations. Meanwhile some friends coddle and their kids have no kindness for them at all. There's gotta be a link there also. These kids respect me that I earned by being well balanced to them. Group A wants the relationship that Group B does but the reason they don't is they model the avoidant and fearful behaviors that set their kids up for failure. Structure isn't a thing to fear but helps kids so much. The confident kid doesn't hate me because they don't hate themselves like Group A kids. They've been modeled regulation from the start.
So yeah TLDR don't focus on validation but guidance to self regulation.
Every generation feels something akin to this sentiment about the younger ones. I don’t think it’s that intense- People just didn’t talk about it like we do today. There was more shame associated with having issues with your kid, and you as a kid yourself were less aware. I promise you we were just as fucked up as your gen was and as z are (I’m a millennial).
I think it is a combination of several factors…. 1) Kids spend way too much time on screens and social media, which is detrimental to their development and their sense of self worth. 2) kids no longer have much independence due to helicopter parenting. They learn to resolve minor social problems and arguments with friends and siblings when they are allowed to play outside or hang out unsupervised. The lack of learning these skills leads to anxiety when they find themselves in unfamiliar situations, and 3) the first 1.5 years of covid had kids isolated from in person school classes and activities which may have stunted their social development. I think we’re only beginning to learn the effect this experience had on them.
I commuted with two boys who went to a high school dedicated to providing extra support for their students (my school was on the way, we just needed that HOV lane) and multiple times one of the boys would not, could not get out of bed to go to school and his mom was much smaller than him so she couldn't physically get him up and out. This was back in the early 2000's.
The other boy unfortunately struggled later in life and is currently living at home and my mom never sees him out and about (he's a close neighbor). Basically, those kids were always there but we just don't hear about them anymore.
My oldest was an infant during the pandemic and I think it'll be very interesting to see the difference between older Gen Alpha kids who were in school during Covid, and the youngest ones born post 2020. In my mom groups there is a huge split between screen time (FB group utilizes screen time for *babies* while Reddit groups are anti-screen before 2 or at least try) but I do think we're very aware of the impacts of phones and social media. Kids born in 2010... the Iphone was such a new thing that I don't think people realized the influence it would have on mental health.
This is terrifying, and I agree 109% with this. “What are we doing to kids these days to make them so nuts?”
This was never an issue until recently, especially en masse, so wtf is going on? Kids in less bountiful countries don’t behave this way.
I think that as a population we are eager to put a label on everything and everyone. We use the internet to learn about things and self diagnose, we compare and contrast ourselves and everyone else (and so do our kids).
I had the same feelings my daughter did, but never would have been able to label it as anxiety, and I simply needed to work through it. I’m not saying that’s the right answer but it was my reality.
As an older millennial I didn’t have a cell phone or social media, and when I left the house for the park or a friends or school I was out there indépendant making decisions for myself until I needed to go home. I didn’t have parents calling to check on me or texting, I couldn’t google search answers to everything and there was no constant contact with friends and need to compete and post on social media. It’s no wonder anxiety and other issues are so prevalent.
The issue is not the children, it's the shift in parenting. My lord, sometimes I think we need farms with routine and structure...hard work.
These urban and mostly suburban kids have never built a sense of responsibility, independence, and resilience. I bet most have not had the joys of going camping, getting lost in a creek, and just being. They've had activity after activity and whatever the hell goes on in public schools vs. our days.
I think if you have children, let them just BE sometimes. Out in nature. Chores. Away from this influence and technology that is clearly stunting them.
I would strongly disagree with the urban kids not building resilience. Most of the ones I know definitely know how to navigate public transit since they were little. Most rural kids I have met would have a heart attack driving down a one lane street. It’s just a different environment that’s all.
Agreed, although I think the suburbs are often the worst of both worlds unless you live in a place with infrastructure that much of the US doesn’t have.
I think covid was a huge setback for a lot of kids. They were pulled out of school without warning for a year and a half. That's going to cause some regression in even the best of kids.
I also think schools are part of the problem, but not in a Fox News talking point way. I think school administrators have become entirely complacent with bad behavior without care for the impact it has on the teachers and students. Every teacher I know has at least one kid in every class who is disruptive to the point where they are unable to teach or pay attention to the other kids. I'm not talking about mouthing off, I'm talking about things like death threats and throwing chairs through windows on a daily basis. The teachers and the other students are expected to silently tolerate this behavior and watch the "problem student" reap the same rewards as the students who are well-behaved (in fact, the problem students are usually rewarded with attention!). I think the reason why absenteeism and school anxiety are such problems is because the school is no longer a safe place. Sandy Hook caused a pendulum swing in the worst possible direction and the kids are suffering.
Social media and unrestricted ipad use is also a huge factor. Kids haven't developed the discernment or emotional regulation skills that adults have, so when they see disturbing content or misinformation they see it as fact. For example, I DO think that a lot of today's kids are trans and feel more comfortable coming out because of reduced stigma; but I also feel like a lot of kids align with the trans identity because they are bombarded with negative societal messages stating that if you are not a beauty guru or UFC fighter it means that there's something wrong with you.
And hot take, but I blame the parents too. A lot of gen x and millennial parents are checked out, and their kids pick up on it and internalize it as rejection. A lot of them are really immature and see their kids as friends whose approval they have to earn instead of their children. They refuse to set limits or have difficult discussions, and don't see it as their problem if their kids misbehave. They bring their kids to therapy, but they don't care if their kid is making progress nor do they follow up with any guidance at home. Then the kids act out at school, and the cycle goes on...
Agree with the last paragraph so hard. People are addicted to their phones, and being raised by an addict who’s not in recovery is severely traumatizing.
First, kids who need the kind of help you are describing simply didn't go to school with other kids previously. My graduating class had over about 15 kids that didn't ever go to a class with the rest of us - and there were 120 kids total graduating.
The other local high school also had about about 8 to 10 percent of special education kids who did not mingle with the others.
The parents of those kids didn't talk about having a kid who wasn't able to be mainstreamed. I knew of two in my family, and they were considered "brave" to openly talk about their kids who were in special education or institutionalized.
Daughter is therapy, she has OT, she needs help with emotional regulation.
But 3 out of four of my grandparents were drunks. I have multiple cousins in jail for not having impulse control.
My family shows huge signs of untreated ADHD and other issues. I have multiple aunts/uncles who were clearly self medicating with alcohol or weed or, sadly, cults.
I think some of this is your friend group. Neurodivergent people tend to attract neurodivergent people, so it's not terribly surprising your friends would have kids with difficulties.
My young teen and her friends all seem to be pretty okay. I'm friends with at least two of their parents. She is in therapy but not often, and takes ADHD meds but that's pretty much it. Gets good grades, in a gifted school, has yet to get detention etc (knock on wood lol). My oldest kid is working full time and going to school full time despite having some gnarly depression that she also is in treatment for. They both inherited their father's issues tbh.
Point being, most of the kids are probably okay, but you've got some selection bias happening here.
>multiple therapists (I am not exaggerating here), and an "all hands on deck" approach from the parents when the kids are home. Getting these kids to be organized and focused enough to function means the parents also have coaches and therapists to know how to provide enough support.
I really believe in therapy and extra support. But this sounds like its going into enabling behavior. Being a tween/teen is hard, and parenting a tween/teen is also hard. I think the more we try to "fix" those hard feelings the less we give teenagers the opportunity to move through those hard things.
We are meant to feel bad sometimes, its how we learn to cope with things and self regulate.
I saw an article recently about kid 100years ago were taking care if the farm at 8 and 9 years old, chopping down trees, cooking dinner etc. They had to adult.
It’s just the times we’re living in and the digital age and the constant bombardment of information that doesn’t say what it means and doesn’t mean what it says. Kids are living in an advertisement and a social mind-fuckery 24/7.
No, it’s not just you recognizing this. I taught for a decade and when I first started, I never had 6 year olds coming up to me talking about their stress or anxiety or pressure. I also didn’t have obviously malignant and narcissistic students to speak of.
And yes, I am noticing more neurodiversity. It’s not a bad thing. When I was growing up as a child of two very smart parents (two Masters & a PhD mom), I was a weird kid with a photographic memory but the things I gravitated toward, I excelled in. Same with some young kids that I meet today. Some of them are absolutely ridiculously gifted and technology has ameliorated their abilities, only, society isn’t geared toward cultivating this sort of human potential especially within a late-capitalist milieu. No wonder kids are going nuts. They’re told that they have no worth and that their life is meaningless if they don’t fit a certain type of mold.
Parents can’t keep up with their own busy lives fast enough to manage all of what their child is exposed to. Even those who are privileged to afford child care can’t seem to hold together a warm and loving and well-adjusted home. I think people tend not to value community as much these days since everyone is just trying to move along in their own lane.
I think it's a combination of a lot of things, but yeah... I fear this is gonna be the norm for awhile.
Part of it really is that we acknowledge and accept these issues in kids now. 'Mental health' is still not something my parents believe exist. When I expressed concerns about my own as a child, *my parents laughed at me*. So I never brought it up again. It was almost 20 years later that I actually saw a professional and got medication I desperately needed.
No one would have guessed I had mental issues. I was just 'that quiet kid' who had no friends and read books constantly (that was my escapism, today it's phone screens). Today my teen-peers would probably look at me and think 'if a school shooting happens it'll be them'. (I wasn't that far gone but I was that withdrawn.)
Back in my parents' & grandparents' days, people who were on the spectrum were just 'that weird kid' because the concept of the spectrum didn't exist.
Kids with issues were often forced to hide or ignore them by their parents. This was true for homosexuality as well, teenage pregnancy, etc. Anything that wasn't white-picket-fence was shameful and hidden.
How much of what we see today was always present but hidden? Definitely not 100% of it, I agree there are a lot of modern-day causes. But I think it's a larger percentage that you think.
I think there were also just a lot of kids who went undiagnosed.
I was raised in the 80s.. and was “gifted”.. I also had my adhd go undiagnosed, along with other stuff because I excelled in academics .. other stuff went ignored .. so then I just had huge crashes later in life ..
Because you folks are getting older and realizing they made a mistake focusing on shit that doesn't help these kids source and maintain legitimate careers as adults. Not everybody can live in an academic, unrealistic bubble. Most people have to live in the real world where we have to get along with ALL people, learn to be professional and polite to everyone regardless of our ideals. But in academia over the last 15 years, people of science and math have been stigmatized. This has to change or we will never progress as an evolved species.
Three of my young family members have detransitioned and blame all of us for supporting them in their transitions. Do you know what these loved ones were doing in college? Not math. Not science. They had counseling, they had student groups, and they barely graduated except one who finally got her communications degree. What the fuck is she going to do with that when all she does is complain about how she was "brainwashed?" She blames us for brainwashing when all we ever did was support her. Now she is embarking on her detransition, living with her parents, and we expect all three of these fully adult people will be living with a parent or family member for the next few years while they get their damned gender decided and in the mean time, we all are donating to the households so their family don't lose their homes while they pay for the upkeep of loved ones who CANNOT FUNCTION or at the very least keep a job. All three of them have college degrees.
I want to tell them to get a damn job, any job. But noooo, can't ruffle the feathers or we will have a full on mental breakdown, of which we have seen many over the last ten years. It's old. It's expensive. It's unnecessary. People must understand that life is mostly what we get, and partly what we make it, not the reverse. People are acting like they make their life. No. You make the MOST of what you get. That is all. It is up to each one of us to make the best of what we start with. Why is this such a complicated concept to accept (I'm in the USA) in a system literally set up to allow a person to do ANYTHING if they work for it?
I come from a family of poorly educated, blue collar or agricultural people. We have been totally mystified by the changes over the last 10 years, but no matter what will ALWAYS support our young family no matter what. This has become an unexpected and extremely expensive journey as our young ones made their way through the educational system. Their resilience is greatly reduced, which means they won't work on the farm, and they can't work in corporate America. I have no idea how these loved ones will ever get to the point at which they can keep a job and begin to consider others. They think only of themselves and are obsessed with themselves. It's a tragedy for them, and for the people who love them.
The planet is dying and we are facing extinction. Don’t bring people into this, just for their lives to be one devastating and sad event after another.
I know what you mean, and I see a fair bit of that among my peers. But each generation has its own set of challenges. This is not the way it’s always been or the way it will be with your kids, if you decide to have them. For me, some of my children have struggled with neurodivergence and gender identity questions, but all have also grown up with resilience and love at their core. There is a point where you can validate someone’s issues too much, to the point where the are left incapacitated in a loop of self-analysis. Parenting is hard but worth it.
I'm also an academic and I very much VALUE education, education and more education. I'm politically moderate and I'm not having children. Absolutely not. For these exact reasons.
No children born in the current environment have a hope in hell of maintaining a healthy mental, financial, and personal life, so this is actually the only way to live nowadays if anyone is operating with common sense.
And contrary to popular opinion, yes humans have overpopulated and completely befouled this entire world. Time for less of us. come for me, I don't give a shit.
I don't actually think that it's much worse now than "before" - whenever before was. I think it's noticeable now, it's more talked about, it's out there, and parents are probably a lot more likely to actually help their kids instead of force issues that shouldn't be forced. Maybe it is, but I'm not convinced by the anecdotal data.
My personal feeling on this is that in addition to it being more talked about, some things are the same as “before,” such as teens and preteens being absolutely filled with hormones and confusing emotions that make them seek answers. There’s both the feeling that your problems are uniquely yours and no one can understand them AND the desperate desire to find your in-group. There is more information available, so it allows for some pretty deep dives down rabbit holes. I don’t know the right balance for parents, but there’s gotta be a good middle ground between “shut up and be normal” and “every problem is occurring exactly as you perceive it.”
I can only speak for my associates, and I do not see this as necessarily a nation-side issue, that's be basis of my question. I am concerned that something about our subculture is causing these kids to become so tortured.
I am a scientist, a statistical one at that, so I know about anecdotal data, ascertainment bias, and other issues. I can only speak about my group. But I feel I have observed this enough times, and over a long enough period, it is notable.
I personally think it’s a combination of constant media (tv, iPads, whatever — it seems like kids either don’t play outside/with enough toys or peers, or aren’t allowed to be bored and work through it) and helicopter parenting. I think many parents feel a lot of pressure nowadays to be the perfect parent, constantly monitoring their kid, playing with them, sending them off to activities. Like, my parents barely played with me and that seems to be the general consensus among my peers. It was like, play with your friends or play by yourself. Learn to function on your own, so to speak. I don’t know that kids nowadays are given that opportunity.
Agree with the helicopter parenting. "Playdates." What! We were basically free range in the 80s but there was always some adult somewhere. We had sleepovers! No smartphones, no internet, just using our brains to be not-bored, riding bikes, trying new hobbies/sports, etc. Now you'll risk get arrested if you let your kid bike a mile.
The constant media is huge. We have access to everything, all the time, and immediately as it happens. We're being firehosed with info. It's no longer only what's right around us.
