Are we raising a generation of helpless kids?

[YouTheCat]

Interesting article in the Huffington Post about if we (generally) are doing too much for our kids, letting them get away with things and not letting them take the consequences.

I have to say I find a lot of it quite true, though obviously not about every parent but in a general way. I see a lot of this at school. Parents descending full of violent indignation that their child has been reprimanded or hasn't got a place in an after school club, where I had never seen this behaviour when I was at school (bloody ages ago).

My own dd (18) has some funny idea that she will waltz into a fantastic job after college when, in reality, she will probably have to work in Asda and gain some experience first.

A parent asked me to stop hassling her kid to do any work. I'm a secondary maths teacher, he was C/D borderline and it wasn't that long until his GCSE.
She wanted him changed to another class, presuming that any other teacher would simply allow him to stare out of the window like he wanted and I was a draconian bitch.

I remember once reading an article in the newspaper (this was a few years ago) about how in one of our local schools a boy had wrote the words 'fu*k off' below one of the GCSE exam questions and he was still awarded points for it because apparently he showed initiative.....

I think when you start going on about the "young today" being pampered or disrespectful bla bla bla, it's a sign you're getting old (mentally if not physically). Has anyone started talked about how they had to walk miles and miles to school yet? My grandad (who would now be over 100) used to go on about that.

It's not restricted to the young though. I know a mum in her 30s with 2 kids whose own mother does everything for her. She doesn't work but her mum does.

Another of my nephews used to ride around in a push chair beyond some MNetters' cut-off age.

I can't remember how old but his feet used to drag on the ground.

He had neither special needs nor mobility problems and wasn't lazy either. He was, however a slow walker and my sister was often in a hurry.

Somehow he's managed to grown up into the kind of young man who can tie his own shoe laces.

BTW I wouldn't have fancied the chances of anyone my sister caught throwing her a judgy look.

Yes, and it boils my piss.Through work I have had phone calls from parents calling regarding apprenticeships for their offspring who are in their twenties

I remember my mother shaming my brother out of his pushchair by telling him they'd laugh at him when he started school the next term.
He was 5 and it was nearly 40 years ago!

I think this is bumping gums bemoaning today's softies when their generation was well ard
Except every generation says that about the one before

I agree whatever5!

"We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control." -- attributed to an inscription in an Ancient Egyptian tomb.

And also that famous Socrates quote!

Bit of a tangent here, I apologise, but MrsDevere, I do agree re the work situation. I’m just out of uni and have been applying for job after job in my industry.
Aged 14 – 17 I couldn’t find a job, I applied and looked hard but there just wasn’t anything on offer. In my Gap Year (aged 18-19) I finally got a job at Wilkinsons, which was great. However, the ‘experience’ thing doesn’t really help now. No one in my industry cares if I worked there and have crossed it out of points to discuss on my CV at the few interviews I have received. I’m in a situation where luckily my DH has just got a well paid job so we can afford some time for me to look, if not of course I would take a job in ASDA. However, I did not go to Uni just to come out and accept working at ASDA, I went to Uni hoping that at some point in the future I could go into my industry and progress. It’s not as though I’d have a problem being paid a pittance and making coffee to learn more about an environment I really want to go into, but unfortunately this – as MrsDevere points out – isn’t possible because I am expected to intern first. Most internships are completely unpaid or pay only for travel. I am now in a position to apply for them (I don’t agree they should be allowed but if it’s the only way for me to get the kind of job I went to uni for I will go for it) due to my DH but previously was not and would have had no other option than to take a shop job.

I want to stress I am not anti shop jobs, only anti it being your only option after doing a degree. It makes the degree itself rather pointless. I think the fact that so many people in my generation went to Uni brought down its value (all my friends bar 2) though that may change now (when the fees went up and seeing my friends’/my situation my sister and most of her friends decided not to go). I have been raised to work hard and had a really tough time throughout Uni due to illness, though made fantastic friends who supported me throughout. I would never expect to progress in a job without making a huge effort and would want to do the very best I could, but I would hope that someone cracks down on these unpaid internships and encourages people to open up to those having just completed a degree. Of course it does depend on which industry/sector you studied in, those who complete a degree in nursing are more likely to get a paid job than someone who completes a degree in fashion where over a year of unpaid work is to be expected before actually getting into the industry.

On the main topic, I could cook, clean etc. absolutely fine. I live with DH a couple of hours away from our parents and we’re fine. Well, he couldn’t do anything when I first met him (had cancer as a child and was mollycoddled since) but that soon changed. I was when he admitted he couldn’t make a cup of coffee.

