American Parents: Doing it WRONG!

AMEN!

I don't think this is an "American" problem.

Almost every day you hear about how parents in Asia are so strict and how wonderful their kids are and how their beating us on PISA and if we don't buckle down and get our kids in line then America will "lose". So we end up with "Tiger Mom" books telling us to watch our kids every minute, to never let them make a mistake, and to criticize the hell out of them should they slip up. Everyone applauds. (OK, not everyone.)

I think there are a lot of reasons we got this way though:

We're fed a steady diet of horror stories about the awful things that can happen to kids if you aren't watching every minute. The internet speculates on how terrible those parents must have been -- they allowed their child to be unsupervised and look what happened!

Your kid makes a nasty post on Facebook? Shoot their computer and post it to Youtube! Get famous as a hero! Appear on the morning talk shows!

Your kid fails a class? Make them hold a sign on the street announcing their crime! Post it to Facebook! Get famous as a hero! Appear on the morning talk shows!

People pat you on the back and tell you you're "doing it right".

If you aren't busy becoming a hero on the internet, you can get busy becoming a criminal:

I saw my neighbor's kids out after dark smoking cigarettes, what do I do? Call CPS!

My neighbor's baby is crying, what do I do? Call CPS!

She allowed her kid to ride the subway alone! Call CPS! She doesn't deserve to have kids! Send her a death threat!

Parents are afraid to let their kid make a mistake because they're afraid they'll get their kid taken away.

There's also the fear that if your kid makes one mistake that their life is essentially over because they'll never get into college and they'll spend their life in a dead end job and it's all your fault.

If you refuse to drug your kid, you're a bad parent.

If your kid tries drugs, you're a bad parent.

I think the biggest problem is that our notion of privacy has changed to the point where a lot of people are fearful of allowing their child any privacy. One forum I look at has a lot of young people on it and they don't seen to understand that privacy is desirable. It's almost like they haven't really done something unless they've announced it publicly.

We're all up in everybody else's business. Same as we've always been.

Word.

Someone in this article agrees with me:

You are arguing that fear is the cause of bad parenting. You have probably noted that I have at many points argued that Americans have been manipulated for a long time by the selling of fear, and that this trick still works alarmingly well.

We can argue about how it got there, but that Americans are full of fear is clearly true, and it is the cause of much of which ails us.

This is simply a case of finding an article or study that fits your pre-existing bias.

There is no empirically tested method of "correct parenting" and too many "experts" have ended up being complete idiots.

Our society is far too heterogeneous, and kids are far too heterogeneous, for one approach to work for all kids.

If you don't think that American parents on the whole are over invested in and over manage their kids lives then you need to get out more.

There is certainly a segment that does that.

There is also a large segment where both parents work and they don't have the time to do that. Or they head to the bar, or they head to the golf course, or they head wherever the hell else they want to go.

Then there's the segment that just enjoys spending time with their kids.


And then there's the segment of the population that has too much free time, so they sit around finding fault with everyone else.



Hey, I found your nose. It was in my business.

How is this an American thing?

The article you posted compares American kids to kids living in the Peruvian Amazon. Those parents sound very invested in their kids. They are teaching them what it takes to survive within their culture. That's what American parents are trying to do too.

I think it's safe to assume that Matsigenka parents aren't all exactly the same.

I am not arguing that this is only an American problem. I don't know enough about other cultures to say, though when I was in Germany for 6 years I found their youth to be much more independent than ours. In any case others having the same problem would not make me feel any better. Nor would it change what we need to do going forwards.

It's just the way kids are, so parents should back off (but not entirely).

A little over 2000 years this is what one person (Socrates) noted about teenagers:

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

Hey, it sounds like he is somewhat describing me when I was in HS.

I think some parents are expecting the unexpected from most of us, stereotyping kids to be perfect angels whith bright halos on their heads.
I call them helicopter parents, they hover on the shoulder at every moment of the kid's youth. Most kids with that kind of treatment become neurotic from anxiety at the first chance of independence they get.

I'm also struck by the automatic assumption that "the way it was done in the past is to be preferred to the way it is done now."

There are many things that we've learned to do better now. Everything from building a better houses, to child safety, to vaccinations, to annual well checks, etc.

Just because things are different now doesn't mean they're worse. I have things a helluva lot better than my dad, and his dad, did.