Is modern parenting damaging to kids?

Well I never found my mum boring or annoying and wouldn't have been ashamed to hold her hand in public and I moved out at 16 and have been living independently without any mental illnesses ever since.

Quite sad that youre judging mother's and daughters for hiding hands

Re your DS being rude to your friends, I'd focus on actions and consequences eg " I'm going to meet Susie today, no you can't join us, it's because you were cheeky to her last time, we'll try again when I can be confident you'll be friendly and polite"

Agree with this

Also (1) not allowing children to fail and bounce back and (2) not leaving them to resolve their own friendship issues

In general I'm very cynical of this idea that we can "teach empathy" to children by exposing them to things that are too scary for them.

You think that our children should be protected from what some children are actually living?

Yes I absolutely think they should. There is this idea that bearing witness amounts to actually doing something, which in fact it doesn’t.

The human brain, and particularly the brain of a child, did not evolve to be able to process misery on a global scale. Children need to be aware of events in their own communities, where there often is plenty of suffering but it’s contextualised and understandable and sometimes can be addressed. Sometimes they need to be aware of national events. Only rarely is it actually helpful for them to know about international calamities, certainly not daily.

Even for adults, daily global news sets all sorts of mental alarms ringing but most of the time it doesn’t help us to know all the details and it doesn’t help the people suffering either. We’re just pairs of eyes feeding news channels/TikTok/Twitter.

I completely agree with this. It is not helpful for a child to be expected to deal with an entire world’s worth of suffering. My kids are aware of big things that happen that directly affect them (eg they know about the war in Ukraine because we have refugees locally). Daily updates on all the world’s problems are a recipe for a negative state of mind.

How much is parents putting their anxiety and issues onto their children?

We see examples on here daily

What rubbish.

Poor mental health today is nothing to do with no violence!

Poor mental health in young people today is due to the huge increase in poverty, the widening gap in inequality, the massive increase in academic pressure on them, an education system that allows them NO say in their lives (up until 16), environment worries/climate crisis, the lasting impact of isolation and fear from the pandemic, the fact that it’s harder than EVER to get on the property ladder, find a job and just how it’s harder than ever to afford anything.

I also think as a generation we do protect our kids more because of the wild amount of freedom most of got at such a young age and how dangerous that was for us. Yes it built a sort of street-wise independence but my god some of the situations we got into at too young an age make my toes curl now. And I come from a very middle class, secure, loving home as do my friends. Drinking at 13, drugs at 14, parties and raves at 14+, going off with random people in random cars, roaming the streets at all hours etc.

I agree with some points made on here that social media and screen addiction is a problem today, for all of us in fact! Not just kids. But in general I’m so sick of the narrative that todays kids/young people are ‘weak’ and ‘snowflakes’. We need to take a good hard look at how society has changed and support our children and young people not constantly blame them and ‘gentle parenting’.

‘Children read facial expressions, so seeing us look calm/unbothered rather than angry/disappointed when they’ve done something wrong is counterproductive and blocks them from naturally learning human behaviour and socialisation.’

well mine are okay then because they KNOW when we are bothered, faces like thunder, scowls and yelling is the norm here. Hurrah!

A few days ago I saw a compilation of tiktoks on Youtube shorts. In the videos a parent was carrying a child in their arms and faked tripping near a wall. They would then put heir hand up to the child's head as if the childs head had hit the wall, the other parent then rushed and both parents made a big fuss as if the child had been hurt. After a momentary look of confusion the child would start crying. The children looked to be aged between 18 months and 3 years. I think there are two takeaway:

1. There are parents who are so messed up they will make their child cry for views.

1. Children react in response to the behaviour of the adults around them.

I think children take their cues from adults about what is worrying and what is normal so over analysing every negative emotion leads them to think their is something wrong with them rather than understanding that uncomfortable feelings are normal and can be overcome.

Yes, same here as a univ tutor. Student arguments in shared accommodation are ending up as formal complaints going through the university system. Still a minority, fortunately- but not a tiny minority. Dealing with adults behaving like 12 year olds is becoming part of the job.

I think many children are left confused by their parents approaches. E.g. at a park with DD, a little lad came over to play on the equipment with DD and another girl. It was equipment that required turn taking. From my vantage point they were playing nicely together. No tears, no upset, just all getting along and mucking in together.

Lad's Mum was hovering and was very overly invested in them all having "a fair turn" (which translated into a really short turn each with much rotating between them); she kept jumping in and taking her boy off the equipment to let the other children have a turn. Therefore little boy understandably bursting into tears multiple times, changing the atomsphere of their game, and in the end mother then told him off and said "I'm taking you out of the park now as you can't behave" and he was absolutely beside himself.

