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!

@Ozanj you say yourself in your field your contemporaries are not white British, so your way of doing things is acceptable to them. In some fields your way of operating would have you branded as rude. People would still do business with you if it could make them money, but they would not want to be friends with you or socialise with you just for fun.

And kids from Indian and Chinese backgrounds are brought up closer to the traditional way white British kids used to be brought up.

As so often happens, some people are describing a certain subset of very English mannerisms as if they hold true for all the diverse peoples who inhabit our multiple nations.

…British you mean? Why is it strange that people are generally expected to abide by local custom? When I go on holiday I always check what is and isn’t expected of me. Other countries can be much more rigid about societal norms than here.

This is probably one of the oddest posts I’ve ever seen on here. What does cultural manners have to do with 130k?

@Stravaig I find people give a lot of leeway in manners to people not born and brought up in Britain. But when people have been born and brought up here they will be judged as adults if they ignore British ideas of manners.
And I have lived abroad and taught my children the manners to follow there.

'Britain' is an colonial construct, it denotes England's subjugation of Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland. Our manners are not England's manners (nor is anything else the same), no matter how often or for how long our erasure is attempted by the blanket application of 'British'.

@Stravaig we all know the history. People in other parts of the United Kingdom do expect thank you and please manners.

Scotland was very complicit in the slave trade and the Empire, it may suit a narrative now to imply victim hood but you have to face up to even embarrassing history.

Local customs should be respected regardless of the country you are in.

Its true, all that being out all day, getting into scrapes and up to mischief, falling out and making up with your peers was invaluable and an important part of our development.

I noticed that the Starmers’ children didn’t do the ceremonial walk into 10 Downing Street because they” didn’t want to”. I do get that, as it’s daunting, but it’s interesting that Sunak and Hunt’s children ( both of Asian/Indian heritage) did accompany their parents. They are younger I suppose, which might make a difference.
I would hazard a guess that the Starmers were laid back and gentle parents, but their children are clearly less confident.
I don’t mean this as criticism as my children were also lacking in confidence and I now wonder whether this was due to my parenting style. I wish I’d been a bit more “old fashioned “ now.

@Rainydayinlondon Starmer has said he is keeping his children out of the public eye as much as possible.

Yes, one of the first colonised, and still not free. Every colonised nation was pillaged of people and resources to fuel the onward march of Empire, that's the entire point of it. Victims and perpetrators, both.

Personally, I think a crucial facet of 'good manners', good psychological health, and general resilience is found in acknowledging and celebrating our diversity, not constantly seeking to homogenise and erase it.

I think there's far too much hand wringing about screen time and children being over supervised. The real dangers to children's development and mental health are things like domestic violence in the home, parental addiction, lack of secure housing, exposure to porn, access to drugs and alcohol at a young age.

Playing out unsupervised sounds like a great idea but children have really poor judgement and sometimes the consequences can be catastrophic. We used to run around like this when I was a child in the 80s and 90s and bullying was rife, we were in and out of friends houses and one of the dads ended up being a convicted paedophile.

Kids out with other kids often spend time with older young people too, teenage siblings etc and for every sensible caring teenager there's one who can't really judge what's appropriate and will talk about stuff that's just not really appropriate for children to hear, or show videos on their phone to the younger ones that they shouldn't be seeing, or let them have a drag on a joint, etc etc.

So no, I don't let my children play out unsupervised and I won't while they are in primary school. I don't hang over them but I am nearby in case they need me. It might set them back but I want them to have a childhood and I don't think there's any perfect answer to this problem.

I think there's far too much hand wringing about screen time and children being over supervised. The real dangers to children's development and mental health are things like domestic violence in the home, parental addiction, lack of secure housing, exposure to porn, access to drugs and alcohol at a young age.

Then why is child and teen mental health so poor compared to the past when the issues you describe were much more prevalent and acceptable?

So can I go to Thailand for example and show people the soles of my feet, as it’s acceptable in the UK, and if the locals become offended I should implore them to celebrate diversity?