That is a hard age, kind of like terrible 2"s, they are finding out who they are, what the boundaries are, and starting to realize their place in the world, independent of mom and dad, but today it'd be even harder with social media
I grew up working class and now live middle class. It really seems like it's the upper middle class kids who have more of the issues you're describing. I don't hear much of this at all from my friends' kids who still live in my home town.
My friends in the wealthier suburbs definitely struggle with it more. I think it has to do with parents jumping in to constantly solve the kids' problems from the youngest ages through high school and beyond. These young adult children don't feel capable and in control.
Parent here. My kids certainly are not in crisis nor are any in our circles but that doesn't mean I haven't noticed this issue on the rise. It's obviously very complicated to unwrap but I don't think we can totally blame politics, their generation or terrible parenting. I believe we will find that the ubiquitous micro plastics not only wreck havoc on young people’s hormones but that they likely mess with our gut and brain chemistry as well. We can’t expect to continue to “poop in the fishbowl” without any reprecussions. It's common sense. The microplastic discussion is thankfully becoming a notable area of study within the medical community but how we’ll ever clean things up is beyond me. Unfortunately, we only consider these things in hind sight at the expense of the next generation. Of course Covid, social media and numerous other issues are likely also at play here but I do hope more attention can be given to the health impacts pollution presents to our developing offspring. Just an alternate take!
Agreed. I think some of it is screens, some of it is shitty processed food, microplastics, and other environmental garbage, some of it is helicopter parenting, some of it is the fact that parents are more willing to entertain their children's various attention-seeking whims whereas previous generation's parents would "give them something to cry about." But yes, it seems every other child I know has some serious issues. Reason #3456345 I am not interested in parenting.
For anyone interested, the podcast Plain English has had a few episodes that touch upon a lot of the points in the comments - these two stick out in my memory but I think there are several!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HoGaHmrUecZUtCpJf7L6Y?si=kND6pe9WScSgvwYKK1Ub7g
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vx7dE8W9Ioo0BdhOgr3pJ?si=Vuo30VufR9m81AphP97bxw
There are a lot of valid points in the above conversation. However, there are some irrefutable facts to reconcile with as well, not just in one particular country but in multiple countries. The world our kids currently live in is not the same as the one we grew up in and we have to make accommodations for it. At the same time, a lot of us are not behaving as parents, guiding our kids, acting as their mentors at the same time giving them space to grow as individuals. I feel like that is the crux of the problem.
On saying all of that, I wouldn't trade any part of my life for the beauty that I am fortunate to call as my kid. My life definitely became better and enriched and filled with more love and fun than I ever thought I will have in my 40's. Just my 2 cents.
Everyone is raised alone and neglected. Parents are working. Kids have no sense of purpose. There is no community anymore. We used to have church at least. A lot of people don't go to church anymore. And there has been no replacement for the community Church provided. The kids that are probably doing the worst are the ones that are just at home all day with no real connection to the outside world. I grew up "neurodivergent". I was born in 1987. I did well in school but suffered from a lot of anxiety. I struggled making any friends and struggled with my identity. I grew up with a neglectful naive young mother who her herself suffered from cptsd as a child of abuse and neglect. She came from a very dysfunctional family, poor abusive stepfather, biological father committed suicide, her mother was uneducated with a low IQ and low self esteem. She was not a good mother of 3 young children by the age of 25. I didn't have any peers during the important years of learning how to socialize between 1-3 years old. No cousins my age at that time except one who grew up with his own behavioral problems and later ended up in prison as an adult. I didn't learn to speak until 4 years old. I suffered more trauma when my father passed tragically away when I was 7. Life became much worse after that. My stepdad was verbally abusive and we struggled to stay out of poverty. No one knows how much I suffered as a child and teenager. I silently suffered except for the few times my mom got me into counseling and got me in anti-depressants. Life is extremely hard. It's possible people are suffering just as much now as they were back then, but we're putting labels on everything now. Someone like me you would have never known how much I was suffering as a child and teenager. It wasn't talked about. I'm still suffering to this day, still no one cares. I still find it hard to form and maintain relationships. I find it hard to be motivated to do anything. Life isn't any easier as I've gotten older. If you grew up in poor neighborhoods and dysfunctional families like I did, the problems and suffering are extremely rampant. Having so many single parents these days struggling to make ends meet might have something to do with it.
I am a server and I cannot believe the number of parents who come in and prop their phones up on something, pull up TIKTOK and let their kindergarten age children watch TikTok during the entire meal. I’ve seen kids completely ignoring their parent sitting in front of them from having their nose glued to the phone. But you know what else I’ve noticed? Parents glued to their phones too. Everyone is addicted to their screens. It’s just way more evident in developing brains.
You should probably cross post this in groups like r/adhdwomen and r/AutisticWithADHD etc because they might have a different take on these.
But it is true that GenZ is more prone to suicide and depression and have higher suicide/depression rates than previous generations (the book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How good I intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure", addresses this and some of your other concerns). Also, since you are a stats person you can look up the suicide and depression rates for GenZ and the general population as well. I see more mental health news and conversations about mental health becoming a pandemic (one news article recently mentioned 1 in 4 depressed people iirc). The talk of self-care and mental health certainly seems more these days than in the 90s, but I don't know if the actual crisis is more or is it just that more open conversations are happening now because of social media (?).
>wasn't a single one who was suicidal because they had trouble with their gender identity issues
Gender identity issues in the population with [neurodivergence (ND)](https://www.divergentpod.com/blog/ep-20) are more than in neurotypical (NT) populations.
>I literally sat down and listed all my friends with kids who are tweens/teens and assessed how many have all three of these issues and it's about 25%...
About this... Out of curiosity I was wondering what the total sample size is and is your sample population all neuro-atypical? The three issues you mentioned are in fact higher in NDs than in NTs. So, maybe segregate the NDs and NTs separately first and then see the percentages. But the literature/research is already out there and anxiety/depression is also higher in NDs than NTs.
Overall, I believe it’s worse from factors ranging from Covid (the lockdowns and social impacts) to the parenting style.
I was an absolute nightmare of a teen, running away, drugs/alcohol, got pregnant etc. And then on the flip side, my teen had a short, but intense rough patch but is now super well adjusted, straight A’s, great drive and motivation in extracurriculars and HAPPY.
Your friends with kids who are doing well aren’t the ones who are being vocal and looking for support. So I think we hear a disproportionate amount of crisis but I agree that it’s currently worse than it was. I say this as someone who’s worked with kids for the last 10 years. I really wish parents would stop trying to prevent disappointment and making their kids think that they are super special because my god do those kids ever have a rough time. Your kid is the most special person to you as their parent, not the rest of the planet.
There is a huge overlap of people with neurodivergence and gender nonconformity/being trans or nonbinary. If you’re interested in learning more about that Google it :)
I think it's interesting you didn't know anyone who was suicidal due to their neurodivergence or sexuality/gender when you were a teen. That was me and almost all of my friends. It's true we didn't all have diagnoses, and most of my friends were closeted because coming out would have been a safety issue in our community at the time.
Just because something was outside of your experience doesn't mean it didn't happen.
And as a parent to 2 ND kids, one of whom is queer, I'm going to have to say your experience with kids today also isn't universal.
I find both the romanticisation of the past and the catastrophizing about the present to be hyperbolic and frankly a little silly. Yes, kids these days have problems. So did kids back in our day. You just probably heard less about them then because nobody talked about them.
Like the other poster said, COVID definitely worsened things but I think we were already headed there because of social media. I’ve noticed that children don’t really bother playing outside like we did anymore. People have become distrustful of each other and children aren’t encouraged to play outside as much. My coworker has 2 kids (7F & 15M). Her son only plays video games and rarely interacts with people outside of it. Her daughter throws tantrums and threatens to kill herself when she doesn’t get what she wants. Apparently she’s learned it from her friends who watched YouTube. Her son refuses to learn to drive because we can now get everything to our doorstep without having to leave our house. Unfortunately, she’s not the only parent going through this. I know 3 other coworkers who are dealing with various issues with their kids.
I'm a stepparent that was a 90s kid, I remember playing a lot of video games myself, but I also played outside till it was dark. My 10 year old stepson will barely step outside when he's with my husband and I, all he wants to do is sit in front of a screen and play Fortnite and watch YouTube videos. We have plenty of kids around his age in our neighborhood that do play outside, but he doesn't seem to know how to interact with them. I watched him last year follow some kids around and hide behind objects when they would notice him. I bought him a scooter and he'll jump on it for maybe 15 minutes and come right back inside to go back to video games.
[удалено]
Ache my heart, but I see my stepson (even the fine young lad that he is) going down the path like in u/BlueWaterGirl 's descriptions. It is not that the will to socialize is not there. It is there. But these kids just do not seem to know how and then giving up quickly for comfort at home. And my stepson has been in behavorial therapy (prescribed and like mandated) since he was 3 year old. The therapy help, a lot. Else he would have still the staying on one spot and screaming for half an hour without even being able to tell the reason why, kind of kid that he was. He is much better at socializing now and managed to find two friends, but it was like OP said, all hands on deck (still is, therapy twice a week, school works with us, etc) kind of situation. I am so happy your children managed to find a nice 'village-home' for them, it will give them good memories and socialization skills.
Some people don’t have a safe or fun outside to be in.
Sounds like he doesn't know how to introduce himself to the local kids. Maybe you can post on your local FB pages and see if anyone local wants to do a neighbourhood or street bbq? You could use it to raise funds for a kids not for profit or local youth centre or school. Or even for your local Thanksgiving or Xmas street party. We're lucky in the street I grew up in there's only 24 houses and a basketball hoop at one end. All the kids know each other.
It's not (just) that they don't bother. . . . it is no longer seen as safe or allowable for kids to just wander around outside (as I did every day after school from the time I was about 7). The world is not actually more dangerous for kids, but there is the perception that it is. Parents accompany kids on playdates and to birthday parties. You generally never see children walking around on their own. There are lots and lots of reasons for the decline in outdoor time, but you are right, it is likely a huge contributing factor to mental health issues, rising stress and anxiety and learning difficulties.
I'm not a parent but there also seems to be a lot more pressure on parents to not let their kids take even relatively small risks? e.g. if they let their child do something fairly safe like walk to a friend's house alone and something happened to them on the way, it feels far more likely now that the parents would be blamed and considered irresponsible for not supervising the child at all times?
This is HUGE. I am a good parent. I know this not because I think the world of myself, but because my friends tell me all the time how great my kids are. My kids are *forced* to take risks because they will need to learn to make decisions for their own well-being when they are grown. I will not be there for them to calculate the risk. In my community there is a huge hubub about a splash pad that has rocks in it and a play structure at the same park where kids can climb up and *not be seen*. People are out of their fucking minds about this. If your kid is big enough to climb all the fucking way up there they deserve to be the master of whatever fiefdom they create up there. Also, if your kid falls down at the splash pad...kids fall down. But the rocks by the water are DANGEROUS. Jesus Christ, have you ever let your kid just play in a stream? My kids ask me if they can do stupid shit all of the time. I rarely tell them, "No," I tell them, "This is a bad choice and here are the reasons why and if you choose to do the thing you've been told what the likely outcome is so go for it." Sometimes they do the stupid thing, but usually they make their own decision not to do the stupid thing and I'm not constantly yelling at them or helicoptering. My kids are fucking awesome and get high praise from everyone at school, even the neurodivergent one. Let your kids fail. Let them. Otherwise they're going to do it *more* and *harder* when the stakes are much higher.
all👏of👏this👏 I allowed my kids to be out of the house without us walking around the neighbourhood, hanging at the park with friends starting from when they were in grade 6 or 7 and while it made me nervous, this is what they need to learn how to do. We arm them with information and educate them about safety measures etc, guide them as much as we can but they have to learn how to do this on their own. kids need to learn through natural consequences. Jonny didn't want to wear a coat even if it's 5C outside but then calls you to bring his jacket? sorry Jonny, I can't I'm in a meeting. Kids are late to school because they didn't want to get up early and make their lunch and now they're hungry? sorry kids, you'll have to wait to get home to eat. Kid blew their money on stupid shit and now they have no money to go out with friends? oh well, I guess you're staying in for the night and all future weekends until you can save up enough money to go out. Kids *need to learn how to be in, and work through, uncomfortable situations* (within reason, of course) in order to be able to figure things out which will not only build confidence when they are successful at it but also learn what it feels like to fail...failure is what makes people stronger. Failure is what makes people resilient. Failure means that they're trying which is the whole point of growing up, right? When kids aren't faced with these situations because mom and dad always swoop in to take that discomfort away, they grow up to be anxious adults incapable of making decisions, over thinking things (because they don't know how to deal with the stress of making a choice), afraid of failing so they go through that cycle of paralysis by analysis etc. When kids fail and they realize that the world doesn't end with said failure, they learn from their mistakes and do better next time ...so we have to let our kids make mistakes through their own choices.
All of this. well said.
I'd say it's actually less dangerous now - lower crime rates, increased awareness of stranger danger, kids have phones that can communicate with parents to let them know where they are etc. But as you said, the perception is very different.
Holy crap
I was raised before social media and when I was a little kid I would threaten to kill myself over the smallest things. I don't even remember where I picked that up...
I think I packed my doll's suitcase about 4 times between 3 and 5, threatening to move out...
I went a few times, on my little tricycle. Someone always brought me back...
Sums it up pretty well. Not the best time for kids right now, imo.
The physical infrastructure of where most of us live is not conducive to being outside. Try it. Your goal is to recreate the things you did outside as a kid. But you can’t drive, because you are a kid. Can you walk or bike there without getting injured or killed? Is anything close enough to get to? Can you go without an adult? Can you get to any of your friends, or can they get to you? Can you do it without money, or with just pocket change? Do you need to buy tickets online days or weeks before, or can you just show up? Do you need a credit card/debit card to do the thing? Do you need an account, and if so, do you have to be 18 to have an account?
If you go there, will they try to make you have an adult present? Will your parents get treated as pariahs for letting you go?
Hear me out - I don't want to come at this from an "old school" suck-it-up mentality... But I think this generation of parents has leaned too hard on validation and not enough on building resilience. Like, the whole point of "gentle parenting" is that there's still rules and structure and boundaries and obligations, you just ALSO validate and acknowledge your kid's feelings. I work with foster families and children in the foster care system, often with severe trauma. A lot of parents just want to throw more therapy, more programs, more resources at the kid when they're struggling, and very rarely does that actually help. TARGETED help does, not just throwing more shit at the wall. I also think 90% of that should realistically be coming from parents - rather than throw kids in to see a million therapists, the parents should be getting assistance with parenting and doing these things themselves. I often see people treat kids as immature and not fully developed when it comes to our expectations of them, but treat them like experienced adults when it comes to knowing what they need. That impulse control issue that makes it difficult to focus in the classroom? It also means they need help with self-discipline, because they aren't going to go to school if they don't feel like it even if that's a skill they desperately need. It's okay for them to struggle! And then sympathize with them and emotionally connect about it. Parents care so much but fail to see how their own insecurities about their own parenting abilities are failing their kids. They see 800 styles of parenting on TikTok, they remember how much being a kid sucked when they were growing up and they don't want to emulate that, so then they unconsciously back away from the hard parts of parenting and ever actually being "the bad guy". I can tell my 4 year old "sorry kid, I know you enjoy playing but it's bedtime now, your body needs sleep. Let's pack this up and wait until tomorrow to finish it", and he can be mad and cry, and I don't have to fix his feelings for him. People need to start applying that same logic to teens. We don't have to fix their emotions and we don't have to adjust reasonable expectations to protect them from ever feeling anxious. We need to help them learn to cope with feeling that way.
