Is modern parenting damaging to kids?

[Rainbowsponge]

My friend’s husband is a professional in the area of child development and education. He’s taught at numerous schools, SEN schools and is now a researcher. He doesn’t have children, but I do, and yesterday we were talking about the seeming increase in children with anxiety, mental health issues and what he described as ‘delayed adulthood’.

He’s British but his extended family are from India, and he said visits to see them make a striking contrast between how our children are raised and how theirs are raised. He said children are sort of left to run around in packs and find their own amusement from quite a young age, and as a result they seem more mature and confident.

His theory is that we are interrupting normal development opportunities for kids brains, and therefore they’re not properly developing. He thinks we intervene too much in perfectly ordinary learning opportunities, like playground disagreements, and our quest to make sure our children never feel challenged or upset is actually making them more anxious.

He also thinks softer, more modern punishments are bewildering children and reinforcing bad behaviour, leaving them confused about right and wrong. 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.

I’m not professing to be a perfect parent at all, but it was a really interesting chat and I want to discuss it further!

I believe there’s quite a lot of research out there about this. I find it fascinating. We also protect our children from any risk at all and this has negative consequences.

Add in constant screens and very little time outside and it’s a perfect storm.

Mine are fairly feral and have a significant amount of outside play and are left to explore and mess around without too much intervention. We don’t have any standing water and are away from dangers such as roads or railway lines.
They’ve fallen off things, been pecked and attacked by poultry and now are fairly good at assessing risk. There is brainwashing about certain risks traffic water pigs and cattle (don’t have any of those) but I’ve still got one with sen.
I do think the punishment was better when you just got a slapped leg instead not being able to join in with something or being sent to your room. This isn’t for minor misdemeanours but as I said they’re fairly feral and so were we growing up.

I have wondered about modern parenting too. I was a child of the 80s and we roamed in packs. We were confident and street smart in a way my kids are not. That said a kid from my estate died after a game went wrong. I was approached by a paedophile who asked me to prove I was a girl and a local teenager once took me shoplifting at Tesco.

I learnt a lot from my child hood and it gave me the confidence to travel and do things my own cosseted children aren’t ready for. That said things could easily have gone horribly wrong like they did for others and I don’t think I’d take those risks with my dc.

The book “the anxious generation” covers this. Yes we are denying children development opportunities with modern screen based parenting, but the horse has kind of bolted.

It depends on how you define modern parenting. Parenting without boundaries is unquestionably bad. Parenting with violence is however also bad; shouting and hitting children has been shown to have serious negatige consequences in adult life. There's a happy medium to be had: It's called authoritative parenting and that has been known about for decades.

I’m a child of the 80’s and never roamed in gangs anywhere. We played a lot in neighbours gardens though, but never left the street.

Dr naomi fisher is also worth a read.

Much about school is much stricter and structuret han it was when I was a kid.

If anyone's interested, read Bad Therapy - Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier. She's a journalist, rather than a vested interest.

I say this on here a lot. I’m an 80s child and I never once ‘played out’ without supervision before secondary school and seem to have grown up able to evaluate risk and function just fine. If I were going to point a finger it would be at social media, not parenting. Comparison being the thief of joy and all that (I can’t even imagine how miserable I could have made myself at 14 if I’d been comparing my tame but lovely weekends to those of the cool set!).

I agree with him.

There is so much pressure on parents now to make sure their child never, ever feels sad or scared or disappointed and is never, ever allowed to take any risk that might possibly end in injury and then we wonder why they can't cope with the world as older teens/adults.

I'm more worried about my DD growing up too fast and doing things that are irreversible and regretful. In the 90s my parents were worried about teen pregnancy and binge drinking. I think 80s parents worried about drugs and blokes in the parks with puppies.

Every generation of parents has some concern or other, rightly I would say.

Things that damage children most in my opinion are "gentle parenting" and screen time. Also pathologising of perfectly normal nervousness or shyness as a mental health problem is very counterproductive.