@MeinKraft you are right about large mixed age range of kids, often teenagers who were sent out with younger siblings to look after. But being allowed to play meant very different things for different children. I was allowed to play out with my friends. We were all the same age, we did not hang about with older teenagers, and we did not get into any bother. We played tag, chatted, played on the playground.

But is children's mental health actually poorer now? Or was children's mental health just overlooked in the past?

Yes it is poorer.

amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/22/evidence-of-uks-child-mental-health-crisis-is-stark-and-compelling

Hmm, I think what you say @Rainbowsponge feels like it could be true, but when you delve into the figures I think they tend to tell a different story. First, it’s really important to address your friends comparator head on. There in no evidence Indian children are on average happier than children in the UK. The recent world happiness report shows the opposite, compared to the UK young and old in India are considerably less happy. So no doubt people from China and India are impressive in their drive and demeanour but if you look at the average happiness levels Uk comes out on top by comparision. These are still medium income/developing so maybe it’s not fair to pick on happiness as a metric but other similar economies have higher levels of happiness and arguably a gentler approach to parenting.

A better comparator might be Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. Those children are happier, grow up to be healthier and happier and have better life outcomes generally. What do they do differently? It could be parenting choices, the evidence is mixed on what style is best apart from authoritative which is broad but would not include any violence, and relatively gentle approaches to discipline. Parents in these countries also spend significantly more time with their children than those in the Uk.

Screentime is another tempting one to blame but the evidence around this is mixed at best, with recent systematic reviews finding minimal or no significant effect at all, especially when you control for socioeconomic status.

Every generation seems to think the younger generations are going down hill in terms of manners, communication, ambition, decency etc. but again the research on this sort of thing rarely reflects that to be the case. I do think spending more time with children and leading by example are probably the best way to raise happy, confident and ultimately capable children. Who knows though? I think you need to be clear about what metric you’re using to judge these things, I think happiness is a good one- what do you think?

@Stravaig

I vaguely remember that the act of union came about because Scotland was bankrupt, as a result of over investing in their very own colony. England had to bail them out. Plus ça change….

But I don’t know what this anti English rant has to do with parenting styles , tbh.

Agree totally that current helicopter parenting is very negative in many ways. Kids almost never face the small, necessary emotional and social challenges without an adult running interference for them. There is sometimes too much planned activity and no opportunity to be bored and make own entertainment with friends, deal with small challenges. Often there is no opportunity to even choose their own friends as contact limited to a very restricted circle selected by parents via playdates/mummy’s friends instead of a mix including other kids in street or school.

Although parents may try to restrict screen time and harmful content it is really hard to manage, and really is negative for mental health and social skills.
Some parents make excuses for everything their child does so there are no consequences even when it’s warranted. They expect other people’s kids to be punished, but there’s often a reason why their child is a special case.

As an example of cosseting - I bet most parents on this site have never ever sent their kid to the corner shop to buy a paper or pint of milk -they wouldn’t dream of burdening (or risking) their child in such a terrible way! I bet anyone on this site aged over 35 was often dispatched to the shop for something or other at age 8,9,10. And no, complaints about the task were not listened too!

The net result is the kids end up anxious, dependent and with no resilience in many cases.

Yep, my childhood was similar (lower middle class, 1980s). Bit grim, generally being shouted at by random adults if you came to their attention, lots of avoidable accidents in primary school (mostly getting run over - do kids still play chicken on main roads?) followed by drink, drugs and underage sex as teenagers.

This running-through-fields-of-wheat idyllic childhood that some people on this thread seem to have lived in apparently the mid-90s is completely foreign to me. Like somebody has read too many Famous Fives.

We ran around in packs as kids. We were friends with all the kids in the neighbourhood and would just go off to the park, go on bike rides, visit the local horse or keep each other company running errands. Parents would never know where we were.
I think the points in the op are all valid.

My main concern is children are growing up addicted to screens and YouTube. I'm sure this is impacting on their development but even more worryingly, they're not reading books or watching films so aren't developing empathy.
Their parents are often addicted to screens too and don't have string connections within the family unit.
It's all very worrying.

@user1471538275 I grew up in a very poor area. I recognise the kind of parents you are talking about. My parents were not like that though and did judge parents like yours.