Really long post and a bit of a tangent, sorry, just thought it might be interesting to hear from someone going through the employment scenario at the moment.

I really feel for you smokeandglitter, and I HATE the unpaid work culture that exists now.
In a way, it exists because young people are pretty clued up about what they want to do. When I graduated from college, I went into an industry similar to fashion, and , although I got paid low wages, I did get paid, and there was not an expectation that people would work for free.
That industry was tricky to get into, and paths into it, for people like me from nowheresville, were not clearly visible, but if you had the drive, work did exist.
Nowadays, young people have the seeming advantage of the world at their fingertips, and know how to access information in a way that I would not have dreamed, but because so many of them want to get into the same fields, this easy access actually makes the competition harder. In a world of supply and demand economics, employers see that they needn't pay. The attitude is almost " they should pay us".
I even see the attitude that you should be grateful for the experience impact on friends still in my old industry, who have been working for 15 years. All of a sudden they are up against people willing to do what they do for free (albeit badly).
I would love to see unpaid work experience banned, and a minimum wage paid to ALL jobs.
Good luck with it all anyway.

Unfortunately, smokeandglitter, your situation is all too common. I don't think that people realise the graduate unemployment situation or understand that there are generally over 100 people applying for every job. We live in a rural situation and we could only afford to keep our graduate son at home, there are no internships anywhere near. There is no way that we could keep him in London with no pay. Internships are very unfair and a lot just want free labour.
My son got a job in the end, but only after a year and literally 100s of applications. There are far more unemployed than the official numbers. My son didn't claim job seeker'allowance and therefore didn't show up on any statistics, there must be many like him.
While I think that some parents baby, and helicopter their children, there are many more who don't.

Thank you Ifnotnow and SatinSandals I'm so glad for your son, Satin, that he's finally got a job.

He just kept on applying- it was very depressing but he didn't give up. He couldn't even get a job stacking shelves! Good luck, you never know what is around the corner!

I don't think yesterday's values and skills should be imposed on today's kids. Nor is it fair to judge them by yesterday's standards, because of a lot of those standards, values and skills aren't valuable now. A generation ago, men were supposed to know how to do basic maintenance on cars. Modern cars just about render this impossible. My father rewired his first house. I gather that would be illegal now. My mother knows plenty about preserving and jam-making, but the truth is that now one can buy jams and preserves from the supermaket for next to nothing. There is no need for that skill, although it is nice as a hobby.

On the other hand, men a generation ago didn't need to know how to wash and iron - now they do. No one needed to know how to fix a computer - now you do.

If some parents are getting too involved in their children's schooling, that is only a reflection of how much more important it is now to do well at school. A generation ago, it was possible to flunk everything and still make some kind of a decent living. I bet there were plenty of "helpless" kids then - they just weren't getting helped.

Some interesting points and food for thought.

I do mot envy today's youth.

I wish house prices would come down and minimum wage up! How could that be achieved??

Revisiting that link in the OP: it's garbage. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was a spoof.

It's full of cliches and anecdotes, there's not one bit of evidence in it, the punctuation and grammar is all over the shop and as for 'literally had a meltdown', well, I wouldn't give her a paid job as a journalist, would you?

The writer has no right to call into question any other person's commitment or qualifications while making such howlers. And neither does anyone else who thinks it's a good piece of reporting.

I'd call it money for old rope, except that it's a blog so the writer probably didn't get paid. Maybe she was doing a bit of work experience. If so, I wouldn't ask her back.

I am a journalist. I wouldn't pay for it but I might allow it because I know it would get lots of green arrows from the mindless. And if I was a commissioning editor at the Huffington Post that's what I'd want because I'd want to keep my job.

I'm depressed, but not surprised, that some people on this thread thought it was great.

I blame dumbing down, meself.

I used to do most of the recruitment in my last office and recruited a lot of bright young things. Two people stick in my mind:

The 25 year old, whose mother wrote to me, saying she thought it was appalling that we didn't provide accommodation (paid for!) as taking this job was forcing her DD to relocate. We did send her DD list of websites for flat shares and renting studios, and also cheap accommodation for young people (like uni halls, but for people who worked).

The Cambridge graduate, who told us so many times in her covering letter that she had a double first from Cambridge, that we laughed out loud. We didn't call her for interview, and she sent us an email saying "I don't appear to have been called for interview - surely there is some mistake here, I have a double first from Cambridge. Which bit of "double first from Cambridge" did you not understand?" Bless her, she'd never done a day's work in her life, no Saturday job, nothing.

