Why it is not 'Kids These Days', a millennium of child hate

I rue for the days when adults were capable of creating a coherent argument about society today that took into account the reality of society yesterday and predicted something accurate for society of tomorrow. 

I should live so long...

Today, in the facebook parenting group, this piece of tripe

REASONS TODAY’S KIDS ARE BORED AT SCHOOL, FEEL ENTITLED, HAVE LITTLE PATIENCE & FEW REAL FRIENDS

August 18, 2017 

was served up, raw and slimy. I mean, why...?

Go ahead and read it. Take your time.

See?

I completely agree with this teacher’s message that our children are getting worse and worse in many aspects. I hear the same consistent message from every teacher I meet.

Does it look and smell remarkably like any of these gems?

15 Historical Complaints About Young People Ruining Everything

I love this quote:

A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages...chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body.

Scientific American, July 1859 

Which of course, mirrors this claim:

Kids used to play outside, where, in unstructured natural environments, they learned and practiced their social skills.  Unfortunately, technology replaced the outdoor time. 

You can almost hear them all nodding sagely, in unison ...

... meanwhile, back in reality ...

The study, published Wednesday in The American Journal of Family Therapy, found students in the early elementary school years are getting significantly more homework than is recommended by education leaders, in some cases nearly three times as much homework as is recommended.

and

Children spend 50% more time on school drive than in their parents' day

Yeah... that's all about the evils of video games interfering with all that free time outside...

... and then, about being free:

Since when do children dictate to us how to parent them? ... What good are we doing them by giving them what they WANT when we know that it is not GOOD for them? Without proper nutrition and a good night’s sleep, our kids come to school irritable, anxious, and inattentive.  In addition, we send them the wrong message.  They learn they can do what they want and not do what they don’t want.

Yes, dear. The problem is children these days are doing what they want, instead of playing ... outside ... doing ... what ... they ... ... ... um ... ?

What is 'wrong with kids these days' is that the adults watching them can't think properly. Back in my day, we learned to think before we put our names on mindless twaddle and claimed it was original thought and intelligent discourse ...

Here's what is really happening:

Children today, the kids of digital natives (those horrific Millennials who are about to destroy civilization with all their inclusion policies and international communications and staying-in-touch with virtually every person they've ever met, who never learned to socialize properly, according to their teachers and parents) have in their hands extremely powerful tools, often for most of the day. This enables them to:

• socialize when they are not supposed to, without passing notes in class (Hi, Gen-X and Boomers!), and, incidentally, voluntarily honing their written communication skills
• to look up current, accurate information (remember the card catalogue, that dusty, dated collection of books printed back when all truth was simple and never changed?)
• to both record and report crimes as they are happening, holding criminals accountable and making it clear that even police won't be excluded from this era of constant, private surveillance
• to create their own industries and earn while they learn by sharing what they know and monetizing it through their social networks across the globe (lazy beasts, going around earning money while they're studying, playing, sleeping...)
• criticizing static knowledge, abuse of authority, sexist and senseless policies, arbitrary restrictions and even the place and practices of 'school' as we know it --just as if it weren't some sacred cow developed over a hundred thousand years by Master Thinkers trained for decades in How To Analyze Quality Education Methods... because it isn't.

While these all-seeing and all-knowing teachers (and even the author herself, with her grand centuries-of-personal-experience: 

Clearly, throughout my time as an Occupational Therapist, I have seen and continue to see a decline in kids’ social, emotional, and academic functioning...

... ahem.) are amazingly good at repeating what they heard last and believing whatever they think, they are clearly not good at critical thinking, understanding history, or observing their own world. 