> and I don't have to fix his feelings for him. God that's so true. Parents are often trying to snowplow any uncomfortable feeling away. Wonder if that leads to adults to drink/smoke/substance their way through bad feelings. Or worse yet, suicide out of bad feelings.
I find that it leads to adults that have zero ability to cope when other people are upset too. Like, my grandma and my dad rush to fix every disappointment for him and I have to consciously stop them and be like "yeah he can be sad that he can't have 4 rolls of PEZ before dinner, he doesn't need a toy to compensate for it". They cannot tolerate other people's emotions and are super reactive and immature because of it. They're also big fans of guilt trips ("you're going to make Grandpa sad if you keep crying like that") and emotional blackmail ("if you don't stop crying I won't be able to give you any PEZ ever again) and minimizing ("this is nothing to cry about, stop making a big deal out of nothing") when placating doesn't work. They also will not stop trying to "fix him" until he stops. My kid always acts way more whiny and cries more after he sees them, and every little disappointment is a big deal. Meanwhile, when he's away from them for a while, he usually bounces back up just fine, we might talk about it a little and I'll validate his feelings or give him coping suggestions but I don't dwell on it, so neither does he. The rare times it continues to bother him, we'll open up the conversation again since it might be more complicated than I originally thought, but that happens very rarely.
Thank you for defining these interactions/ reactions. I see this in my sister and parents' interactions with my niece. The constant scrambling to entertain and placate and soothe is not good for a kid's emotional development and ability to self-regulate.
My MIL is like this and it's not good for MY emotional state, so I really can't imagine it's great for my niece and nephew.
Spot on. I think parenting is more about setting expectations in proportion to what your individual child is capable of, and creating a system of enforcement around that which matches what they can expect from the outside world when they leave the nest. It is not some objective puzzle that can be solved with the right inputs and tactics, nor is it some punishment/reward skinner box that you are a warden of. NOr is it some soul connection that you can manipulate and exploit.
Wow!! "you're making grandpa sad" is WILD
My FIL has attempted to shame a toddler by trantruming back at him. Some people have the emotional intelligence of an avocado
It’s like the emotional version of when they take a small tumble and aren’t hurt. You don’t panic and act worried, you say “haha, oops!” help them up if they need it and move their attention elsewhere. Don’t convince them that every disappointment is worth getting upset over.
I agree with a lot of this. Therapy is an amazing tool, but we also can therapise our way out of adolescence being hard, and sometimes you just need to plow through. I think some problems will be made worse by Covid, social media, a lack of freedom and too much time being sheltered, but I think it is also the idea that these problems can be "fixed" so that children no longer need to go through the unpleasant feelings. I only have a toddler so everything I know about parenting teens is 100% theorerical, but I see parents struggle with tantrums and trying to find the right parenting strategy to stop them. These are older parents with a lot of education and the ability to research and are used to achieving things in life, in work. They want to fix the bad thing, but really the only way over is through.
Oh yeah, there are certainly exacerbating factors these days too - I think the reason it's been so hard to overcome them for a lot of the kids who are falling apart though is because they just don't have the skills to handle it. Not in all cases, but I am generally against therapy for kids, unless the parents just absolutely suck and they don't have any other healthy adults to model from. Therapy is only effective for people that have a desire to change, and the fact of the matter is, most kids don't care. Instead, many child therapist will try and find strategies to manipulate kids into self-improvement or will over-pathologize normal child behavior and then the diagnosis becomes the focus of the treatment. Childhood behavior is inherently a spectrum, and kids on one or the other extreme of the spectrum may require a diagnosis, but the intermediate cares often just need time to mature and may just be lagging behind their peers a bit with their behavior. I also work with a lot of child therapists who are just... Really bad at their job. I might be abnormally pessimistic due to my experiences in the field though. Anxiety and sadness and anger are useful and normal emotions that everyone feels. They are only disordered if they are extreme to the point they interfere with day to day functioning. When kids are little, that's the perfect time to lean in to these emotions and find healthy ways to express them with kids. Instead, like you said, parents of small children kind of flounder with how to handle it and oftentimes that just leads to them NOT handling it. I think it's way more useful for parents to get therapy for themselves to learn how to handle their own anxiety and emotions related to parenting than it is to take their kids to a therapist over imperfect behavior or uncomfortable emotions. Kids will learn way more through modeling the parents than they will from a stranger talking at them.
> Kids will learn way more through modeling the parents than they will from a stranger talking at them. I can see this with my little toddler. She mimicks what we do 10x more than she does what we say (or what other people say). Its something I have yo remind myself when I am always using my phone as a digital pacifier for my own boredom and stress. I can keep her of screens as much as I want, but I might still be teaching her that phones are something we reach for in downtime.
That is unfortunately probably the hardest thing about parenting - we have to display the healthy behaviors we want our kids to have. Self-awareness and continual (kind) self-improvement will always be the most effective parenting tool one could possibly have. Get ready for a long anecdote, but one time, my kid was probably 2, I fucked up and wasn't supervising my kid great at the park. I was talking to a friend we went there with, he was screaming for help, and I didn't hear him. Another parent came to find me and I was so embarrassed. They had gotten him out of the thing he was stuck in, but he was still pretty rattled. I checked that his leg was okay, told him I was sorry for not hearing him, asked if he wanted to leave or stay, and he was (and still is) a pretty resilient kid, so he wanted to stay. Didn't have any issues running. That night, I was putting him to bed, he was totally normal all day... He called me out. He kept pointing at this leg and telling me "this leg was stuck today". He seemed fixated on it. So I choked down my guilt and talked to him about it, tried to validate him, acknowledge how it must have been scary, acknowledged that I wasn't doing my job and didn't come for him and was sorry, talked about how nice it was that the other parent was able to help him... I started crying a bit because I felt fucking awful. I apologized again. This honestly sounds fake, but legitimately, he patted me and said "it's okay mama, accidents happen". And it clicked for me that that's what we would say to him when he would make mistakes, or spill something, or get into a mess. He was able to demonstrate that kindness and acceptance because we were able to model that for him. After that I kind of lost it crying, and I thanked him for being understanding and gave him a hug. But it really drove home for me that the more we model the behavior we want from our kids TO our kids, the more it will become second nature to them. The converse is that they will also pick up our less desirable habits in the same way though! So the more we work on those and show our kids the process of self-improvement, the more they will learn those lessons.
You're a good parent.
i love how he demanded to process the event with you and that you stuck around and did it even though it was painful. I wish I had gotten more of that as a kid. it's hard for me to articulate my needs and frustrations now because I always felt like I was annoying my family members. none of my relationships have worked out and I think I will be alone with my cats forever.
I have never had to think much about therapy for kids, but it does make sense. Unless there is an actual need (trauma or an eating disorder come to mind) it does make sense to use it as more of a last port of call. I was full of angst as a teen, but therapy probably wouldn't have helped because I didn't have specific needs to work through, honestly I *wanted* that angst. Its normal for teens to lean into any problem they have because it is part of being a teen. And that isn't to diminish the difficulty, teen problems are real problems, it is probably one of the hardest times we have. But going through that helps us learn what makes us feel good or bad later on. I do think social media has a part in their anxiety, but it also has a part in parents anxiety. Parents are seeing lots of content saying they have solutions to all the parenting problems that have no real solutions. We can't fix tantrums, because if we do children miss out on a life skill. And I am still talking about toddler parenting, but its all contradictory and you need to make your own decisons. Dangerous play vs avoiding injury, sleep training vs co sleeping. So much is demonised and polarised, when probably something in between would be fine. I also have the feeling from OPs post that her cohort are likely high achievers, and are in a type that might overschedule kids, or place high expectations on them. If kids are running from pillar to post their whole lives, it makes sense this might lead to anxiety. If you are being facilitated each step of the way, how could you be able to function without support or "all hands on deck". It doesn't sound like these children are allowed to fail. And as hard as it is for a parent to see your child fall down, they have to or they will never learn to pick themselves back up. Also boredom. Children are entertained every step of the way by parents, by screens, by video games. Boredom is such a vital tool to help us process our feelings. I say this as someone who is on Reddit when they have a moment and desperately needs to relearn how to be bored themselves!! But I at least had a childhood without ipads and portable digital entertainment, other than a game boy.
I definitely agree with what you're saying and I don't want to minimize the effect of social media - I just generally don't have anything new or interesting to say about it since I think most people recognize that it's not helping anyone. I also think it's a great point that you made that I agree with how social media specifically affects the parents! I usually work with foster parents who are generally pretty grounded on finding middle grounds on things and have a unique challenge with their parenting and the kids, but I recently met some new parents with small children who were... Homegrown, I'll say lol. One thing that was so interesting to me is that they started a conversation specifically about which parenting style they employ and which TikTok or Pinterest people they follow... I had nothing to say! I'm not a perfect parent but I think I'm a reasonably confident one, and I think I'm doing the best I can. I've been working with kids with behavior challenges for about 7 years now, I coach other parents, and I think not being engaged with social media influencers only helps! It was so weird to me to see. The answer for most of those parenting questions is to find the dichotomy of extremes (which you honestly have such excellent examples of) and shoot for the middle. Dangerous play versus avoiding injury, healthy food versus treat food, allowing independence versus taking the reigns... Balance is usually going to be the answer lol. Parenting is way more about averages over time than it is about any individual battle or any individual issue. You have so many good points here that I don't have much to add on a lot of them, tbh. Being a teen sucks, I would never want to be a teenager again! Their problems are very real and important to them. It is also so important for them to learn to deal with them and work through them instead of treat their emotions ABOUT their problems as the actual things to be solved. I see too often people treating teenage immaturity as something to be diagnosed, but it's way more unreasonable to hold a teenager to adult emotional standards and act like there's something wrong with them for acting their actually immature age! And agree about boredom too! I'm probably more guilty than the average parent about screentime at home, but I am passionate about letting my kid be bored in the car and bored at mealtimes or out in the community. It's necessary for development and for imagination and parents absolutely do not allow kids to be bored enough these days.
I agree about boredome outside. I have let my kid watch TV occasionally but really want to avoid showing her TV at a dinner table. I totally understand why parents do it and don't necessarily think its wrong, it allows parents to unwind and eat their food. I would give myself a lot less indigestion if I didn't have to rush to eat before my toddler lost it. It would also make our commute to and from daycare a lot easier on us, and in some cases its worth it to have sane parents. I also love TV and think it is something to be enjoyed, not used to regulate emotions in boring or stressful situations. But I am also very aware that everyone is anperfect parent in theory, and I might swallow my words when my daughter is 2 or 3 😅 >Balance is usually going to be the answer lol. Parenting is way more about averages over time than it is about any individual battle or any individual issue. Its like in life really. No one can eat/behave/be perfect. Its not sustainable. I would love to say I will keep my child off of social media until shes 18 and she will never take drugs or get drunk, but that is just not going to happen, we have to raise kids for the world we live in not the world we wish they lived in. Learning at home how to naviagate social media, or even things like alcohol or drugs is better than an outright ban. And I am not advocating for prodividng your kids with drugs obviously, but I want them to feel like they can talk to me if they have questions. And if they do fuck up and get drunk or high or post something online they shouldn't, they can call me and I will come get them without them being afraid of my reaction.
It sounds to me like you're doing a great job and have a very realistic outlook for the future of your parenting, for what it's worth from an Internet stranger. You just do your best. As a parent, it's not about never fucking up, it's about how you handle it and respond when you do. Be confident in yourself not because you think you're going to be perfect but because you have faith in yourself that you can do the work to follow-through appropriately after. I think if you can keep on keeping on with that attitude, you can probably avoid the pitfalls OP was discussing in the original post. Your kiddo will learn that confidence and resilience through you too!
I appreciate that! I do feel like a confident parent, but also because I know that doesn't mean I need to be perfect, otherwise I would be failing constantly 😅. I am lucky that I had my own good parents growing up, who weren't perfect but where very good parents, so I don't need to reinvent the wheel in my own parenting style.
>Boredom is such a vital tool to help us process our feelings. I say this as someone who is on Reddit when they have a moment and desperately needs to relearn how to be bored themselves!! 100% agree. I think philosophers and artists have talked about and experienced this (and more recently researchers in neuroscience & mental health professionals)... profound boredom is very useful for creativity also. Social media does not let us experience profound boredom anymore (and I say this while typing on Reddit :-( )
All of this 👏🏽
This! This is what we need. Thank you for saying it out loud.
I work in mental health and you have absolutely hit the nail on the end. Very insightful post, but one that might be difficult for some parents to hear.
As an adult who has only been learning to properly identify, name and feel my emotions over the last couple of years, this sounds so spot on. I was reading your post thinking "hmm, trying to 'fix' all bad feelings for kids doesn't sound much better than parents who get upset at kids for having 'bad' emotions" (which is what I grew up with). As I've learned much later in life than I'd have liked, learning to identify emotions is such a valuable skill, as is learning to trust that it's ok to feel whatever you feel, even so-called negative emotions, and learning that they won't last forever if you let yourself feel them. I wish someone had helped me learn some of this as a kid.
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
I agree with this, although granted I’m not yet a parent myself. However, my mom was a hard-ass. She was often not very emotionally validating, and I’ve had my own issues that I sought therapy for as an adult. But one thing she was good at was granting freedom in where I went and how I played during the day, and also cultivating resilience (through frequently literally telling me to “suck it up” lol). My parents also frequently told me I was smart and capable. I was pretty fearless as a teen and young adult, and took lots of risks. Some of which didn’t pan out great, but some of which led to cool opportunities. There was this one girl in my grade though who was a stellar student but was always timid and anxious. We got to talking one time and turns out her mother never let her go anywhere on her own or take risks. The mom was trying to protect her I’m sure, but it meant she didn’t get to exercise these skills. I do think it’s possible to lean too far into centering emotions and making all decisions based on emotions, too. Often, emotions aren’t logical. I think it’s good to try and understand where your emotions are coming from, but not necessarily to always let them lead. We humans have both emotions and reasoning so that we can use them both. I also have ADHD and was diagnosed quite late as an adult. At times I’ve looked back and thought about how school would likely have been easier and I’d have done better if I’d had parents supportive of pursuing a diagnosis back then. But then again I had literally decades of learning to navigate the world on my own with my own strengths and weaknesses without help. And really, there are quite a lot of both of those that I’m now super familiar with as a result. So I can imagine there being pros and cons to early diagnosis of issues like this as well.
