Times: Parental failings ‘spawned an infantilised generation’

[Lamahaha]

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/parental-failings-spawned-an-infantilised-generation-s78q5t7zw

Interesting article.
He said that, similarly, the debate on transgender rights had challenged the binary distinction between men and women, just as in politics the boundary between public and private lives has become blurred.

Professor Furedi argued that the dismantling of moral boundaries has created a paradox. Young people who have grown up without them abhor others who make moral judgments.

I agree with him. I was raised by an extremely liberal mother who provided no boundaries whatsoever -- which got me into a lot of trouble in my late teens. Luckily I realised soon enough what was happening and corrected myself; I gave myself rules and boundaries and tried my best to stick to them. It was the best move I ever made. Long story...

Sorry, I still can't get a share token. When I click on the mail signa, I get a "share to email" pop up but no link. I managed it once but never again.

I am one of these bad parents. Coming from an abusive childhood myself, I over-empathised with my children and found it reliably hard to set strong boundaries. Not so much when they were small but as they grew older. What frightened me most was being like my mother; in the process of being utterly unlike her, I am sure I've not done my best.

Mothering is hard. Mothering with a history of maternal abuse is harder.

I do think the fact that my kids are not MC has-been helpful, in terms of avoiding a cossetted environment. For example, all my kids have needed to pick up casual work as teens if they want money for 'stuff'.

Idk. It's hard if you've not seen appropriate use of authority modelled.

it sure is, Contentious. On the other hand, I think it's never too late to improve the relationship we have with our family.

You don’t have to expect dc to work to ensure they are well brought up. The two don’t go together necessarily. Lots of less well off dc don’t bother to work at all as teens. They are frequently not very employable and actually are not very motivated. I’m looking at my own relatives to see that. In fact mc children who are ambitious like to work. Or volunteer. They might have comforts at home but are willing to earn money or help others.

I don't understand the part about moral judgments. Don't these people make them all the time, but just pretend they are universal truths instead?

The part about boundaries is spot on and explains why they support the erasure of female spaces, i.e. remove women's boundaries. The whole 'inclusive' notion necessitates removal of boundaries.

@ScrimpshawTheSecond

it sure is, Contentious. On the other hand, I think it's never too late to improve the relationship we have with our family.

True. In darker moments I do worry that ROGD in one of mine was a result of maternal permissiveness. It's as if that's how far he had to go to get me to say something other than 'yes'.

're the boundaries thing - yes a child will push until they find a strong 'no' . It's absolutely terrifying for a child to feel adrift in a world without clear rules and guidelines, which is why some of these kids act out - they are both terrified and highly stressed and trying to get a safe container in the form of a decisive, trustworthy adult/parent.

I don't use punishment/rewards, though - I find that manipulative, and in the long run less effective. It can be a bit more work to do consequences/discussions but I find it works better overall.

Also agree that looking at structural and wider context is useful. But at the end of the day my kids are my responsibility and I'll do what I can to raise them as well as I can - I can't magic a socio-anarchist commune out of a neo liberal dystopia, but I can research the most effective and compassionate parenting methods and do my best to implement them. Alfie Kohn is an interesting author on the subject.

Bearing in mind we all do the best we can and largely are 'good enough'.

Contentious, that last post looks like a reply to your last post but it was a cross post!

@ScrimpshawTheSecond

Contentious, that last post looks like a reply to your last post but it was a cross post!

No worries!

When I saw the headline yesterday I knew immediately it would be Frank Furedi. He has been peddling this schtick for years. He is part of the libertarian organisations Institute of Ideas (run by Claire Fox) and Spiked (formerly Living Marxism). I dare say he has a point but I tend to take anything coming from that direction with a massive pinch of salt.

I do agree that having this coming from a man sticks in the craw a bit as he will not have felt the pressures mothers do to be endlessly nurturing and nice and educational while somehow producing well-behaved kids and being lumped with most of the childcare and other domestic responsibilities (on average) even if they work. I don’t know about his personal life but statistically he’s unlikely to have had as much in his plate as a female partner, if they had kids.

But he’s entitled to say his piece on these issues and it’s definitely something that needs discussing.

Regarding why parents are like this, I genuinely think besides those who actively see permissive parenting as their aim, many are scared of being abusive. One time I took my dd to a playground, and another child was pursuing her around the equipment, trying to push her off whatever she went on. The child’s mum was standing there doing nothing so eventually I (calmly and politely!) asked her to tell her DD to stop doing it and take turns. The mum looked at me like a rabbit in the headlights and stammered “but... she’ll be upset!” I said “but that’s ok” and she just looked terrified. As I said before I think it’s linked to the fact that hitting children has become unacceptable - which is a good thing in itself but it’s as if people think the reason for this is that it’s not ok to be negative to them in any way.

