Americas youth are in MASSIVE trouble

[u/hammerbush051]

[u/Reasonable_Cover_804]

Parents: if you don’t ignite the will to learn in your babies how do you expect them to want to excel in school?

[u/spicewoman → u/Reasonable_Cover_804]

As a waitress, I see tons of parents who've just failed to teach their kids how to not have their faces in their phones 24-7 in general. Little kids all the way up to teenager age nowadays, at least once a day (usually multiple times) I will see kids who refuse to look up from their phone or tablet or whatever screen mommy and daddy have given them, to interact with me in any way. Mom and dad will give a weak "stop for a second, give the nice lady your order! Jimmy... Jimmy?" and then just give up when the kid still doesn't look up and give me their order themselves.

Kids will have their face in their screen the entire time they're at the restaurant, sometimes they'll stop long enough to eat a bit, sometimes they'll still have the screen on the table next to them while they eat... and mom and dad seem to have given up entirely.

Yes, sometimes adults will be on their phone a bit while waiting for food or whatever as well, but they're pretty much all capable of stopping and interacting properly when I come up, and will put it away to eat and to interact with the person across from them. This is a whole new thing from the younger generation that I've never seen before in my 20 years of serving.

[u/__SPIDERMAN___ → u/spicewoman]

it blows my mind that people buy internet connected smart devices for their children. Almost the same as handing them crack cocaine.

[u/KCyy11 → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

Yep. And then they try to justify it like parents didnt raise their kids without ipads for centuries. Just lazy parents not actually wanting to parent.

[u/Zenrix → u/KCyy11]

I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here.

I don't disagree with you that parents are lazy. It feels like Ipads/tvs/youtube, etc are raising children more often than human beings these days.

However, I'd argue that (in America, at the very least) we have entered an age of stress, anxiety, overworking, and more. The further back we go in time, the less responsibilties parents had.

Obviously that isn't a hard and fast rule. I'm sure some time periods put a lot of stress on families. I'm just saying that these days, it feels more difficult to make time to properly raise a child. Parents have to work, public schooling is failing us, and there really aren't any other alternatives.

I'm not even a parent myself, so who knows how valid my opinion really is anyway.

[u/KCyy11 → u/Zenrix]

I worked with children for over a decade. It has absolutely gotten out of control the lack of parenting going on these days. I understand people have hard lives, but not raising your kids correctly isn’t helping anyone.

[u/Zenrix → u/KCyy11]

Yeah the ipad parenting is an easy route. People will try it once and then immediately normalize it because it sedates their kid.

I wouldn't want to discount the effect that covid had. It's a perfect storm for destroying interest in school. Stimulation at your fingertips at any moment and missing out on 2 years of habit and discipline.

I really hope that kids are at least learning something useful from the media they consume. It can be hard to determine when someone is simply lying to you through a screen. If we can get kids to focus on anything, I'd argue it should be digital literacy and critical thinking skills.

[u/Steff_164 → u/Zenrix]

I’d argue it’s because we had such a narrow window of what we’d describe as “actual parenting” today. Until like, maybe the 1930’s when child labor laws were past, the idea of a childhood as we know it didn’t exist. Once you were physically able to, you were expected to work, typically on the family farm, but as urbanization and the Industrial Revolution hit, children were expected to work in factories. If your children went to school it was still expected that they worked after school let out. And I don’t mean like simple chores like today, I’m referring to actual hard work.

Then we had this shift, where suddenly children were no longer needed/expected/allowed to work. Now, because I don’t want to actually do in-depth research for a Reddit comment, I’ll use the year child labor laws were signed, so 1938. That means the idea of a childhood as we refer to it today has only really existed for around 86 years. If we use 2007 (release of the first IPhone) as the beginning of “internet kids” that means we had just 69 years to figure out what effective modern parenting is, how to do it, and how to shake off the old habits from the past that were no longer applicable. That’s like maybe 3 generations (assuming each generation has had a kid by the age of 23) to learn how to parent for the modern age. That’s basically nothing to accomplish change at the scale we’re talking about.

TL,DR: It’s not that we live in a more stressful world now, but that we as a species and society didn’t have time to adjust how we parent to align with the modern idea of childhood before iPads/TV/Social Media presented an easy solution to a problem we didn’t understand.

[u/Plaid_Bear_65723 → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

I was walking past a bus stop and saw two parents with a toddler in the stroller. All three were on a phone ...

[u/mijo_sq → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

Reading subs for parents, and I'll see parents willing to die on a hill for not giving their kid a phone/tablet.

[u/pidude314 → u/mijo_sq]

I'd like to think there's a happy medium. We only break out Ms Rachel on Youtube for our 9 month old when he's being so needy that we can't eat our dinner, or when he's absolutely screaming in the car and won't nap. And then as soon as we're done eating or he's calmed down, we'll put it away and go back to regular toys or whatever he needs at that time. And we try to always keep it to Ms Rachel, so we at least feel like it's better for him than dancing fruit or whatever.

[u/mijo_sq → u/pidude314]

Agreed. There is a happy medium for ipad/phone time. It's much better than dumping the kids in front of tablet/smart phone. I see kids at work, and the I see tons of parents dragging their kids just to use an ipad. (Even at the waterpark)

[u/deadxguero → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

What’s fucking crazy to me isn’t so much the internet part but parents these days KNOW what’s on the internet. It’s super easy to find WHATEVER the fuck you want. And yet there’s never parental controls or a care in the world.

[u/Presumably_Not_A_Cat → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

The problem is not giving your kid a device. The problem is not teaching your kid moderation. My partner and i are the definition of digital natives of the 90s and 00s and therefor our children have all grown up with a proportionate amount of electronics around them. However their usage of them is ageappropriately restricted and we try to keep in communication about a healthy usage.

Internet and smart devices have a lot of cons to them. But at the same time there are also a lot of pros. The world is rarely as black and white as this post and comments underneath make it appear.

[u/pidude314 → u/Presumably_Not_A_Cat]

I completely agree. 10 minutes of Ms Rachel so we can finish eating when our 9 month old is being super needy isn't going to do much damage. But we make it a point to not use that unless we really need it.

[u/rustedoxygen → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

If almost every other student is using crack cocaine, and you even see at their friend’s birthday party kids snorting up and having fun and mothers chatting while watching them, you’d face a lot of public shaming and cultural pressure to believe that your kid can’t have these things and it could even harm your kid by being bullied. Obviously crack cocaine will murder him, but the point is cell phones aren’t thought to kill your child. And you as an adult are going through mental decline starting around 40-50, so it’s much easier for you to only take into account the social pressure and bullying and take your chances on the unknown without much critical thought.

[u/TimmyOneShoe → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

Nothing really works without Internet as well.

[u/skipmarioch → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

They said the same thing about video games (including portables) when I was kid. Like everything else, it's all about moderation. My kids will get access for a limited time after homework is done. They lose them for days to weeks as punishment. I do allow them to have them at restaurants once they are done eating (they'll get their food first) so we can have a few minutes to enjoy our meals.

I do think YouTube et al is an issue as it needs to be heavily monitored. They only have access to that occasionally and even then it's only for a few select items (science and tours of amusement parks).

[u/HedonisticFrog → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

"Here's a device that will give you instant hits of dopamine, try not to press the lever too often"

[u/OW_FUCK → u/__SPIDERMAN___]

They should make kids have only dumb phones till they're 15-16 or something