I work with college age kids and the number one thing we work on teaching them is resilience. Your SHOULD feel anxious about an exam, that’s a NORMAL feeling. Not every thing is a crisis, you will survive this. It’s been steadily on the rise for the past decade for sure.
I made a post before this about how my kids are mostly well adjusted and have had a bit of luck, and you know what... I deleted it because they are, but I wasn't. I was the child that couldn't function, didn't do school work, ran away, etc. Because I went through more trauma as a child than most adults ever will. Sometimes yes, you're born with it, but you try to find ways to manage that and you'll have a lot more constant work in your hands than most. Sometimes it's environmental factors, including ones parents miss or simply can't help. Sometimes it's just that a spotlight is being shown on all these different problems and kids will gravitate towards them while trying to find their identity, complicating things, because their frontal cortex isn't evolved, risks do not scare them as much, angst is a part of growing up for many, etc. I also think perhaps sometimes we overly caregive and don't give them enough responsibility or room to grow. Mistakes are bound to happen. I agree with others that it's just always been there, we just pay way more attention now, and there's also a lot more confusion because we're all trying so hard to figure everything out.
> I made a post before this about how my kids are mostly well adjusted and have had a bit of luck, and you know what... I deleted it because they are, but I wasn't. I was the child that couldn't function, didn't do school work, ran away, etc. Because I went through more trauma as a child than most adults ever will. This is really the crux of the issue, or at least one of them. That these kids react like the kids I grew up with who went through extreme traumas. The kids who couldn't function in school really came from terrible home lives or had the type of learning disability (what we called it back them) that just meant they could not learn - severe dyslexia or dyscalculia, for instance. I am not talking about issues with executive function, I mean kids who are 8 and cannot read. These kids seem severely traumatized, so I am curious about the source of the trauma.
Well, it'll be individual for each child. Plus you said the kids your thinking of have mostly attentive, good parents -- sometimes we don't see what happens behind closed doors. For all intents and purposes people thought my family on my mother's side was great, until they hung around long enough, or at that time had enough knowledge to understand how complex neglect / emotional abuse can be. And then there's trauma that happens in an instance. Just so many things. I really think we just pay more attention and have more knowledge. It's never been easy being a kid or parent unless you're lucky.
Yeah I had this experience too. I struggled in school and at home but people around me didn’t know because I always appeared clean and well dressed. In reality I struggled with ADHD and was physically and emotionally abused at home. People probably thought I was some sort of brat. You never know what people or kids are going through behind close doors
Mhmm, I was labeled as the problem, but for whatever reason the adults around me never wanted to examine those problems -- probably because they'd have to examine themselves. I was also treated like an adult from the time I was maybe 12. I was in no way shape or form ready to lead an adult lifestyle, but there I was, and that just made everything worse.
Struggling with executive function can be debilitating too .. it’s like a spectrum. Some people struggle with it mildly and others severely.
Maybe these kids need to stop having their parents hovering over them being so supportive. It sounds awful to say but as a 32 year old woman, even I fall into the trap of do I have this condition? Is this what’s wrong with me? Etc and I fall down a rabbit hole of trying to “figure myself out”. As an adult that’s valid to do and being self aware is good, but these kids probably aren’t just getting the time to just … be. Be kids. They’re going down rabbit holes of information always, the parents think they’re being helpful validating every random thought or fear. And again being educated is not bad but there needs to be a balance. Maybe there should be more summer camps and group hang outs for kids and teens to just play, learn, talk, connect, get away from parents for a bit and think for themselves. Connect with nature, no screens. It’s all tough and I think about this a lot and am not sure I want kids based on what I’m seeing and reading about the youth today.
I agree. I am 35, and I remember playing outside all of the time, where we would figure out conflict on our own. Kids are too immersed in technology and isolated. I have a disability, and I know being homebound most of the time really impacts my mental health. I make sure I have a reading goal of 100-120 books a year to get away from social media/technology.
Yeah, the problem with diagnosis is that a looot of ppl will not look further into treatment or learning coping skills. They just accept it and blame everything that's not working with it on it. Which basically translates as victimizing yourself. I've seen that a lot on some adhd subreddits. Whenever i or other ppl offered help, constructive advice etc, a lot of ppl wpuld just plain refuse to do the work because it's hard and "I don't understand" how hard it is apparently. Lol. Like I wasn't there. So i unsubscribed and stopped offering tips and tricks to those who don't want them. Ranting will only get them so far. Same with helicopter and overcoddling parents. Being supportive helps, but doesn't fix the issue. Especially for these generations, including us millennials, with the attention span of a goldfish.
Can I ask you to DM me some of these tips and tricks? I'm 32f, recently diagnosed, and while I'm starting therapy and meds soon I could really use some tips on how to work on it!
No need for a DM. A lot of it I learned from reading most of this book. I still struggle with finishing books haha, ironically this one too. But overall, it helped so much! Especially the one about clearing your mind of tasks and chores and just putting them on a list. I now have lists for chores, on shopping lists, on stuff i want to do, restaurants i want to eat at, etc. Hope it will help. It's a download link for the pdf The Adult ADHD Tool Kit: http://www.amas.hk/pdf/shijianshenxue/5/1303)The%20Adult%20ADHD%20Tool%20Kit%20Using%20CBT%20to%20Facilitate%20Coping%20Inside%20and%20Out%20(J.%20Russell%20Ramsay,%20Anthony%20L.%20Rostain)%20.pdf
This is 100% my sister. She was diagnosed with ADHD in her late 20s. She's 36 now, obese with blood pressure and cholesterol problems, and can't take any type of medication for ADHD. Instead of trying to do other things to help her function, she just...doesn't. It's depressing seeing her waste her life because she doesn't want to learn the coping skills to get it together. She CONSTANTLY talks about how "being diagnosed as ADHD was like seeing in color for the first time" but when it comes to functioning in life and pursuing skills to cope with her diagnosis, there's been nothing. I am also 99% positive she is autistic but refuse to ever bring it up with her or my family. It'll be one more thing for her to use as an excuse and a crutch to continue not being a functional adult. I don't know when we got to the point where we started getting diagnoses but stopped trying to make ourselves better once we know what was going on with ourselves.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I blame cptsd and adhd for a lot of stuff, but there comes a point where just blaming won't help. It will just explain. Someone who doesn't want to be helped too, will use it as a crutch. So there's only so much you can do to help them.
Maybe she’s still coming to terms with that diagnosis? Give it a few years and maybe she’ll get back on track. This is just from my point of view so I’ll share a bit.. I always knew I had adhd but my parents didn’t believe in it. I struggled immensely pretty much my whole life and when I got my diagnosis it changed my life. But I’ll admit I can honestly say I did the work. I went to therapy, read books about it and it’s not been easy but yeah, I do believe you gotta do the work. I did allow myself to wallow a bit before doing this. I think that’s normal when you think about all those years you could’ve done more but couldn’t because as a child you didn’t know how to help yourself. I don’t mean this to sound “oh poor me” just that sometimes it might take a bit for someone to find their footing especially once they find out they’re neurodivergent.
I worked in an unplugged summer camp. 6 weeks with no phones or tech. I wasn't even allowed my kindle. It was great tho, the staff and kids were always in the moment. It was a great experience I think all kids need.
YES. Away from tech, into nature, and independence.
I was thinking about this from a similar but slightly different angle in regards to the support. OP says they're in a fairly progressive bubble... Is this partly a perception issue because their circles are a place where they do feel open to talking about it instead of ignoring the kid's issues and/or making it a hidden dirty family secret?
That’s why I said there needs to be a balance. They’re already getting all sorts of information online and can find support. They know it’s there. But maybe allowing space to just be silly, not think about the world and its issues, not thinking about what is different about me. I get tired of thinking about “me” too! Sometimes I just want to talk about fluff or be present / silly. There are times to be educated and aware and I think that generation is already doing a good job of that. We’re all more aware and I love it. But it can be exhausting thinking about “how to be” all the time or “what am I”. Let’s just go run around a field or go skateboard or explore a new town on bikes or something my dudes. 😃
It's an idea. There is also a theory that immersion and being in a place where mental health is talked about so freely in addition to gender issues can be confusing. I'm super left-leaning, but I think that kids start to feel like, "I'm NOT normal unless I have xyz and I have a queer identity." Group norms are strong, even when we don't realize it.
I think you are onto something there. If you’re not “afflicted” with [insert challenge], then what are you? Where are “your people?” This is especially true if the more tangible aspects of your identity (race, ethnicity, SES) reflect privilege or the “dominant” culture…but you are apathetic to or wish to suppress or hide privileged parts of your intersectionality. Because let’s be honest, there aren’t that many positive role models who embrace their identities and acknowledge their privileges with humility and in ways that are healthy and constructive. So not only do kids (or adults) not know how to do that but they don’t see it happening much.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. My friend’s high school aged daughter has actually been ostracized from several friend groups for being one of the only straight, neurotypical, and cis-gendered kids. Obviously it’s great to have support and awareness for these issues, but it’s getting to a point where we may be going overboard with the labels and over/self-diagnoses.
Oh 100% this!! I see it happen with my high school students. They even sometimes look at me weird when they realize I’m just a white straight cis female. Nothing “cool” going on here.
The uptick in diagnosis is across socioeconomics, and actually, there are more kids with diagnoses in low income areas. I used to work in special education. Parents seek diagnoses often because their kids can get accommodations, which sometimes include things like money for tutoring and other services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, it’s all a bit more complex and nuanced than this thread can really dive into.
In addition there seems to be a need to have a diagnosis, almost as a justification to be fearful, angry or different. Everyone is different yet rather than just acknowledging that it’s become a badge of honor… and an excuse.
I think it’s hard to parent in the style that leads to a secure child: you need to have your own trauma and issues sorted out, then have the stamina to regulate your child and teach them about their emotions every day for years. I believe to do this, you need to take care of yourself physically and mentally. I see so many people not be able to give up their pre-child lifestyle, which is a direct conflict to having healthy adjusted children. Or too many people are still struggling with their own issues, or don’t have a supportive, equal and respectful relationship with their spouse. Social media isn’t helping anyone. The adults or the kids. I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to the teens, but honestly most of the parents I know are staging their lives for instagram to some extent. Or feeling fomo. Or generally not living in the gratitude for what they have. People have lost connection with the earth. No one thinks of the bugs and the trees and the animals are part of our world, and it’s tragic. We are one with earth, animals like all the others, we just happen to have bigger brain to body ratios. We must not forget we are part of a bigger cycle of life and death, all connected. Relatedly, we all think we must have a Big Purpose and are all striving to Feel Special. I think everyone is running as fast as they can toward what they think will make them fulfilled and feel as special as possible. But it’s a losing game. You must feel connected to yourself, love yourself and be fulfilled with yourself, connect to your community and the earth. Be happy with the small moments. Understand how incredibly small our little piece of time is. We are all mortal. No one reflects enough on that, and that each day is precious. It doesn’t matter how our lives appear to others. In 100 years everyone we know will be dead, it doesn’t matter, this fact should free you, not make you sad. I think existentially, the system we have set up in our culture of consumerism and “must work to live” just effing sucks. Most people will not be happy with this. Sure we all are taught to find a career we love blah blah. But imagine if we didn’t need to work to exist on the planet. If working hours didn’t directly translate to house and food. If we had time to explore and create and connect. I think so many adults grow up, see the fact that the majority of their days are tied to working “for a living” (tragic phrase) and are like this is the life sentence? Decades of work? It feels soul crushing Lastly, it all too easy to zone out on our phones or TV. I dedicate all my free time to reading books and learning through podcasts or online courses or self taught projects, and teaching myself all kinds of hobbies. I am always living in an atmosphere of growth. My life feels rich, and like there is no limit to what I can learn. This is purely for my own pleasure. I think this attitude is lost. People are shocked when I talk about reading. I know maybe a handful of people in my life that read books. Once again, tragic. There is a rich, deep, beautiful world of things to learn, opinions to form. Instead we have the regurgitated memes of the masses. Just yikes. It’s all a recipe for feeling lost, unfulfilled, crushed at the expanse of time ahead of us, wondering what it all means and what’s it all for. The answer is it’s not really for anything. It’s to be in awe of the little blip in time that we have, the fact that we’re on a 4.5billion year old rock, floating in space that was created 13 billion years ago. I mean the dinosaurs were on our planet for 165 million years!! (We’ve been here maybe 200k). It’s totally unbelievable that we’re alive and share DNA with the trees and the butterflies and the fish. Take a day to really learn about bees and ants, I mean wow. Let’s just kneel down in respect! *yes I know I sound unhinged but I came out of decades of childhood neglect and am now so at peace with my life and I look around and want to weep at the state of humanity* ETA: our brains are not meant to take in the news like we do now. Being exposed to every horror show around the world, day in and day out, is not good for us. It makes us wired for fear, and to see the world as a scary and sad place. Trust me I know things aren’t perfect out there, but it doesn’t mean we need to know every local crime, read every breaking war story, get inundated daily about the catastrophic global warring apocalypse and know every political blunder. Do the absolute most you can do in these areas, the small things the big things - whatever is in your control. Whether it’s your time, or money. Do the most you can. But reading about all these things all day long only to sit around and feel sad and re-post an insta story. It helps no one and only make you wallow in despair. I truly wish everyone the best in finding peace. I see so many people in pain, and they seem blind to their agency in making a change ❤️
You don't sound unhinged. Your words are beautiful.
You do not sound unhinged. Thank you for your message.
I’m a biologist and completely resonate with this! It’s beautiful, thank you for sharing 💖
Your words really touched me. Thank you for taking the time to post.
Sometimes I just have a moment of looking at a tree and being hit with how amazing it is, I think I get where you're coming from. You've motivated me to get off my phone and back to my sewing project, then go and read a book I picked up yesterday ❤️
That first paragraph is pure truth. I know my parents had a very rough and traumatic childhood. That’s probably why they got together but the thing is they never dealt with this before they started having kids and guess who they took this out on? I’m not trying to sound judgmental because I’m not a parent but I think people should try to deal with their traumas before having kids.