I'm more worried about the fifth of school leavers nobody's bothered to teach how to read or write and the pregnant 11 year old in the Daily Fail. And minimum wage being so low you can't support a family on it, zero hour contracts, lack of quality housing, skilled labour being bought abroad, massive cost of living, sink estates, Portsmouth job losses, army redundancies, unemployment, thieving politicians.....

I was a very neglected independent child. My sister walked me to school on my first day, after that I prepared my own lunch and walked on my own, sometimes hooking up with neighbourhood kids on the way.

We all had chores to do round the house and it never occurred to us to involve our parents in our school lives. School was school and home was home.

We made up games, played outside a lot and made many forbidden trips to the shops for sweets.

As it happens, I turned out pretty capable, and walked into a dream job as soon as I graduated.

When I first had children, I was anxious to give them a better childhood, one in which they felt cherished within the family. For reasons even I don't understand, I pampered them. And now that they are both school age, I have new respect for the way I was raised.

My eldest child will occasionally be helpful around the house and volunteer to walk to school. She moves between two homes so is adept at packing but really she is a baby compared with the 10yo that I was. And I think this is largely the result of my good intentions backfiring.

I seem to be doing better with the second one; he makes his bed, puts his washing in the right spot, brings in his lunchbox and lets me know what he needs for school.

I am proud of their table manners and I do notice that many of their friends seem unable to sit at the table, that they hop and down constantly and fuss about food.

But I have been soul searching somewhat to try to help them gain more self help skills and independence.

I think these days that parenting is much discussed in a way it wasn't in the past, and that we have bred ourselves a new anxiety disorder, parenting failure. Whereas when I was small, parents were pretty damn sure they were right about everything and didn't fret or pamper in the way so many of us do now.

I was having a conversation with my sister this afternoon about this. We concluded that though we understand those employers and politicians who are trying to drive down wages and destroy working conditions and prospects - after all, why not make more money if you can? - we'll never understand the lemmings who'll only ever be employees who support it and encourage their children to think the same.

And I'm not sneering at employees. I will only ever be one too. I just want it to be a fair exchange - my skills for their money.

ATM it's not and I'm dismayed at the alacrity with which so many working people do themselves down in their scramble to bitch about other people.

I think the reason that so many parents now go on University Open Days has to do with the fact that so many of us are now paying, either for our child's maintenance at university, or for that and towards tuition fees too - and so parents want to know they are getting value for money.

Thinking back, I think dh went to one of ds1's open days with him (though I might have remembered that wrong - blame my ageing brain), but he did the rest on his own, and ds2 did all his on his own.

Sorry, reviving a slightly old thread , but I very much agree with treadheavily. I think our own parenting is strongly derived from our experience of parenting as children. Like many here, my parents expected me to be highly self-sufficient and there was very limited emotional support. I wanted to be a quite different parent, more caring and understanding, and less demanding. My children both have SEN so I can't expect great independence from them anyway, but I think I too have probably gone too far the other way. It seems to be incredibly difficult to get right - yes to the new anxiety of parenting failure! I don't think our parents' generation analysed themselves in this way at all!

purple I agree. It's not just about feeling like a failure imo-it's the feeling that you are being judged by other parents. I always thought of myself as a strong, opinionated, assured sort of person until my dd started school. Seeing the other parents (mainly mothers) with the headmaster on speeddial, who would march into school at the slightest provocation, or who would quite readily slight other children-and their families-in order to make their own children look superior, was a culture shock. And this parenting approach-in my neck of the woods at least-is the norm.

I felt my rather more laid-back approach to bringing up kids was way off-piste.

The attitude of other parents took away much of the enjoyment of bringing up dd when she was younger, and I found hanging round the schoolyard utterly soul-destroying.

I still feel I do too much for my dd, despite my best efforts not to. But going against the grain of the prevailing culture is difficult.

I also feel there is a connection between the number of young "boomerang " people living at home into their 30s and the prevailing parenting culture. I think it is simplistic to blame house prices alone-buying a house has always been hard-but for my generation staying at home once established in a job would not have been an option.

There are some parents who bring up such children, and more dominantly so in some countries than others.

There is no reason for people to demand children as young as 4 to 'earn points/money' to get their toys, etc. - even if it's just for putting their toys away. I don't think children should get used to get everything for free. One day, they will have to leave the nest, and how shocking would it be for them to find out that nothing in life is for free??? It's good to teach them as early as possible that they have to do something to get something.

If 12-week old dogs can learn that, I am pretty sure even toddlers can.