Commenter Teresa posed interesting questions today:
“[Raising children] takes more time, discipline, and maturity than it once did.”
Why is this so? Are parents doing all the things, chores, obligations, responsibilities that growing children maybe/could/should do? I think the better question is are today’s parents, no matter what social class, mature themselves?
Why aren’t parents disciplining children, instead of pampering them? Why aren’t their children cutting grass, washing clothes, vacuuming, dusting, making their beds, hanging up their clothes, shoveling snow? Why are today’s Gen-X parents, the prior baby-boomer parents, some Millenial parents doing for their children what their children can do for themselves?
Why aren’t these children at age 15, 16, etc. getting part-time jobs, and being taught how to manage their money? Why are children for the last 50 years treated like hot-house plants? Why are parents running themselves ragged, when their children could be of significant help in maintaining a home? What better way to grow tomorrow’s parents, than by having our children learn to manage a home themselves?
Categories: Childhood
I’ve been thinking about the difference between what I had to do and what my child has to do and also about the difference between myself and my parents and between them and theirs.
Like why am I not able to go to work at 8:00 like everyone else in my office? Why do I have to show up at 10:00 am and loose 2 hours pay so I can drop my kid off at school at 8:50 after the last express bus to down town SF has already left 22nd avenue & California? And why do I have to pay nearly $50 a day for after school care which is well over $500 a month when we live 1 block, that is ONE block from her school? By 8 years old I’d been walking to and from school or taking public transportation to school for 3 or 4 years by myself already. I had a key on a string around my neck and I’d let myself into the house until mom and dad got home from work at 6pm or 6:30.
Well every time you hear of a child kidnapped and chopped up into little pieces they were just waiting for a bus on their way home from school or on their way to school or some dance class or basketball practice or whatever. So parents have to bring their kids to and from school something my parents would NEVER have done ever. We were allowed to be home alone because they were both at work and to be fair I can’t remember ever doing any home work and I did get into a fair amount of trouble and it was dark when they got home and they could not tell I had not watered the yard like I was suppose to. I lied and said I’d done it until everything in the yard died. I spent my afternoons crank calling people and seeing what kind of color fire different liquids made out of aerosol cans and then there was the murcury collection I made by breaking all the thermometers (I loved the little ball of silver and how it broke apart)
But I could cross the street alone and I could roll a fair joint by the time I was 13 and I knew what to do with the boys that came over to my house.
Ah independence. Those were the days when there were no such thing as play dates where parents went with you…it was just “Mom I’m going to play out with________” and she’d say “be back by dinner”.
I honestly have no recollection of either of my parents ever looking at my homework. They’d ask if I’d done it. They’d look at my grades and say I should apply myself. That was until I learned that I could get the mail before them and erase my grades and with a dull number 2 pencil write a good grade in…but not too good, that would be cause for alarm. I guess I did learn a few things with all that greater responsibility I had.
It would be wonderful, just once, to have a discussion about parenting that doesn’t start out with the smug premise that Kids Today are lazy, spoiled and have everything handed to them by their spineless parents.
Mythago I was just having a little fun with the topic but I think my point is your point. I had way more responsibility that my own kid does but I was unsupervised a lot which makes for some awesome stories I hope never to give my kid the opportunity to have those kinds of stories to tell.
We are younger longer and longer. Toilet train later get off the tit later marry later have kids later we are stretching out childhood at about the same rate we are stretching out life.
That is a tright, self-serving cliche.
But now that we’re well past the start of the discussion, I can contributed the insight that my kids are lazy, spoiled, and have everying handed to them by their spineless parents.
Ok, not so lazy academically. And they pursue athletic and artistic endevors with vigor. These facts give their parents great joy.
But they contribute nothing to home maintenance as far as I can tell — even to the point of failing to remove from the car the McDonald’s trash left over from the food they just ate. If asked, they’ll gather their own dirty clothes. Occasionally they’ll even deign to take clean clothes to their rooms. Getting clothes into closets and drawers is a fight I’ve abandoned.
I can get them to walk the dog if I flog them. And my wife disapproves of flogging — and all other forms of inducement. It’s not much fun for me either. So I walk the dog.
Hey, they’re teenagers. Mostly they’re happy. And my wife and I work crazy hours, which discourages our undertaking a new crash course in remedial home maintenance for kids.
So if my kids must learn to cope with housework once they’re out of the house, well, it’s not the ideal, but it’s the current trajectory.
I think a lot of kids are too supervised and micromanaged today which is also a problem but what are you going to do, as marilyn said, with the fear of kidnappers lurking everywhere?
So, if this coddling has been going on for fifty years, aren’t GenXers themselves “coddled” kids who….apparently grew up to be responsible?
Marilyn thank-you. Most of us in my generation, when we think of the good old days–the days in which we were raised–its the American suburbs with moms at home and safe neighborhoods.
I also walked 5 blocks to catch the bus to kindergarten. My Mom was home and I never learned how to roll a joint. (Yes there was drug use in my high school and a lot of joints smoked at Yale, and quite a bit of sex going on too–by my adolescence it was the 70s).
But for a lot of kids today the alleged “good old days” were the latchkey kid days.
I know a mom in the very expensive Westchester suburb where I raised my kids (mostly) who refused to let her 12 year old son stand at the top of the driveway alone, for fear he would be kidnapped.
It was a long, leafy driveway, but still.