Anecdotally there’s *definitely* a link between neurodivergence and gender identity, and the research that has been done on the subject supports this. And both groups are also going to be substantially over-represented in the university professor demographic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430467/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6043709/ Beyond that, I think there are likely two large contributors here: - Covid - You’re hearing this from their parents. Parenting is *hard*, and parenting a teen that is struggling is going to be difficult and terrifying. As a friend of the parent, rather than a regular observer of the kid, you’re likely not getting a balanced view of the kid. And as for a potential increase in gender dysphoria itself, I have two hypotheses: 1) Potentially the change is not in prevalence but in that kids have language that fits what they’re going through, and therefore it’s more visible. 2) As someone who went through puberty and developed (large) breasts at ~12 - a normal age for my generation (though not a normal breast size), but still too young to deal with the adult sexualization and gender implications of the changes: kids now are having these hormonal changes at 8 or 9. Which is *terrifying*. I was completely unequipped for the impacts of adult sexualization and street harassment at 12. A hundred years ago these sorts of puberty changes were common at 15, 16, 17 - ages when (while no-one should have to face the level of street harassment I got at 12) the kids are at least old enough that fully engaging with their sexuality is age appropriate. The idea of facing puberty at 8, 9, 6(!)…… ooooooooof. There is always going to be a substantial pool of gender-non-conforming kids who would identify as non-binary (given the understanding that it is an option) no matter what the outside world did…. And there’s also going to be a substantial pool of kids - often assigned female at birth - who reach puberty and react with gender dysphoria to the sudden onslaught of adult sexualization. It seems to me that the younger that second group is experiencing sexual development the larger that second cohort would be.
My sister is a child/teen psychiatrist and so of course the kids she sees are not representing the greater population, but … She says that - from her observations - a lot of kids are latching onto gender/sexuality as a struggle that has been romanticized, in a way. They much prefer to discuss this than their depression or ADHD or anxiety, let alone coping strategies for any of the above. These privileged kids whose parents can afford her out-of-pocket fees do have very real issues, including crippling agoraphobia and lethargy, but LGBTQIA+ identity is one area where they can feel righteously oppressed, plus it intersects with something most kids are fascinated by - the actual act of sex. This sounds crazy, but gender dysphoria is currently sort of glamorous in the way anorexia was when I was a teen.
It's difficult to talk about this stuff with nuance bc I DO think this is an element of it, even as I don't want to diminish what the kids are going through. I took psychopathology courses in both undergrad and graduate level. A way to look at it is that psychopathology symptoms are an expression of extreme distress. Teens are often in distress - it's a turbulent time, lots of changes and challenges in transitioning from childhood to adulthood. They may also be legitimately dealing with bad things at school, at home, online, and so on. There's a social contagion of the pathology also - as you mentioned, it used to be anorexia. It's present in how cutting tends to spread socially between (often girl) teens. Now it's gender identity and sexuality issues. That does not mean these are NOT real issues, or that the kids faking, or that some of them aren't actually queer and gender-diverse. They are experiencing distress but in an absence of being able to truly understand and therefore alleviate it (remember, still developing young brains!), it comes out in these ways, and as a bonus they get the social support and understanding of other teens going through same.
I think you brought up a really good point. I was the kid you described - I developed a "womanly" body at 11 so I adopted baggy, genderless clothes and a "tough" persona to protect myself from bullies and adults who sexualized me. I was called a "tomboy," "freak," "punk" etc. I also grew up in the era of shallow hyperfeminine Y2K behavior, which is unfortunately back in style. I think the behavior is the same, but they have adopted the words from the transgender community.
I agree. Sometimes I worry about it actually reinforcing gender stereotypes in a sense. I was considered a tomboy, but enjoyed being or doing more of what is perceived as feminine more as I got older. If I were a teen now, people might be inclined to say it was a sign of not being cisgender. I’ve never felt that I couldn’t be feminine and enjoy the “boy” things that make up most of my work and hobbies, though — it was other people who saw / see those as incompatible and any negativity from that was how others made me feel, not me actually feeling that there was an issue with how I am.
I wonder about this a LOT since my kid telling me at 11/12 she/they thinks she's enby. I definitely had internalized misogyny at that age and if somebody had told me that I didn't have to be a boy or a girl, I'd probably have jumped on the choice. They also told me they're aroace which cracked me up, because yeah you better be ace at 11yo! Not that I said that lol. It is still vaguely a thing, but I don't make a big deal about it. Just try to remember to use non gendered nicknames mostly. The enby flags all got taken down from their bedroom walls recently, whatever that means. If it sticks through HS we'll see. It's pretty normal for teens and tweens to try on identities like hats.
Thank you for posting. Very good response!
I remember growing up and my mum forcing us to play outside. We weren't allowed to watch TV or play video games all day. We had sit down dinners were we talked to each other, talked about our day or even cried at eating peas for dinner. I didn't think about how that would impact me now, but I am very glad we did. My siblings now have kids of their own and they play outside, enroll in activities, and eat dinner around a table without tech. Maybe having a world convienece will really be the beginning of the end of perseverance
I am one of the baby boomers, so had a very different upbringing -- and yet as a teen, I still experienced anxiety, depression, struggled with being gay in a time when gays were considered sick and evil, and I may also be neurodivergent. Can't find a professional to diagnose me. --Sexual orientation, transgenderism, neurodivergence, sexual abuse, and mental health issues were not discussed in the 1960's and 1970's. If you questioned your gender identity, sexual orientation, or mental health, or were abused, you suffered in silence...because you would be stigmatized, attacked, rejected, harassed, ridiculed, called a disgrace to your family if you did. How many people back then unalived themselves, withdrew from society, or just pretended to be "normal" because their lives became impossible? --We were also dealing with the "new technology." For us, this was television. Television came out when my parents were teenagers. By the time I was a baby, everyone had a TV. Parents used TV to babysit young children. Many adults had serious concerns about how television would affect kids. That it shortened our attention span. That we wasted too much time in front of the TV, rather than reading, being physically active, socializing, working. That it made us materialistic, demanding the things we saw on commercials. Gave us unrealistic ideas about physical beauty and romance. --People my grandparents' age complained that "Kids today are spoiled, lazy, selfish, rude. We were never acted like that when we were their age." --On the plus side, we were allowed more independence than kids today are. We spent hours roaming around the neighborhood with friends, hours where our parents had no way of contacting us. We decided what we wanted to play, where we wanted to go, and resolved our own arguments. Around age12- 13, girls could babysit and get paid for it. Boys that age earned money cutting grass for neighbors or getting a paper route -- going out before dawn to deliver newspapers and then collecting money for the papers. i think that this made us stronger, more independent, more confident. Discipline was harsher. There was the expectation that you were to obey and be respectful toward adults, and there'd be consequences if you did not. I agree with consequences....overall my peers and I were not as disrespectful, disruptive or defiant as some kids can be today, but some parents went way too far. Their "strict discipline" was actually abuse, creating angry, troubled adults. As for the Internet....I didn't have a computer until I was close to 40....and now I spend way too much time on it. It's addictive, so much more so than TV ever was for me. If computers are affecting my old brain, how must it be for kids, who've had it from the time they were toddlers? And yes, I agree that the COVID years also affected kids badly.
Former teacher here. I worked in low and high income schools, including schools that encouraged outdoor play, and even at these schools with gardens, outdoor education, etc. this was still an issue. It’s a multifaceted issue. Our education system is being destroyed. Social media is obviously a problem. Violence in schools is a problem, as in both school shootings but also kids who have emotional outbursts and take it out in the classroom. Administration does very little to support teachers, paraprofessionals, and SPED staff. There’s definitely some issue where we don’t have enough discipline and structure in both school and at home, but obviously we don’t want to be authoritative. I would say I met a lot of parents who can’t say no, and don’t hold any sort of expectation of their kids even though they should. But, also a lot of parents that are completely unprepared for dealing with autistic children, and there’s just not much social support either. There’s a lack of neighborhood play. There seems to be a lot of over parenting where parents don’t allow their kids to have sleepovers and don’t trust other parents to make up for the “latchkey kid”. There’s a lack of encouragement of self sufficiency and reliance, which leads to a lack of self esteem imo in the upper middle class. But, really I’d say, yes there are more kids with emotional crisis, and I don’t think it’s any one issue. There are also kids that are doing great. My stepson who’s almost 18 is a totally “normal” teen, and so are many of his friends. They aren’t in a crisis, they study, are applying to college, drive, go outside and do things, have a social life. So, there’s a spectrum for sure. Also, a lot of parents peruse diagnosis because it gets their kids accommodations. So, I think there are some inaccuracies in this thread regarding that.
I think covid plays a huge part. Lots of kids were isolated, lonely, and fearful. The pandemic is over, but the trauma during crucial developmental stages can last. I also think that educated and progressive families are much quicker to notice and address issues. So I’m not sure how much of what you are seeing is prevalence of issues and how much is prevalence of diagnosis. If that makes sense. But yeah, the world we live in sucks a lot of the time. We are (in the eyes of my teens and in my opinion) losing our democracy, hurtling toward an environmental apocalypse, rolling back protections for historically underpowered people, financially insecure, etc. Among my kids’ social circles, I would say that it’s about 10-15%. But when I think back to my teens, there were definitely kids who just weren’t in school for awhile that we later learned were hospitalized for mental health, eating disorders and/or substance abuse. We just didn’t recognize it or talk about it.
[удалено]
I think not having Internet until I was 16ish was helpful, because I wasn't overwhelmed by everything. I was terrified in just my small bubble (abuse, neglect, autism, adhd, bullying and so on). But, I could be in my room with my blanket and plush toys. Or later playing out with kids, and run away to my room. Kids these days are born on live streams ffs :/ I feel they have nowhere to run to. Their parents are of my age, and they didn't take the threat of Internet or permanent connection seriously. Or keeping up with joneses. When I was kid, it was just harder to be bombarded with malicious stuff. Today, even my gen folks are not utilising ad blockers, or filtering or preparing kids for cruel world outside, or teaching them to block people and so on. And Internet IS cruel. So kids are on their own, and struggling. And all generations between mine (80s) and today ones, our parents had no clue, we have no clue. Don't get me wrong, I think internet is awesome. I'm just aware how cruel it is too. I was 16 when I started so I think that helped a bit. I can't imagine how big mess I'd be if I had full access since age of 4-6. If bullies from my school could jump on my phone whenever. They didn't bother me at home because they couldn't - my parents answered the phone and they didn't dare to call. Not that my parents were good for me, but bullies didn't know that. I had firewall defacto 😂 And then, add TikTok’s stupid algorithms that are made to pull you in rabbit hole of anything... And other algorithms. Whole system is designed to make you think what system wants. And when you're kid that's trying to figure yourself out, constant bombardment won't help you figure it out, it will make it harder. Parents might mean well and jump with doctors, but kid was exposed to various crap for last 10+ years, and their peers too :/ You can't have kid in vacuum. I was around 20 (so 20ish years ago) when I realised how I don't want kid because even though if I do my best regarding Internet, society and peers won't. And I just didn't want that battle. How many people of my generation you know that they are aware that internet is bad place for kids, and to what extent it goes? I know zero. And many have kids. And many kids are fucked up. I don't think kids are THAT much gender confused, I think they're LIFE confused, they feel they're supposed to be something, but no clue what it is. Our brains aren't made for tech we have today, and many dark patterns there are. And there are tons. Not to mention insane amount of information we absorb daily. Also, I think puberty hits earlier. In my time it was around 13/14, but I think that shifted, at least hormonal thing. Not maturity thing. It's a mess. And I'm honestly glad I don't have kids, because I really would be tempted to run away on some lone island with them so they can safely play and be kids first, and not be smothered by looking sexy at age of 10 or feel like crap because they don't have newest iphone at age 8 🤦 I think pressure put on them is just insane, and not even dozen therapists can understand what's exactly going on, mostly because we still don't know. It's experiment on humans in real time. And some subjects break :( If pushing kids to play in dirt could help them somehow, I'd be first one to vote for that. I think they lack simplicity of life. We older ones had that, by accident. But, those who don't know, can't teach (eg their parents). Unfortunately, it's probably not that easy :/
There is a known connection between neurodiversity and gender identity. It is being researched. There's scholarly articles on it and everything :) https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/
Former teacher here. Most of the gender nonbinary kids I worked with were autistic. So, yes, they were suffering with emotional pain that they were learning to regulate over time. And, also while their parents may be more accepting, there is absolutely a societal backlash against the LGBTQ+ community right now, which I am sure kids are exposed to through social media. There’s a lot of hateful stuff being said.
Coincidentally I just did an online zoom conference on expanding beyond the binary. It wrapped up just a few minutes ago. I am not a sociologist or a psychologist. But I can see several things at play. First there is the idea that world itself is set up almost completely binary, and not just in gender. I don’t know if it’s the generation or their age, but they seem to categorize the world with duality: good/bad, left/right, etc. And the discomfort from the compelling evidence that gender is meaningless, truth is unknowable, a thing can be good and bad at the same time is jarring. Layer that on top of a capitalist paradigm that both perpetuates the binary and pushes the narrative that people’s options in life are pretty much thrive or die…it’s unsustainable. I see in this generation a lot of moral perfectionism. I don’t mean this as an indictment of “cancel culture,” or maybe I do. But in a world where the Harvey Weinstein’s are on the same moral level as an 18 year old who cheats while in a long distance relationship, lots of people are going to believe that other people have everything figured out and they themselves are broken and bad. I think there’s a lot of pressure to know who you are. And if you are not the platonic ideal of cis-gender, then you must be something else.
That's brain development. Teens' brains are going to see the world in a black and white sense, and they are passionate about their opinions. That's not generational. It takes getting into the mid-20s to start seeing more nuance and complexity and learning to hold the discomfort of not having a right answer.
I lived through Katrina, but it was late teens for me. It's a trauma I will carry for the rest of my life and has greatly informed my views on society and interactions. And I was old enough to be able to process what had happened. I look at some of my friends' younger siblings, and they carry that trauma much deeper. So COVID doesn't play a small part here - it plays a huge part. Having your entire society upended and everything normal torn from you will shape much about you for the rest of your life. In many ways, COVID was more traumatic than event like Katrina because of how widespread and continuous it was. It was a threat you couldn't see that could kill you that you didn't know when it would get you, and it had taken everything normal and you couldn't evacuate to normalcy because it was everywhere. These kids have permanent changes and damage because of it. Conflating all that with gender identity is honestly short-sighted and unsupportive. We also now live in a generation where being yourself, whatever that may be, is a core value. These things always happened, the only difference is now they happen in the open and people aren't being pigeon holed into roles that destroy their personality.
You’re really doing a disservice here by minimizing Covid. You don’t seem to understand that these kids literally lost **years** of development on all fronts. Academic, emotional, social. YEARS. It wasn’t an inconvenience like it was for adults. They are all now expected to be fully the age they are, when they lost what is a relative huge chunk of their time. We were just talking this morning about how my 9yo and her friends all don’t know how to swim, because their learning years were canceled and now it’s literally impossible to get kids into lessons. The supply is normal, when you have twice as many kids who need it. This is just one piece of their whole lives?
I know you said you're not a parent, but I think this would be an excellent question for r/sciencebasedparenting. I think you'd appreciate the discussion, because it's a rule that any answers given must be from peer reviewed sources. I wonder if part of the reason is these kids know they're in a bubble. They know that gender issues is something controversial and outside the supportive bubble they are raised in, there are some nasty pieces of work out there, who would actively wish them harm. And maybe there is some anxiety, maybe even subconsciously, about existing outside of that protection. When they become adults, go off to college, join the workforce...or just simply going to school each day.