Simple observation of my NCT cohort, all with similar economic profiles and children in their early 20s, half the DC going to good state schools (lots of tutoring or renting in catchment) with the other parents stretching themselves to go private.

A proportion have failed to launch. Ironically the parents who may have been seen to be trying the hardest, allowing their DC choices at an early stage on school, food and activities, seem to have been more at risk. It is almost as if the independence, and the effective responsibility for choices, at an early stage led to a level of anxiety and loss of self confidence, which has meant they then can’t seize independence as young adults.

I’m not sure we made any conscious decisions, but we struggled to afford a London mortgage and school fees, whilst I also had significantly pulls on my time from dependent parents. It meant DC had to pull their weight. Including taking the bus alone to primary school, eating what they were given, taking responsibility for getting homework done, and coping with a plethora of holiday schemes. They were assumed to be careful with money, as our salaries were largely committed.

Student DD claims she might as well have been raised by wolves. However she gets exacerbated by peers with faddy eating habits, who turn up the heating rather than wear a jumper, live on Deliveroo and take out coffees and use taxis, yet complain they have no money, and so on. She also has utmost understanding for those with MH issues, but has less patience with those who, rather than try to address them, use MH as a form of excuse or get out.

It will interesting to see what parenting styles they adopt. I am just relieved that both are moving forward with their adult lives.

About the tree climbing - perhaps that is sensible on a population level, but I as a parent can't bear the thought of my child being the one to fall twenty feet onto their head and die, so I won't let them take such risks even if they are more likely to benefit than die from it. But I might be getting the analogy wrong - I don't think that unaccompanied tree climbing is the only way to learn to climb, for example.

@Coyoacan

I really think what our children are most missing out on is being able to run free outside with their friends, away from the constant parental gaze.

I believe that negotiating with their friends, receiving their peers opprobium at times should be part of growing up.

But that is no longer a choice for individual parents. Society as a whole decided that this should not be allowed.

And yet it is perfectly normal still for children to do this in other countries. Not all countries, of course, but Germany for example. School playgrounds (from the age of six) are almost completely unsupervised and tend to be totally open to the surrounding area. The attitude to bullying is very often "Well, the child ought to learn to defend themselves". This is changing a little, particularly in the case of violence or discriminatory hate speech, but fundamentally they want children to learn to get on and the way it's dealt with is often by getting the bully/ies and the bullied child together under supervision and getting them to talk.

DS1 has been getting the bus by himself to his friends' houses and back from the age of nine and nobody thinks this is unusual or neglectful. Now he is eleven, he goes halfway across the city. He went to visit his friend last weekend and the parents went out for the whole day and left the children money for a local takeaway.

The one big problem is that children with any sort of special needs which would render them unable to cope with such freedom are excluded from this kind of normal childhood experience, which I find very sad and exclusionary. They tend to go to special schools. A friend's child was excluded from kindergarten at the age of three because they could not adequately supervise him (kindergarten children are trusted not to run into roads, not to touch fire, and to play with small nails without swallowing them).

Tree climbing can be a managed risk though - I climbed trees a lot as a child but I didn't go above about 10 feet out of fear. It's the kind of thing that you can do as a deal with your child - you can climb it, but above x number of feet it's more dangerous so limit yourself. I've often let my kids climb trees where I could see they couldn't get too high and explained the rules to them.

I remember a schoolmate falling from very high up in a tree once and that really scared me (he survived though)

The thing is when you get old enough you can do dangerous things freely if you want to. If you haven't been able to learn about risk and danger then you're more likely to come a cropper later on.

Having said that I am a worrier and don't like it - I now have a teenager who's out alone a lot and it's hard.

I think a lot of this is fuelled by economic pressures and inequality.

Getting 'stuff' is used as a substitute for parents not being present. And getting 'stuff' is also used as a way to demonstrate love or to for insecure parents to get instant feed back that makes them feel loved. See the parents who spend thousands they don't have, on Christmas presents, because they need to demonstrate how much they love their kids and how they can keep up with the better off parents even if this means they end up thousands in debt. At no point is anyone taught to value none materialistic things in quite the same way as the past and we don't have the same family culture as some other countries.

In terms of where the UK sits in this, we tend to have longer commutes than many other places in Europe and we definitely have longer working hours. We also have greater inequality and we are much more fashion and fab conscious. Our trends are that we eat out more often and we eat fancier food, and we are in greater debt.

This all has an impact.

We value education but see it as something that is solely the schools responsibility. It is not the responsibility of parents to teach life skills in the same way. What is notable is the parents who teach their children to cook and to do chores and expect the kids to contribute to the household compared to those who just buy them the latest trendy clothes or phone.