I also find it fascinating! Kids now are less likely than ever to be smacked, more likely to have a huge variety of toys and activities, awareness of mental health is 20 times what it was when I was little. But, and I’m not a ‘good old days’ type believe me, they seem so much unhappier now.

I agree about screen use. I caught the bus home from work the other day a little early and it was full of secondary pupils. All of them - every single one - was sat starting down at their phones, not speaking. It was a marked contrast from my old school bus, which was seen as a chance to gossip/hope the only free seat was next to your crush/share magazines etc

One of my DCs spends an awful lot of time playing outside with the neighbours - running between houses and gardens and over the road to the park. I'm really pleased she has this opportunity because I know, from chatting to other parents who don't live near us, that this is not very common now. In fact, a few were really surprised that she does 'play out' every day after school.

I do think it does teach them great social skills and how to co-operate and how to solve problems and to make up after an argument.

But I know this is very dependent on where you live. And how 'safe' you feel your area is.

Yes I agree (although I have young DC and I'm sure I'm guilty of some of it). I teach at a university and the lack of resilience at the cohort level is concerning.

Agree with you. But also massively agree with screen time being awful for kids. My 12 year old lost his phone 2 weeks ago which we aren’t replacing in a rush. Having seen the change in his behaviour we may not get another one at all. He had strict limits and gamed for 2 hours on a weeekend day but the lack of “can I play on my phone now” has triggered his imagination in a way that is lovely to see.

I was going to post about this. Absolutely backs up what your friend is saying OP.
We over police their time in the real world and don’t police it enough online

I think he's spot on.
I had a fairly feral childhood out with other kids, but quite clear rules and standards were imposed and expected at home.

It was a pretty rough estate tbf. I’ve often said I was self raised like bread. I’m sure other people had more supervision but people would take dogs down to the bottom of the stairs (we lived in flats) and shoo them out for a walk. Pretty much the same with children. I used to walk to the local library ( maybe a mile and a half) and spend hours reading. No one knew where I was.

Agreed. It does not teach kids to be resilient at all

I have barely seen my 9 year old all day. She's been out with friends going from house to house and all round the neighbourhood. They were here for a bit this afternoon and I threw some snacks at them but she's fairly free range.

I'm not sure she'd be able to have that sort of day in England, which is where I'm from but not where we live. Even if I let her out I suspect she'd have trouble finding a pack of mates whose parents were willing to do the same.

I think we are sleep walking into a situation where young adults can't deal with problems on their own without needing parental support. You need to practice dealing with small problems so when you have to deal with a big one you know where to start. It will be interested to see how todays 20 to 30 year olds deal with parenting.

I am so glad some of my grandchildren are growing up in Switzerland. They have to walk to school, and are allowed to do all sorts of activities, sport and otherwise, in the woods, nature, the lake, etc. Much more like my childhood in the late 60s and early 70s. Much more free and independent. They do get crazes, but they have built in naural balance because of this, which protects from all sorts of more serious injuries. Win, win and more win.

We gave our children quite a bit of outside freedom, but that is due to where we live, I wouldn't feel so comfortable in a city.

Corporal punishment is abuse.
It should never be reintroduced.

The one single biggest advancement in parenting is that parents no longer hit and smack their children. It is so damaging.
Children that get used to living in home where violence is condoned, can go on to think violence is normal and continue with domestic violence, common assault etc. We have much happier children for not hitting them and using fear as a tactic instead of explanation and parenting in my view.

Abuse is normalised in some cultures, that does not make it right.

He moved into research because of dissatisfaction at how challenges were handled at school. If a pupil said they ‘felt overwhelmed by the classroom’, rather than asking why and work out ways of increasing their social stamina they would simply be handed a card which meant they could leave the room at any time.

I feel like in general people would agree with my OP but in specific situations they don’t apply it. So they might say ‘yes I agree children are too cosseted’ but if their own child was upset that somebody was mean to them, it would be ‘different’ and off to the teacher they go.