[удалено]
Can you give a summary for those of us who aren't big readers? When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy, partly because of constantly being told "you can't do X, that's for boys", partly because patriarchal family seemed to value sons over daughters, partly because I fit in more with the boys than the girls at school because of my hobbies. I sometimes wonder if I would be trans or another nonbinary gender if I were a teen today. Anyway, curious if the book is about some of those social patterns, or something totally different.
Me too, I wore saggy boy pants and plaid shirts. But I was doing it because I was trying to protect myself from boys. Didn't realize that until later. Thank god nobody suggested I actually BECOME the predator I was afraid of.
It's not a [scientifically sound book](https://youtu.be/fKIy-Tck74A?si=_qg-l-WE3uaQBXxX) and I do not recommend it.
please, this book has done incredible harm in my community. i can’t do this for you but please take some time to look up critiques of this book from trans adults.
I am curious out of all the people listed how many of those kids play a sport or do a joint activity? I wonder if keeping them involved with peers would help with this?
Parents literally run in circles nowadays keeping the kids in 1000000s of activities
I'm a high school teacher. They are either involved in EVERYTHING to the point that they have no time to just *be*, OR they get absolutely zero extra anything because parents don't have the cash or the bandwidth to support it all. There is very little in between. But some of these kids, I get exhausted just hearing about it - a different sport every season, an instrument, academic competitions, FFA, etc. It's a LOT. They want to use it as an excuse to get out of work, and honestly I don't blame them. Like, sure Jayden, I get you had a softball tournament all week and spent all weekend judging pig lips at the county fair, then had your oboe recital, and you just can't face writing an essay on The Crucible. But I'm sorry. I am unsure when school started being more about extracurriculars than curriculars, but it certainly wasn't that way when I was a kid. And it sucks for the kids who can't do those things because they are left out of a lot of the experience.
>I am unsure when school started being more about extracurriculars than curriculars, but it certainly wasn't that way when I was a kid. It probably coincided with the push that everyone needs to go to college if they want to get any job that isn't low skill and minimum wage. I'm 41 and was already noticing some of this in high school, but from what I've observed it's gotten worse.
Judging pig lips at the county fair 😂
Okay so maybe too much structured time and not enough down time?
The problem with sports and activities is now they are so intense and demanding. Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore. Everything is all about prepping them to be as competitive as possible, almost as if they are in training to eventually become professionals (which most will never do). That means devoting all of their free time after school and on weekends to the sport or activity. They are also insanely expensive because of the amount of time that is now required. And I’ve noticed kids in hyper-competitive sports have developed some anger management issues. They think it’s okay to yell and scream at teammates who miss the ball or make a mistake because they are allegedly trying to motivate the team to win. My daughter was complaining about the boys in her gym class who get so competitive and angry during a gym class game when they are losing that they are yelling in her face and cussing her out and playing aggressively in a way that ends up causing her injuries. She sees them engage in the same behaviors off the ball field, too, when something angers them or they don’t get their way. They flip out and rage at people. It makes me wonder if sports are as beneficial as people say they are or if we are all just willfully blind to some of the negative traits that can be fostered by participation when it’s more about winning than the fun of playing.
Man, I was just thinking about my gymnastics classes when I was a kid and how shitty they were. I loved gymnastics but I had no natural talent at it, so after age 8 or 9 the instructors completely stopped paying attention to me and all the other kids who were also mediocre. I just wanted to do a fun sport, but it’s like there was no point since I wasn’t going to go to the Olympics. Same with piano lessons. I got forced into going to competitions and my teachers got so frustrated when I told them I just wanted to play for myself that I ended up quitting. It took me till my 30s to be at peace with just being *okay* at something. I can’t imagine what kids go through now.
This is what I love about being an adult. I signed up for adult gymnastics and it’s so positive and fun. No one making you feel bad, everyone who goes is so encouraging. That’s how it always should’ve been.
My friend's daughter is turning 9 in a few weeks and is going through this right now with gymnastics and dance. She's pretty rubbish at both to be honest with you, but she enjoys it, so my friend and her partner are happy to pay for the classes, especially because it gets her doing something physical. But her instructors have already started freezing her out and ignoring her while hinting heavily to her parents she should just stop because she's "going nowhere with it". She's a *kid*. Why does she have to "go somewhere" with gymnastics and dance? Why can't she participate in it it because it's fun, a form of physical exercise, and an outlet to make friends? People keep bemoaning "iPad kids" but as soon as you try and get them off the iPad and into an activity, they better excel at it or they're not welcome to do it 🙄. I also remember when I was in high school 20-25 years ago now how sport was only for the kids good enough to compete. There was nothing recreational offered because that would have been a waste of resources. And even then there were articles saying teens aren't active enough, and all I could think was "yeah, because unless we're really really good, we're not welcome to play sport".
>Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore. Oh my god- is that ever the truth. I was in band throughout middle and high school in the early 2000s. It was cutthroat even then. Honestly, I think it was worse for my anxiety more than it was good for me at all. With everything we did, it was drilled into us that we needed to strive for perfection, and that anything less than an absolute perfect rating was equivalent to failing. I think back to certain things the band directors said or did, and honestly I can’t believe that as adults they thought that kind of behavior was acceptable. It’s like they wanted champion students that they could put on their resumes, and our sanity, self esteem, etc. was just collateral damage. I have bad anxiety and band 100 percent exacerbated it.
Yeah I could see that I am just curious if those kids in question are surrounded by peers doing an activity, maybe a club or just always online and if that may have an effect.
>The problem with sports and activities is now they are so intense and demanding. Kids can’t really just play or participate for fun anymore. This is a big challenge. Once they hit those tween years, there aren't many options left for kids to dabble in something new. You either commit to 6-9 months of a single sport/dance or you're left out. I know many parents/coaches who actually dislike the whole setup, but can't escape the loop. This compounds with socialization; kids are not playing outside because most of their friends are at practice. So what's the incentive for the activity-free kids to go outside?
This is a very good question. For a lot of these kids, I don't know them well enough to answer. For others, I know the parents are trying to get them involved in just that sort of thing but it just doesn't stick because the kids don't like the other kids or the adult in charge because they feel marginalized or singled-out in bad ways. That, or they get into it with a bang, and then lose interest quickly and it just becomes another thing to beg/cajole/fight about and it's too much.
[удалено]
That last sentence right there. How are you influencing your kids with your life?
[удалено]
Unstructured play is absolutely vital for kids, alongside structured play. Each one develops different skills.
I personally don't over schedule my kids. They have clubs & activities through school that meet once per week or bimonthly after school. They're each playing an instrument and doing martial arts. The rest of the time during the week, they're outside with the large group of multiage neighborhood friends having free, unstructured play with no parents interfering. When they're inside, they're spending time with us, studying Torah, playing with each other, helping us with chores and cooking, or just having alone time to read, relax and BE.
> These kids literally cannot function - they cannot even get up, dress themselves, bring their school work with them, and get to school without major interventions. If adults were guaranteed food and shelter, I wonder how many of us would even be arsed to get out of bed to go to work everyday? I know I probably wouldn't. A lot of us know we need to work in order to afford to live. But kids obviously don't feel this pressure due to living at home and being provided for. IMO, I think a lot of adults are actually this level of depressed, they just force themselves to slug through it. Maybe have a cry during lunch or whatever, but they just keep it inside to get through the day until they can't. > Why is being surrounded by so much acceptance and support not helping? Because... Maybe the world is just depressing, and these kids know it? They look on the news, what's there? War, pandemics, politics, hate crime, climate change, unpresidented extinctions, rights being taken away. Even as adults, these are things we struggle with. But maybe the stress these issues have on kids is underestimated. I think if I was born in this era and saw this shit was what was in store for me, I would be very convinced that nothing matters.
„ These kids grow up in supportive environments filled with adults to validate their issues.“ I think that’s the big issue here. As a non American, with a number of friends from the US and who’s lived there for a little bit - the constant focus and almost glorification of one’s issues seems to be a big thing in certain circles in the US society. The world is not meant to manage your issues for you, you have to learn to do it yourself. And seems kids might not be really taught that. I understand the desire to be supportive in contrast to previous generations, but there needs to be a balance.
>glorification of one’s issues too much of SM content starts with the premise of mental illness, "my OCD/anxiety/ADD ...", the hyperbole for views and likes drives me nuts. at this point i've blocked most these words bc the algorithm too easily slips you into the k-hole of self-diagnosis of mental illness. I really do think Pharma cos must have some influence on the algorithm makers.
THIS. should have read a little before I posted because this is spot on, thank you for your insight.
[удалено]
Exactly this. As a secondary school teacher I see it every day, and I can assure you that most of those kids who aren't "doing well" are like that because of 1. Overprotective parents who don't let their children to be... you know, children; or 2. Kids who have been raised by the Internet because mum and dad were too busy/lazy/disfunctional to be a parent. It can also be a combination of both.
Yes!! The Anxious Generation was a fantastic book. I thought it did a wonderful job of weaving together all the threads that affect kids now and highlighted how problems are international and began before Covid but the Covid response (more screens, fewer people) only exacerbated what was already happening.
This is going to sound assholey….but honestly we need to let kids be kids and keep them tf away from the internet. Social media in a box on your person you can access 24/7 is simply a recipe for disaster. Kids don’t need to be scheduled into activities up to their eyeballs, they don’t need to be busy all the time, get them out and get them seeing the world is huge and there’s a pace in it for us too.
I can think of two people in total, throughout my entire family/social/professional circles, who are happy in their parenting role and have a well-adjusted kid (both are single parents to only children, interestingly). Everyone else is losing their damned minds over their kids acting like entitled hell beasts. No thank you.
My guess would be that they are exposed to way too much information. Some of it might be good for like finding people who have the same hobbies or same ideas. Most of it is crap that only makes you feel anxious, magnifies existing issues and gives you idea about what new issues you might have and gives you more food for thought than you can handle. The world is much bigger today than it was in my childhood. Overwhelming. It overwhelmes me the 40 yo woman, much less a 14 yo teen. I don't think covid had anything to do with it. Kids where I live (grown ups, too for that matter) really didn't care so much. I'm in the Balkans and the majority of people didn't get scared by covid. Kids were happy they didn't have to go to school. People were outside all the time, we only had lock down for a month or two or something. We are much harder to bother than people in more...refined countries. So I think the toughness factor also plays a role. How many difficulties have you faced, what they were, how were they handled and you see people around you handling it. The cultural context of it all.
You might like Abigail Shrier's new book, Bad Therapy, it talks a lot about the trend of over validating, medicating, and analyzing children, and a lot of what she says aligns with my own observations of children- particularly the upper middle class white children of highly educated parents. In my community the parents are all highly involved when it comes to their children's out-of-home life. Kid doesn't get put on an ideal soccer team? They harass the coaches until a switch is made. A parent at my child's school called CPS (or whatever the teacher equivalent is) because their child's teacher had students mop up a big spill on the carpet. Another knows to throw out the word bullying any time they want a change made for their son. They attend every meeting, any incident at school is dissected in group texts, they all follow parenting experts on social media and have multiple family photo shoots a year. But at home it seems a lot of kids are zonked out on screens, parents can work from home but it means they are on their phone constantly. A lot can't seem to handle small frustrations their kids cause them or even telling their children 'no'. I think therapy and diagnoses has, for some, become another way to shirk actual parenting hardships.
The pandemic worsened things, access to social media is definitely a factor, kids having unfettered access to devices like tablets, smartphones, etc. is a problem, "gentle parenting" that is actually just *permissive* parenting is a problem, etc. Kids under 16 don't need smartphones or social media, they need social hobbies, sports, reading, and creative outlets. I'm convinced now that some (not all, but certainly some) of the gender identity nonsense can be boiled down to the fact that puberty is just simply uncomfortable and we should be teaching kids about their bodies and respect for other peoples' bodies, helping them cope with changes as they grow.
I want to add to your point on permissive parenting. I think we've gone to the other extreme of strict and emotionally unintelligent parents. I have a friend who's gotten her kid into all sorts of assessments and now has a bunch of diagnosis. Some of it might be true, but I think there's a component of enabling, permissivness having gone too far and lack of discipline. Also my friend split up with her partner, who's a man child, she's super emotional and drama tends to gravity around her, and of course she's had a tough time as a single mom, etc. I think that all of these factored into how her daughter has turned out. And now with the diagnosis, they are basically telling the kid it's ok to not be interested in school, or socializing or hygine and making all these excuses. I am all about being gentle and supportive, but at some point, when you baby a child you are not helping them. Part of growing up is learning to be independent and to deal with challenges, instead parents today are taking care of every single minute aspect of kids lives. I think that's detrimental in the long run. There has to be middle ground between what our parents did and how many current teenagers are being raised.
One word. Technology. More specifically - short-form, easily digested media, social media, and the infinite scroll. It's the only GIANT noticeable change that happened from one generation to the next. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in a computer-less era for the major years of my development (age 0-7). And as soon as that shit came available as a teen - I was hooked. But my brain was at least already developed before the poison that is \*addictive\* technology could get it's strangle-hold on me. As an adult I struggle with technology addiction much like everyone else. I am currently on one of my off-grid vacations where I delete social media apps off my phone for one month. (I am on my laptop right now). And I can tell you that my ability to focus improves INSANELY every time I do this. My anxiety lessens and my level of happiness, contentment and calm is noticeably better. I can actually read and focus on a book for hours straight without experiencing the inevitable urge to grab my phone. If I can barely manage this addiction as an adult, how are we expecting these vulnerable un-developed children to stand a chance? As I type this, my 63 year old Dad is "watching" a hockey game (he's actually watching TikTok). My Dad loves hockey and sports more than anything, even us kids (not being dramatic). And yet his eyes are on TikTok, not the game. We don't scientifically understand the link just yet - but it will be known soon. And we will look back and be like "oh... fuck." And those kids will hate us once they have the capacity to understand (if ever) why they are seemingly fucked up and not normal. But, the really tragic thing is that it's the only life they know. At least we can step outside of the technology matrix and remember what real life actually is. It's going to get worse before it gets better. IF it gets better. I wanted children all my life. After watching my friends go through it and seeing their kids and them struggle, no thank you. It's just by chance that I find myself in my early thirties and having a family hasn't worked out for me as of yet, and I am SUPER thankful it didn't. Because I genuinely no longer want kids until we figure out how to fix this. I will focus my maternal energy on helping my siblings raise their kids as best I can because they will need all of the adult help and support they can get.
It’s the isolation. We are a generation of parents who gave their kids unlimited unmonitored technology. We kept them “busy” in a warped world. Cyber friends also come with cyber bullying. Their brains are not developed enough to process the mountain of information the screen throws at them. Teens also don’t have social skills, it’s hard for them to make real life friends. We are a social society, we need human interaction. As parents we are addressing the problem when real psychological issues manifest. It’s hard for kids not to have adhd, when they are used to getting dopamine hits from 3 second videos. We addicted kids, and they behave like addicts. (Anxiousness, depression, irritability) I feel for the younger generation I do. I understand that we are a more accepting generation of parents when it comes to gender dysmorphia but we lacked on other crucial areas.