Neglect is not something which is restricted to poor households. DH is a scout leader and its sometimes shocked him how parents just dump their children and never become interested nor involved in their lives. One children he had was effectively raised by the au pair as the parents were so busy working and when they weren't they were more interested in their social life than spending time with their child.

Even the invention of the tablet is a problem here. Its easy to dump a child in front of a screen at an early age. The nature of these things is to dump a pile of dopamin in the brain and get children addicted to that feeling. And its extremely difficult to break that cycle if you are exhausted. Its easier to just take the easy way out so you can have a rest from working and commuting.

What ends up missing is the ability to communicate with other human beings or the opportunity to mix with different generations or people with different views. Instead children seek out likeminded individuals and become ultra tribal.

And yes, its about teaching the managment of risk.

@Lamahaha
Sorry, I still can't get a share token. When I click on the mail signa, I get a "share to email" pop up but no link. I managed it once but never again.

That is the share token. Just copy and paste the link.

That German version sounds extreme, Bertie.

I was more referring to the negotiation and dealing with each other that unsupervised play allows. We could still only do and go as far as our parents allowed.

Another point I don't agree with is being authoritarian with teenagers.

Anecdotally I have four friends and we all have grown up children. Three of us had boundaries for our teenagers but were not authoritarian and two were. The offspring of my authoritarian friends are the ones who are involved in drugs and lots of unsafe activities.

I think the focus on feelings is a key factor here. I did some work eight or so years ago for a university education department, and it exposed me to some of their teaching materials. One piece had a rhyme on it: "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can wound as well."

In my generation, this was "but words can never hurt me." And I thought at the time that teaching young children that words were equivalent to physical violence was not a good idea. And look at where we are now...

I understand why there's been a focus on feelings over the last twenty years, but, in reality, you need to learn to manage your emotions or sometimes just ignore them - - particularly when you need to take a rational course of action to remove yourself from a dangerous situation.

Feelings are ultimately illusory. Thoughts are too. The only thing that has solidity is material reality. Yet we seem to have spent a lot of energy getting Childrey to focus on the former, rather than observe the latter.

My own children’s experience of school is that bullying is not really a thing (they have both now left). When I was at school it was rife. I still look back with sadness on a boy in my class who experienced mass verbal bullying and wonder what happened to him.

The impression I have is that schools did a lot of work in perhaps the nineties to change the culture around bullying and how it was dealt with, learning from other countries.

I’m glad we no longer tolerate bullying. My American friends see it as quite normal, and I think that sets the basis for US culture and it’s culture wars.

@wagtailred

The parenting discussion has been interesting if a bit judgemental. I think if you are looking at a large shift in society then you cant really point the finger at individual mums who struggle to say no as there has always been varied parenting ability. There must be a reason a huge section of parents stopped saying no around 20 -30 years ago if we are agreeing that current adults are not growing up. Eg one thing that had a big impact on my parenting cohort was a particular barnados advert that was aired repeatedly and was quite haunting basically saying 'child has learned not to cry because noone comes'

Yes, I think this is an important discussion and not really about blaming mothers. Yes, it might suggest those of us with kids need to think about some of the parenting trends ad expectations we find ourselves in. But that's not a personal indictment.

But if this particular change in the philosophy of parenting is affecting the ability of young adults to have, say, important political discussions about sex, or anything else controversial, that's of interest I'd have thought.

Ferudi’s belief is that a large number of people - 20’s -30’s are attempting to create a moral and cultural zero.

So all boundaries that are meaningful to people are seen as bad - adult and child, man and woman, past and present, public and private as well as physical boundaries.

This entails writing the past as overwhelmingly bad, thus placing moral authority on the young as the only people fit to make moral judgements, and to remove culture from its historical context and traditions so that it can be entirely remade.

He says this is perpetuated by the media and education system and uses the promotion of Greta Thornborg as an example. The Times has picked up on the parenting element.

Sorry, that should be they are attempting to create a moral and cultural year zero.

I have really mixed feelings about how we treat bullying now. Part of it is the meaning of the word seems to have expanded. It's good that serious bullying and physical violence have been tackled. And I worry about the way social media means kids never get a respite from the teen social scene.

But it seems like children's relationships now are very managed by adults, right down to mandated friendships. Kids who were excluded and didn't fit in did used to have a challenge in that, but as a kid who experienced that I wasn't very old before I saw that some ability to be independent of the approval of others was a positive thing.

It's like adults have focused so much on teaching kids that they are "safe" and the adults will maintain a safe environment, mentally and emotionally, that they don't realise that the flip side of that is the kids learn that other more challenging environments are not safe.