Current Events > The Fragile Generation (tl;dr: it's us)

(+) Yeah! (+)

http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/26/the-fragile-generation

If you're over 40, chances are good that you had scads of free time as a childafter school, on weekends, over the summer. And chances are also good that, if you were asked about it now, you'd go on and on about playing in the woods and riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Today many kids are raised like veal. Only 13 percent of them even walk to school. Many who take the bus wait at the stop with parents beside them like bodyguards. For a while, Rhode Island was considering a bill that would prohibit children from getting off the bus in the afternoon if there wasn't an adult waiting to walk them home. This would have applied until seventh grade.

As for summer frolicking, campers don't just have to take a buddy with them wherever they go, including the bathroom. Some are now required to take twoone to stay with whoever gets hurt, the other to run and get a grown-up. Walking to the john is treated like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

After school, kids no longer come home with a latchkey and roam the neighborhood. Instead, they're locked into organized, supervised activities. Youth sports are a $15 billion business that has grown by 55 percent since just 2010. Children as young as third grade are joining traveling teamswhich means their parents spend a lot of time in the car, too. Or they're at tutoring. Or they're at music lessons. And if all else fails, they are in their rooms, online.

Even if parents want to shoo their kids outsideand don't come home till dinner!it's not as easy as it once was. Often, there are no other children around to play with. Even more dishearteningly, adults who believe it's good for young people to run some errands or play kickball down the street have to think twice about letting them, because busybodies, cops, and social workers are primed to equate "unsupervised" with "neglected and in danger."

You may remember the story of the Meitivs in Maryland, investigated twice for letting their kids, 10 and 6, walk home together from the park. Or the Debra Harrell case in South Carolina, where a mom was thrown in jail for allowing her 9-year-old to play at the sprinkler playground while she worked at McDonald's. Or the 8-year-old Ohio boy who was supposed to get on the bus to Sunday school, but snuck off to the Family Dollar store instead. His dad was arrested for child endangerment.

These examples represent a new outlook: the belief that anytime kids are doing anything on their own, they are automatically under threat. But that outlook is wrong. The crime rate in America is back down to what it was in 1963, which means that most of today's parents grew up playing outside when it was more dangerous than it is today. And it hasn't gotten safer because we're hovering over our kids. All violent crime is down, including against adults.

Thoughts?

This think piece is so fucking passe. The "kids don't get to play anymore because parents are too worried, but crime is lower so it's the media's fault" isn't a deep analysis. Literally everyone has said this for the past decade. Come up with a new idea.
---

42. Grew up in rural nowhere Missouri.

Another old fart article written because they are jelly of our higher living standards
"Waaah waah kids today have it good. Waaah waah they dont have to be enslaved and walk 100 kilometers a day to work/school waah waah"

It's called progress, bitch. Yes idiots in our generation exist, but idiots have existed since tge dawn of mankind, every generation has sets of idiots, there are just look alot more today because generally population increase and fast communication and information transmitting now exist and you can know know what happen to a person's butt pimple from other continent if they post it theri twitter/fb/instagram
---

One of my big problems with the article was that they do that thing where people exaggerate the prominence of safe spaces on college campuses. After spending 5 years at one of the biggest universities in America, I never heard the word "safe space" from students (or if I did, it was specifically talking about buildings for underrepresented groups).

But I do see the difference in how my cousin and I grew up, being allowed to walk to the bookstore a mile or two away, and my siblings, who weren't allowed to have the blinds open in house when there wasn't an adult present. And the way I grew up was nothing compared to how my parents grew up in the '80s.

I see kids playing unsupervised outside of my apartment all the time.
---

Lunaaaa posted...

It's called progress, bitch.

Point conceded.