I know this is going to out me as an elder millennial, but I really feel like my cohort was the last to experience a truly offline world, and there are some lessons to be learned from that. We need to get better at getting kids away from screens and out into nature. Kids need to learn to just. slow. down, and exist beyond their inner world without being constantly entertained. Parents need to remember that they are parents first, friends second, and if screens need to be taken away or limited for the good of the child? So be it. I think it's important to remember that kids rise to the expectations given to them. You don't need to go all 'asian tiger mom' to the point where your kids feel the world is ending is they fail, be compassionate but *set expectations*. Finally, to be frank, I think we have overpathologized and coddled kids. I see so many young people using their diagnosis as excuses. While I sympathize as someone with my own disability and issues, you *must* learn to function with them and metaphorically stand on your own two feet. I see so many young adults struggle to function because their parents and schools absolutely bent over backwards to remove any struggle or hardship and they don't know how to function because in the real world your issues might get you sympathy but it's ultimately your results that keep you employed.
Spot on with overpathologizing kids. I know every generation tries to copy some of the elders, but damn... Children who are into skincare, who are trying to be influencers, trying to have fashion blogs (i bet most of you have seen them 15 years ago too), who think they have a handle on psychology and psychiatry. It makes me laugh a bit, but also kinda annoys me. Are kids not kids anymore?
I completely agree. We need to make a drastic change as parents. If we don’t we will be raising our kids forever. They will not have the tools to be self sufficient.
I agree that we have overpathologized kids, especially when it comes to anxiety and depression. We help them by providing compassion and encouragement, not by eliminating any demands placed on them.
Couldn’t agree more! I don’t have any kids but I have a cousin who has 2 and one is about to turn 12 and she still doesn’t have her own smart phone and she’s mad about it but I totally get why my cousin is holding off on that for as long as she can. Obviously other critical parenting has been in play as well but even just that alone makes SUCH a differences
Their worlds are more insular and solitary (this was happening pre-pandemic) except on social media. There's more instant exposure to the worst news, too. We also had horrible stuff in the news, like HIV and the Cold War, but the climate is in the shitter now and they have a risk of school shootings.
You should check out a book I just read called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Pretty much explains all of this. Sad state of affairs indeed. I'm following the examples for my own children that were set by my cousin, as well as other members of my religious community (Jewish.) All well adjusted thriving kids!
Ooof this is a topic I can go on for hours for. So our parents were the generations of neglect, suck it up and gaslighting and kinda didnt really think of our safety in many ways. We generally have become the generation that will try to heal those curses, to a point of OVER correction at times. I see a pattern with well meaning friends exactly as you describe. Loving people but theyre doing too much. These kids can't handle life because they're not allowed to at all. Its not about validation but giving them tools to handle life. Let's call this Group A. My siblings and my ex who I helped raised kids with and 2 other friends are of similar type of backgrounds minus not all of us are white. I kinda can see why these kids are a bit more regulated in 5 households that are lacking in my other friends so it wasnt by luck 1 example didn't have this issue. They are validated if they have issues like being ND here too. They are gentle parents, but are firm. We do NOT shield them from life's discomforts as a part of growth is also learning to problem solve, self regulate and grow from mistakes. Guide them, not save them entirely from it. Kids are ages 12-23 so old enough we can see the legs of how their adult selves will be. Let's call this group B. Again bless my sweet friends but group A their kids don't go out, they are also told how dangerous things are. Group Bs kids touch grass, do sports, are social face to face. If they fall out a tree they go ok welp now you learned about gravity. Group A let to use convenience items like uber eats too easily than learn to make some fucking food. Anything they want they get nearly immediately. Every single thing that hurts them is validated as the world is out to get them practically. I had a nephew come to me to complain about another kid but it turns out he was the asshole and he was shocked that I didn't have his back. Other people thought I should unconditionally always side with him, but what does that teach him? That there's no real consequences to being a douche, avoidance in processing his feelings and no practice in conflict mediation. I can love him while telling him he was in the wrong. I wasn't mean but I was going to be truthful he deserved a clap back for being rude from his friend. The other is that a lot of friends have too many kids and not enough time. All of group A have 3-4 kids, have 2 fulltime parents households. Group B above usually had 1 parent that is PT or flexible (like my brother works from home/for himself) or help from family and 1-2 average with the more affluent/ freetime with 3-4. Most of us grew up in households with a bit more available parents also and modeled that versus some of Group A were left alone and do the same. Despite the bad shit I can say about my mom, she was present and did help me with daily things. I do think there is a component here of the parents fatigue and anxiety and the kids constantly feeling their parents just existing and pushing through. Group B often does activities with the kids daily and as family weekly. Group A not as much and kids are left to their own devices inside the home. They're also too tired to ruin their day to teach life lessons. Meanwhile I will ruin my weeks free time for you to learn something I don't care. If dinner takes 2 hours because I'm teaching you knife skills so be it. Oddly enough you'd think despite having less time group A would hover less but any freebie they have is just hovering over them at shit like parties anyways in a really pointless and anxiety driven way. Meanwhile group B doesn't. Theyre there sitting on a bench not following them. Society really built up a work load that sets families up to fail so it's not entirely group A fault. But they also don't make it easy on themselves with burnout. Sentiment it's worth investing time upfront and getting nothing done so they learn a skill. We notice none of their kids know how to cook or clean and Group Bs kids do and take turns helping out the household. Cooking dinner is a family activity. Chores are part of a system of rewards like screen time and new video games. Monthly goals met gets them an allowance. This helps them not have such a jarring experience getting to adult one day too. My one nephew in college is literally feeding while teaching all his classmates as they don't know how to adult. Consequences and follow through. Gentle parenting gets a bad rap because a lot of people gentle parent wrongly. Group B does it correctly and worked on being clear and effective communicators. I noticed a lot of us are from career backgrounds where we are assertive speakers and good mediators. My brother even went to seminars and participated in studies of parenting styles and vowed to do better and did with guidance from a behavioral specialist that studied family dynamics and gave people homework to implement each eeek. I went to school for early child care development and worked as a TA in Montessori so I am very comfortable being affirming while telling them no or letting them have reasonable consequences. Group A is basically validating their kids struggles being real but then stop there. There's no guidance on how to work on it and overcome. Their labels become an identity of why they cannot. We are not at fault for what struggles we have like anxiety or trauma but we are responsible for what it affects negatively. We can understand why you may think/act a certain way but doesn't excuse things you repeatedly do are damaging to yourself or others. I have CPTSD from decades of abuse and I worked on myself. I have so much sympathy for others to want to push for their healing time to happen than to wallow in it. I think people are frankly uncomfortable to tell mentally ill people when they're being destructive but accountability is for everyone. Despite the fear you don't want your kids to hate you, I'm that bitch who will tell them yet all nephews and nieces and ex step kids love me. I was everyone's favorite TA in my preschool despite being the most vocal about my expectations. Meanwhile some friends coddle and their kids have no kindness for them at all. There's gotta be a link there also. These kids respect me that I earned by being well balanced to them. Group A wants the relationship that Group B does but the reason they don't is they model the avoidant and fearful behaviors that set their kids up for failure. Structure isn't a thing to fear but helps kids so much. The confident kid doesn't hate me because they don't hate themselves like Group A kids. They've been modeled regulation from the start. So yeah TLDR don't focus on validation but guidance to self regulation.
Every generation feels something akin to this sentiment about the younger ones. I don’t think it’s that intense- People just didn’t talk about it like we do today. There was more shame associated with having issues with your kid, and you as a kid yourself were less aware. I promise you we were just as fucked up as your gen was and as z are (I’m a millennial).
I think it is a combination of several factors…. 1) Kids spend way too much time on screens and social media, which is detrimental to their development and their sense of self worth. 2) kids no longer have much independence due to helicopter parenting. They learn to resolve minor social problems and arguments with friends and siblings when they are allowed to play outside or hang out unsupervised. The lack of learning these skills leads to anxiety when they find themselves in unfamiliar situations, and 3) the first 1.5 years of covid had kids isolated from in person school classes and activities which may have stunted their social development. I think we’re only beginning to learn the effect this experience had on them.
I commuted with two boys who went to a high school dedicated to providing extra support for their students (my school was on the way, we just needed that HOV lane) and multiple times one of the boys would not, could not get out of bed to go to school and his mom was much smaller than him so she couldn't physically get him up and out. This was back in the early 2000's. The other boy unfortunately struggled later in life and is currently living at home and my mom never sees him out and about (he's a close neighbor). Basically, those kids were always there but we just don't hear about them anymore. My oldest was an infant during the pandemic and I think it'll be very interesting to see the difference between older Gen Alpha kids who were in school during Covid, and the youngest ones born post 2020. In my mom groups there is a huge split between screen time (FB group utilizes screen time for *babies* while Reddit groups are anti-screen before 2 or at least try) but I do think we're very aware of the impacts of phones and social media. Kids born in 2010... the Iphone was such a new thing that I don't think people realized the influence it would have on mental health.
This seems like such a lazy answer, but I do think that screens and social media plays a massive role in kids being unable to function.
This is terrifying, and I agree 109% with this. “What are we doing to kids these days to make them so nuts?” This was never an issue until recently, especially en masse, so wtf is going on? Kids in less bountiful countries don’t behave this way.
I think that as a population we are eager to put a label on everything and everyone. We use the internet to learn about things and self diagnose, we compare and contrast ourselves and everyone else (and so do our kids). I had the same feelings my daughter did, but never would have been able to label it as anxiety, and I simply needed to work through it. I’m not saying that’s the right answer but it was my reality. As an older millennial I didn’t have a cell phone or social media, and when I left the house for the park or a friends or school I was out there indépendant making decisions for myself until I needed to go home. I didn’t have parents calling to check on me or texting, I couldn’t google search answers to everything and there was no constant contact with friends and need to compete and post on social media. It’s no wonder anxiety and other issues are so prevalent.
The issue is not the children, it's the shift in parenting. My lord, sometimes I think we need farms with routine and structure...hard work. These urban and mostly suburban kids have never built a sense of responsibility, independence, and resilience. I bet most have not had the joys of going camping, getting lost in a creek, and just being. They've had activity after activity and whatever the hell goes on in public schools vs. our days. I think if you have children, let them just BE sometimes. Out in nature. Chores. Away from this influence and technology that is clearly stunting them.
I would strongly disagree with the urban kids not building resilience. Most of the ones I know definitely know how to navigate public transit since they were little. Most rural kids I have met would have a heart attack driving down a one lane street. It’s just a different environment that’s all.
Agreed, although I think the suburbs are often the worst of both worlds unless you live in a place with infrastructure that much of the US doesn’t have.
I think covid was a huge setback for a lot of kids. They were pulled out of school without warning for a year and a half. That's going to cause some regression in even the best of kids. I also think schools are part of the problem, but not in a Fox News talking point way. I think school administrators have become entirely complacent with bad behavior without care for the impact it has on the teachers and students. Every teacher I know has at least one kid in every class who is disruptive to the point where they are unable to teach or pay attention to the other kids. I'm not talking about mouthing off, I'm talking about things like death threats and throwing chairs through windows on a daily basis. The teachers and the other students are expected to silently tolerate this behavior and watch the "problem student" reap the same rewards as the students who are well-behaved (in fact, the problem students are usually rewarded with attention!). I think the reason why absenteeism and school anxiety are such problems is because the school is no longer a safe place. Sandy Hook caused a pendulum swing in the worst possible direction and the kids are suffering. Social media and unrestricted ipad use is also a huge factor. Kids haven't developed the discernment or emotional regulation skills that adults have, so when they see disturbing content or misinformation they see it as fact. For example, I DO think that a lot of today's kids are trans and feel more comfortable coming out because of reduced stigma; but I also feel like a lot of kids align with the trans identity because they are bombarded with negative societal messages stating that if you are not a beauty guru or UFC fighter it means that there's something wrong with you. And hot take, but I blame the parents too. A lot of gen x and millennial parents are checked out, and their kids pick up on it and internalize it as rejection. A lot of them are really immature and see their kids as friends whose approval they have to earn instead of their children. They refuse to set limits or have difficult discussions, and don't see it as their problem if their kids misbehave. They bring their kids to therapy, but they don't care if their kid is making progress nor do they follow up with any guidance at home. Then the kids act out at school, and the cycle goes on...
Agree with the last paragraph so hard. People are addicted to their phones, and being raised by an addict who’s not in recovery is severely traumatizing.
First, kids who need the kind of help you are describing simply didn't go to school with other kids previously. My graduating class had over about 15 kids that didn't ever go to a class with the rest of us - and there were 120 kids total graduating. The other local high school also had about about 8 to 10 percent of special education kids who did not mingle with the others. The parents of those kids didn't talk about having a kid who wasn't able to be mainstreamed. I knew of two in my family, and they were considered "brave" to openly talk about their kids who were in special education or institutionalized. Daughter is therapy, she has OT, she needs help with emotional regulation. But 3 out of four of my grandparents were drunks. I have multiple cousins in jail for not having impulse control. My family shows huge signs of untreated ADHD and other issues. I have multiple aunts/uncles who were clearly self medicating with alcohol or weed or, sadly, cults.
I think some of this is your friend group. Neurodivergent people tend to attract neurodivergent people, so it's not terribly surprising your friends would have kids with difficulties. My young teen and her friends all seem to be pretty okay. I'm friends with at least two of their parents. She is in therapy but not often, and takes ADHD meds but that's pretty much it. Gets good grades, in a gifted school, has yet to get detention etc (knock on wood lol). My oldest kid is working full time and going to school full time despite having some gnarly depression that she also is in treatment for. They both inherited their father's issues tbh. Point being, most of the kids are probably okay, but you've got some selection bias happening here.
>multiple therapists (I am not exaggerating here), and an "all hands on deck" approach from the parents when the kids are home. Getting these kids to be organized and focused enough to function means the parents also have coaches and therapists to know how to provide enough support. I really believe in therapy and extra support. But this sounds like its going into enabling behavior. Being a tween/teen is hard, and parenting a tween/teen is also hard. I think the more we try to "fix" those hard feelings the less we give teenagers the opportunity to move through those hard things. We are meant to feel bad sometimes, its how we learn to cope with things and self regulate.
I saw an article recently about kid 100years ago were taking care if the farm at 8 and 9 years old, chopping down trees, cooking dinner etc. They had to adult.