Separating the reality of childhood from the nostalgia (or in the case of the 50s and 60s the antinostalgia), it is true we are much more filled with anxiety than people were in the 50s and 60s because we judge reality based more on media.
We are so connected to every bad thing that happens now, nowhere feels safe.
I don’t see any evidence that “kids today” are any more or less irresponsible than “kids yesterday”. There is more teenage unemployment now as opposed to the 1970s, and (in my demographic) less personal car ownership by 16-18 year olds because of cost, gasoline prices, and the fact that my state has restricted licensing for people under 18 (ex.: no driving after 10:00 PM on a weeknight; 11:00 PM on a weekend).
But “good old days”? In the “good old days” of the 1950s, the ability of teenagers to find employment was strictly gendered—there weren’t any girls working at the grocery store like my father did. He could get work like that because he wasn’t expected to do anything inside the home; that was his sisters’ job. Bagging and shelving groceries was one of those he-man jobs that girls were supposedly too delicate to do; meanwhile, those same delicate flowers were hauling around younger siblings (who weighed more than groceries). My mother (like my father) was also the oldest, and her job was….basically being a housewife from the moment she hit puberty (her own parents did shiftwork; she was the oldest of six).
People have fewer children now. In the 70s, I was usually the only “only child” in any given classroom; now only children are ubiquitous, right behind two-child families. Frankly, less “child labor” is needed around the home. I’ve got a 2-person household; if my daughter picks up after herself, we’re good. I’d rather she focus her free time on homework, reading, music practice, etc. That and being a “junior zookeeper”. Those activities will get her somewhere in life.
At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think it boils down to selfishness – and not on the part of kids, on the part of parents. Parents find all of their worth in their kids and in “taking care” of their kids. In so doing, they deprive their children of self-sufficiency and self-reliance in order to feed their own addiction to “being needed.” As parents, our goal should be to raise children who are capable of living without us, not to create a fan club or a reason for our own existence. That is selfish and hurts our kids in the long run. When we make our kids our idols (the thing that is most important in our lives) we put an undue burden on them which they will never be able to live up to. When we find our meaning elsewhere and bring that into our parenting role, then we are capable of modeling for them what it really looks like to be an adult.
Many of the parents I know have kids who do fewer chores around the house than their parents did. This seems to be mostly because the amount of homework required by schools has grown. Parents don’t want to force their kids to do chores when almost all the kids’ time is already filled with school, travel home, homework, and after-school activities. Kids often aren’t getting enough sleep.
Another factor for some families is that the parents are able to afford someone to do some of the housework or yardwork themselves.
I’ve tried to make sure my kids learn how to do things and do chores, particularly in the summer or school vacations. However, at a certain point I feel torn because I want my kids to get some sleep.
I also think it’s sadly realistic if a parent believes that their child needs to spend time doing homework and extracurricular activities in order to get into college and to compete with other kids whose parents do the chores.
All I know is you you only have to tell me 3 to 4 times a year that a child or teenager found hacked to bits in a ditch or slaughtered in someone’s apartment was kidnapped on their way home from school or while walking the family dog. It is against the law to let your child walk to school now without an adult, did you know that? My mother would have called it over protective but my kid is not going to get stolen on my watch, or high or play with mercury or light farts or aqua net hairspray on fire. She’s not going to get locked in the dryer by her bratty little bully friends or get harassed and bullied and be afraid to walk up her own block because we are all there us parents forced to watch or at least play with our phones while they all play in our general vicinity. She’s not going to pierce her ears at 11 with a sewing needle some ice and a potato or her belly button at 15 with the same implements. She won’t be dying her hair blond with clorox or carving pumpkins alone with a 15 inch french knife. She won’t be buying cars from boys down the block and driving them unlicensed, uninsured, and unregistered into mailboxes.
She helps me with dinner and would do more yes if I made her do more. But all that supervising tuckers me out I’m not much of a kid person to begin with a little togetherness goes a long way and making her clean up her room is a chore for me because of how difficult it is to get her away from the tv or the computer or her dolls. I realized though that she can’t even put her own pony tail in and she waits for me to get her dressed in the morning so I have got to buckle down a little in the near future and get her at least independent enough to look presentable when she is ready for the world 10 years from now.
It is against the law to let your child walk to school now without an adult, did you know that?
Where is this illegal?
In the state of Illinois, it is illegal to leave any child under the age of thirteen without adult supervision. So, technically, this includes the walking-back-and-forth from school if there isn’t an adult present. It also makes the “latchkey” solution technically illegal. Now, the policy of DCFS is to allow leeway by any case officer for children ten and over; on-the-ground conditions mean this is enforced by race, class and marital status of the parent.
Crazy? Yep. As it automatically makes parents of middle-schoolers break the law, since afterschool care isn’t offered at middle schools (which include eleven and twelve year olds).
So, technically, this includes the walking-back-and-forth from school if there isn’t an adult present.
I suspect there’s a little more to the law than that. Otherwise, if you dropped your child off at school and she walked into the building to find out that you were the only family not notified of a last-minute school closure, you’d be guilty of a crime. “Leaving alone” and “leaving home alone” and “leaving in a car unattended” are usually different things; in my state (California) I believe there is no set age, which on the one hand sounds great, and on the other hand means that if your kid sets the house on fire by accident when you go out you can’t say “well he was over the legal age”.