They had been taking turns beforehand, perhaps not exactly the precise equal number of minutes each that his mother seemed to require, but they were all having fun watching each other on the equipment, even when they were waiting for their turn. I heard them say to each other things like "I'll have a go after you", "You come on now" etc and they had been working it out amongst themselves. I feel like the mother's interference added nothing to the situation and just made it all worse and left her son confused and upset, and the other children confused about what had happened. I don't think he'd done anything wrong and he wasn't allowed to learn anything for himself.

In your opinion as a teacher, how do you think we expose children to the darker side of current events while ensuring they don't see the world as a horrible scary place? Perhaps it's just the young people I know but they have such a negative view of the world it borders on nihilism.

I really don't remember feeling like this as a young person growing up in the 90s. We knew there were horrible things happening e.g. famine in Ethiopia but ultimately we felt optimistic about the future and our ability fix the problems.

Those saying it was just my parents that were shit.

It really wasn't. It was the prevailing attitude of the times. You were hit at home, you were hit at school. No one believed what you said if you told them someone had hurt you. You were told to get out of the house so that it didn't get messy. Out of house meant playing down the river, on the building estate and quite often doing things that were annoying and low level criminal to the neighbours. Parents often did not want the kids they had, they had fallen into parenting and worked hard physical jobs and no energy to parent.

It did teach me how to be very sneaky and not get caught though and to lie and continue lying to avoid the consequences - great life lessons. At least I'm still alive, A few children in my estate died in the river or from fooling around.

It was a working class community though so it is likely it had a different vibe to other's experiences.

I watch Newsround with my class every day.

They love it and Newsround never shows footage of genocide.

I genuinely believe that with Valium as a very large problem as far back as 1969, "mental health" or "suffering with nerves" is not a new medical condition.

The 1970s it was very common to find people were taking valium.

In 1900 there was an average of 1000 inmates in each mental asylum and there were around 120. The population was 41 million, but with a life expectancy much lower and only 1 in 5 children making 5 years old.

mental health isn't a new problem it's just that we don't have insanity wards or idiots wards.

The suicide rates were still high and many men just took themselves and walked into the local canal.

Todays generation have much more access to mental health literature, its talked about at school at home, on social media, to the point its hard to avoid if you wanted to .

I hate the way kids are stopped in their tracks if there's a vague hint of a risk. 'Stop running, you might slip'. 'Don't touch that, it's dirty' 'Stop this, stop that'. How will they learn?

I agree that it's important for children to learn that e.g. there are children out there who are living in poverty but that's different from watching footage of a genocide. I speak to young people and they all seem so incredibly despondent about the future. I don't think that's a good thing.

I have a genuine question -

I see thread after thread on here about how today's children aren't "resilient" enough and it's all because of modern parenting...

But it's not just children, is it?? Mental health as a whole is basically in the toilet.

I know so many adults, ranging from late 20s to early 40s, who are on some kind of anti depressants, anxiety medication, going to therapy, needing breaks from work due to mental health. Things like exhaustion from working long hours whilst taking care of family, struggling to pay bills, caring for elderly relatives, seeing doom and gloom on the news 24/7 is obviously taking a toll and if modern life is affecting adults to this extent, I would think it's fairly obvious it will take a toll on children too?

Newshound is a fairly sanitised version of world events, tbh.

You think that our children should be protected from what some children are actually living?

Understanding climate change and our personal responsibility to towards it is on the curriculum.

Watching Newsround is a great way to educate children on national and international events. It encourages discussion and helps them to contextualise their own life experiences and develop empathy.

@GeneralMusings

School is no more structured than when I was a child and my mum thinks they are really soft on them now, far more structured back then.

I don't think the trend for ultra gentle parenting is doing children any favours. Giving children clear boundaries from infancy is actually kind not cruel, whether that's behaviour, food, sitting still, waiting their turn etc. and yes they need once able to, to be able to sort out minor disagreements learning to take turns etc. it's a gradual process and nobody expects 5 year olds to not need significant intervention but by the teen years they should be pretty independent yet I see parents still arranging things for their dc (no sn) and just yesterday packing for 18 year olds! Ok what does it matter mum packs for them you say, whereas I think it's symptomatic of the wider issue of not letting them make mistakes which are necessary to develop as an adult.

I'm not saying run around in packs btw just there's a line and we crossed it here a while ago

I think age inappropriate teaching about mental health can act as a social contagion. In my own adolescence it was self harm, it was all over magazines for teenagers, I even remember one with some extremely graphic pictures.

Yes self harm has always existed but no, I don't think most of us would have tried it and done it without being exposed like that.