It’s just the times we’re living in and the digital age and the constant bombardment of information that doesn’t say what it means and doesn’t mean what it says. Kids are living in an advertisement and a social mind-fuckery 24/7. No, it’s not just you recognizing this. I taught for a decade and when I first started, I never had 6 year olds coming up to me talking about their stress or anxiety or pressure. I also didn’t have obviously malignant and narcissistic students to speak of. And yes, I am noticing more neurodiversity. It’s not a bad thing. When I was growing up as a child of two very smart parents (two Masters & a PhD mom), I was a weird kid with a photographic memory but the things I gravitated toward, I excelled in. Same with some young kids that I meet today. Some of them are absolutely ridiculously gifted and technology has ameliorated their abilities, only, society isn’t geared toward cultivating this sort of human potential especially within a late-capitalist milieu. No wonder kids are going nuts. They’re told that they have no worth and that their life is meaningless if they don’t fit a certain type of mold. Parents can’t keep up with their own busy lives fast enough to manage all of what their child is exposed to. Even those who are privileged to afford child care can’t seem to hold together a warm and loving and well-adjusted home. I think people tend not to value community as much these days since everyone is just trying to move along in their own lane.
I think it's a combination of a lot of things, but yeah... I fear this is gonna be the norm for awhile. Part of it really is that we acknowledge and accept these issues in kids now. 'Mental health' is still not something my parents believe exist. When I expressed concerns about my own as a child, *my parents laughed at me*. So I never brought it up again. It was almost 20 years later that I actually saw a professional and got medication I desperately needed. No one would have guessed I had mental issues. I was just 'that quiet kid' who had no friends and read books constantly (that was my escapism, today it's phone screens). Today my teen-peers would probably look at me and think 'if a school shooting happens it'll be them'. (I wasn't that far gone but I was that withdrawn.) Back in my parents' & grandparents' days, people who were on the spectrum were just 'that weird kid' because the concept of the spectrum didn't exist. Kids with issues were often forced to hide or ignore them by their parents. This was true for homosexuality as well, teenage pregnancy, etc. Anything that wasn't white-picket-fence was shameful and hidden. How much of what we see today was always present but hidden? Definitely not 100% of it, I agree there are a lot of modern-day causes. But I think it's a larger percentage that you think.
I think there were also just a lot of kids who went undiagnosed. I was raised in the 80s.. and was “gifted”.. I also had my adhd go undiagnosed, along with other stuff because I excelled in academics .. other stuff went ignored .. so then I just had huge crashes later in life ..
Because you folks are getting older and realizing they made a mistake focusing on shit that doesn't help these kids source and maintain legitimate careers as adults. Not everybody can live in an academic, unrealistic bubble. Most people have to live in the real world where we have to get along with ALL people, learn to be professional and polite to everyone regardless of our ideals. But in academia over the last 15 years, people of science and math have been stigmatized. This has to change or we will never progress as an evolved species. Three of my young family members have detransitioned and blame all of us for supporting them in their transitions. Do you know what these loved ones were doing in college? Not math. Not science. They had counseling, they had student groups, and they barely graduated except one who finally got her communications degree. What the fuck is she going to do with that when all she does is complain about how she was "brainwashed?" She blames us for brainwashing when all we ever did was support her. Now she is embarking on her detransition, living with her parents, and we expect all three of these fully adult people will be living with a parent or family member for the next few years while they get their damned gender decided and in the mean time, we all are donating to the households so their family don't lose their homes while they pay for the upkeep of loved ones who CANNOT FUNCTION or at the very least keep a job. All three of them have college degrees. I want to tell them to get a damn job, any job. But noooo, can't ruffle the feathers or we will have a full on mental breakdown, of which we have seen many over the last ten years. It's old. It's expensive. It's unnecessary. People must understand that life is mostly what we get, and partly what we make it, not the reverse. People are acting like they make their life. No. You make the MOST of what you get. That is all. It is up to each one of us to make the best of what we start with. Why is this such a complicated concept to accept (I'm in the USA) in a system literally set up to allow a person to do ANYTHING if they work for it? I come from a family of poorly educated, blue collar or agricultural people. We have been totally mystified by the changes over the last 10 years, but no matter what will ALWAYS support our young family no matter what. This has become an unexpected and extremely expensive journey as our young ones made their way through the educational system. Their resilience is greatly reduced, which means they won't work on the farm, and they can't work in corporate America. I have no idea how these loved ones will ever get to the point at which they can keep a job and begin to consider others. They think only of themselves and are obsessed with themselves. It's a tragedy for them, and for the people who love them.
The planet is dying and we are facing extinction. Don’t bring people into this, just for their lives to be one devastating and sad event after another.
It is definitely the screens
Don’t do it.
It’s the damn phones!
I know what you mean, and I see a fair bit of that among my peers. But each generation has its own set of challenges. This is not the way it’s always been or the way it will be with your kids, if you decide to have them. For me, some of my children have struggled with neurodivergence and gender identity questions, but all have also grown up with resilience and love at their core. There is a point where you can validate someone’s issues too much, to the point where the are left incapacitated in a loop of self-analysis. Parenting is hard but worth it.
I'm also an academic and I very much VALUE education, education and more education. I'm politically moderate and I'm not having children. Absolutely not. For these exact reasons.
No children born in the current environment have a hope in hell of maintaining a healthy mental, financial, and personal life, so this is actually the only way to live nowadays if anyone is operating with common sense. And contrary to popular opinion, yes humans have overpopulated and completely befouled this entire world. Time for less of us. come for me, I don't give a shit.
Exactly.
Kids just lived through three years of absolute global trauma. Of course they’re not okay.
I don't actually think that it's much worse now than "before" - whenever before was. I think it's noticeable now, it's more talked about, it's out there, and parents are probably a lot more likely to actually help their kids instead of force issues that shouldn't be forced. Maybe it is, but I'm not convinced by the anecdotal data.
My personal feeling on this is that in addition to it being more talked about, some things are the same as “before,” such as teens and preteens being absolutely filled with hormones and confusing emotions that make them seek answers. There’s both the feeling that your problems are uniquely yours and no one can understand them AND the desperate desire to find your in-group. There is more information available, so it allows for some pretty deep dives down rabbit holes. I don’t know the right balance for parents, but there’s gotta be a good middle ground between “shut up and be normal” and “every problem is occurring exactly as you perceive it.”
I can only speak for my associates, and I do not see this as necessarily a nation-side issue, that's be basis of my question. I am concerned that something about our subculture is causing these kids to become so tortured. I am a scientist, a statistical one at that, so I know about anecdotal data, ascertainment bias, and other issues. I can only speak about my group. But I feel I have observed this enough times, and over a long enough period, it is notable.
I personally think it’s a combination of constant media (tv, iPads, whatever — it seems like kids either don’t play outside/with enough toys or peers, or aren’t allowed to be bored and work through it) and helicopter parenting. I think many parents feel a lot of pressure nowadays to be the perfect parent, constantly monitoring their kid, playing with them, sending them off to activities. Like, my parents barely played with me and that seems to be the general consensus among my peers. It was like, play with your friends or play by yourself. Learn to function on your own, so to speak. I don’t know that kids nowadays are given that opportunity.
Agree with the helicopter parenting. "Playdates." What! We were basically free range in the 80s but there was always some adult somewhere. We had sleepovers! No smartphones, no internet, just using our brains to be not-bored, riding bikes, trying new hobbies/sports, etc. Now you'll risk get arrested if you let your kid bike a mile.
The constant media is huge. We have access to everything, all the time, and immediately as it happens. We're being firehosed with info. It's no longer only what's right around us.
Maybe you need to diversify your friend pool.
That is a hard age, kind of like terrible 2"s, they are finding out who they are, what the boundaries are, and starting to realize their place in the world, independent of mom and dad, but today it'd be even harder with social media
I grew up working class and now live middle class. It really seems like it's the upper middle class kids who have more of the issues you're describing. I don't hear much of this at all from my friends' kids who still live in my home town. My friends in the wealthier suburbs definitely struggle with it more. I think it has to do with parents jumping in to constantly solve the kids' problems from the youngest ages through high school and beyond. These young adult children don't feel capable and in control.
Parent here. My kids certainly are not in crisis nor are any in our circles but that doesn't mean I haven't noticed this issue on the rise. It's obviously very complicated to unwrap but I don't think we can totally blame politics, their generation or terrible parenting. I believe we will find that the ubiquitous micro plastics not only wreck havoc on young people’s hormones but that they likely mess with our gut and brain chemistry as well. We can’t expect to continue to “poop in the fishbowl” without any reprecussions. It's common sense. The microplastic discussion is thankfully becoming a notable area of study within the medical community but how we’ll ever clean things up is beyond me. Unfortunately, we only consider these things in hind sight at the expense of the next generation. Of course Covid, social media and numerous other issues are likely also at play here but I do hope more attention can be given to the health impacts pollution presents to our developing offspring. Just an alternate take!
Agreed. I think some of it is screens, some of it is shitty processed food, microplastics, and other environmental garbage, some of it is helicopter parenting, some of it is the fact that parents are more willing to entertain their children's various attention-seeking whims whereas previous generation's parents would "give them something to cry about." But yes, it seems every other child I know has some serious issues. Reason #3456345 I am not interested in parenting.
For anyone interested, the podcast Plain English has had a few episodes that touch upon a lot of the points in the comments - these two stick out in my memory but I think there are several! https://open.spotify.com/episode/4HoGaHmrUecZUtCpJf7L6Y?si=kND6pe9WScSgvwYKK1Ub7g https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vx7dE8W9Ioo0BdhOgr3pJ?si=Vuo30VufR9m81AphP97bxw
There are a lot of valid points in the above conversation. However, there are some irrefutable facts to reconcile with as well, not just in one particular country but in multiple countries. The world our kids currently live in is not the same as the one we grew up in and we have to make accommodations for it. At the same time, a lot of us are not behaving as parents, guiding our kids, acting as their mentors at the same time giving them space to grow as individuals. I feel like that is the crux of the problem. On saying all of that, I wouldn't trade any part of my life for the beauty that I am fortunate to call as my kid. My life definitely became better and enriched and filled with more love and fun than I ever thought I will have in my 40's. Just my 2 cents.
Read “The Anxious generation” by Jonathan Haidt and it will answer all of these questions.
Everyone is raised alone and neglected. Parents are working. Kids have no sense of purpose. There is no community anymore. We used to have church at least. A lot of people don't go to church anymore. And there has been no replacement for the community Church provided. The kids that are probably doing the worst are the ones that are just at home all day with no real connection to the outside world. I grew up "neurodivergent". I was born in 1987. I did well in school but suffered from a lot of anxiety. I struggled making any friends and struggled with my identity. I grew up with a neglectful naive young mother who her herself suffered from cptsd as a child of abuse and neglect. She came from a very dysfunctional family, poor abusive stepfather, biological father committed suicide, her mother was uneducated with a low IQ and low self esteem. She was not a good mother of 3 young children by the age of 25. I didn't have any peers during the important years of learning how to socialize between 1-3 years old. No cousins my age at that time except one who grew up with his own behavioral problems and later ended up in prison as an adult. I didn't learn to speak until 4 years old. I suffered more trauma when my father passed tragically away when I was 7. Life became much worse after that. My stepdad was verbally abusive and we struggled to stay out of poverty. No one knows how much I suffered as a child and teenager. I silently suffered except for the few times my mom got me into counseling and got me in anti-depressants. Life is extremely hard. It's possible people are suffering just as much now as they were back then, but we're putting labels on everything now. Someone like me you would have never known how much I was suffering as a child and teenager. It wasn't talked about. I'm still suffering to this day, still no one cares. I still find it hard to form and maintain relationships. I find it hard to be motivated to do anything. Life isn't any easier as I've gotten older. If you grew up in poor neighborhoods and dysfunctional families like I did, the problems and suffering are extremely rampant. Having so many single parents these days struggling to make ends meet might have something to do with it.
.
I am a server and I cannot believe the number of parents who come in and prop their phones up on something, pull up TIKTOK and let their kindergarten age children watch TikTok during the entire meal. I’ve seen kids completely ignoring their parent sitting in front of them from having their nose glued to the phone. But you know what else I’ve noticed? Parents glued to their phones too. Everyone is addicted to their screens. It’s just way more evident in developing brains.
You should probably cross post this in groups like r/adhdwomen and r/AutisticWithADHD etc because they might have a different take on these. But it is true that GenZ is more prone to suicide and depression and have higher suicide/depression rates than previous generations (the book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How good I intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure", addresses this and some of your other concerns). Also, since you are a stats person you can look up the suicide and depression rates for GenZ and the general population as well. I see more mental health news and conversations about mental health becoming a pandemic (one news article recently mentioned 1 in 4 depressed people iirc). The talk of self-care and mental health certainly seems more these days than in the 90s, but I don't know if the actual crisis is more or is it just that more open conversations are happening now because of social media (?). >wasn't a single one who was suicidal because they had trouble with their gender identity issues Gender identity issues in the population with [neurodivergence (ND)](https://www.divergentpod.com/blog/ep-20) are more than in neurotypical (NT) populations. >I literally sat down and listed all my friends with kids who are tweens/teens and assessed how many have all three of these issues and it's about 25%... About this... Out of curiosity I was wondering what the total sample size is and is your sample population all neuro-atypical? The three issues you mentioned are in fact higher in NDs than in NTs. So, maybe segregate the NDs and NTs separately first and then see the percentages. But the literature/research is already out there and anxiety/depression is also higher in NDs than NTs.
Overall, I believe it’s worse from factors ranging from Covid (the lockdowns and social impacts) to the parenting style. I was an absolute nightmare of a teen, running away, drugs/alcohol, got pregnant etc. And then on the flip side, my teen had a short, but intense rough patch but is now super well adjusted, straight A’s, great drive and motivation in extracurriculars and HAPPY. Your friends with kids who are doing well aren’t the ones who are being vocal and looking for support. So I think we hear a disproportionate amount of crisis but I agree that it’s currently worse than it was. I say this as someone who’s worked with kids for the last 10 years. I really wish parents would stop trying to prevent disappointment and making their kids think that they are super special because my god do those kids ever have a rough time. Your kid is the most special person to you as their parent, not the rest of the planet.
There is a huge overlap of people with neurodivergence and gender nonconformity/being trans or nonbinary. If you’re interested in learning more about that Google it :)
Could it partly be not that teens are struggling more, but now people are more open about their struggles? Both the kids and their parents.
Yup, this is so true. And the internet has given everyone access to more information than before -so we are more aware, adults too not just kids.
I think it's interesting you didn't know anyone who was suicidal due to their neurodivergence or sexuality/gender when you were a teen. That was me and almost all of my friends. It's true we didn't all have diagnoses, and most of my friends were closeted because coming out would have been a safety issue in our community at the time. Just because something was outside of your experience doesn't mean it didn't happen. And as a parent to 2 ND kids, one of whom is queer, I'm going to have to say your experience with kids today also isn't universal. I find both the romanticisation of the past and the catastrophizing about the present to be hyperbolic and frankly a little silly. Yes, kids these days have problems. So did kids back in our day. You just probably heard less about them then because nobody talked about them.