The education world: a mish-mash of cobbled together ideas to free all adults to contribute to the GDP, control the population and stop them thinking they have any right to a voice in public decision-making, to create 'well-rounded' adults (that, at least, is working with their demands for sitting still and drug them if they don't) and copy this iota of that country's system that produces 'better' results (while ignoring the suicide rates, a completely unrelated result no matter how many young adults write 'pressure to get perfect scores' on their notes) ... while ignoring the research that indicates clearly what helps kids thrive (like getting to sleep when their bodies need to, not taking 7am extra-curricular classes so their portfolios will have enough 'roundedness' for Harvard to let them in...) because it's inconvenient to the system that is, really, what our fine lady Victoria calls the first problem:

1. TECHNOLOGY
Using technology as a “Free babysitting service” 

We can't change the hours of school because school is for free babysitting for the normal (like that's real now or ever was) work week. If teens started at 1pm, who would babysit them for the mornings while they sleep according to their circadian needs ... and who would do the 'afterschool' work in their places, if they are in school until 7pm? How can they be taking their younger siblings to school so parents don't have to, if they're sleeping later than the kids' start? 

That can't work... we can't be adaptive to reality, because The School System is ideal ... well, made already ... employs too many people comfortable in their places ... too big to fail... 

Clearly, the problem is parents today being all terrible at parenting ... like always... 

Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?

Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790 

What is Misoproliny? My new word... on hating children

I love English. It's so cool the way you can make up whole new words by using other language pieces.


Misogyny is a combined word, from the Greek, using miso- meaning 'hater' and -gyny meaning 'woman', neatly making the commonplace 'womanhater.'


Misanthrophy is the same prefix with the suffix which means both all people and men --neatly confusing the issue whenever it's 'manhating' rather than 'hating people' that is at issue.


The suffix proli- means child. A misoproliny is, therefore, a childhater. Strange, considering the decades of vile and hateful texts circulating as parenting advice and pedagogy, that this word has never before been coined. On the other hand, I'll take credit for making it up...

How Not Yelling Makes for Peaceful Parenting

Long ago, I attended a La Leche League Canada Area Conference. It was a cooperative event, with all attendees asked to help run the show. I was involved in the registration --it was my assignment-- so I know that there were far more than 200 people in attendance, from 8:30 to 5:30 the first day, 8:30 am to 9pm the second day and from 8:30 to 4 the final day.

Beyond being a great deal of fun, there was something... odd about the experience. It took me nearly two days to figure out what it was.

Of course, it was a La Leche League conference on the West Coast, which lent it an odd air of super-granola in virtually every aspect, but I was used to the Islanders and their homemade soap lifestyles. The oddness was something else. Then I figured it out:

No one (seriously: no one!) was yelling at their kids

Virtually everyone attending had kids with them, with few exceptions of national office-level representatives, and one of the Founding Mothers who by that point had a handful of grandchildren and I'm sure wouldn't have thought of towing them to a conference.

Some of the kids were yelling. Some were melting down completely. 

But no adult in the whole building for the whole weekend yelled at any child anywhere I could see.




To say I was astonished is an understatement. I don't think the possibility of not yelling in life had ever occurred to me. While I certainly didn't make it to my kids' late teens without ever yelling at them, or about them, or near them... the conference opened up the possibility in my head that yelling was optional, not natural or necessary.

I'm sure lots of those parents who attended yelled at their kids at some point or other. Why not there?

I think there were two things: a basic premise that yelling wasn't going to help anything anyhow, coupled with a tremendously child-friendly, family-supportive atmosphere. There weren't spaces where kids were expected or encouraged to behave like mini adults (or like they don't exist at all). And that, to me, seems like the core of peaceful parenting.

There is something inherently violent in the premise that children should, or can, be 'little adults.' The very idea insults the core of who they really are: children. 

If they were adults, they'd have fully-formed adult bodies and fully-formed adult brains, they'd understand things the way adults do and would do things the way adults do. But they don't. 

They can't. 

Because they aren't. And they aren't going to just because we have a whole society convinced it's how it should be.

Believing that it is somehow aberrant to create an environment that acknowledges --even welcomes-- childhood's different needs, different pace, different lifestyle; that's just normal here these days. Encouraging violence, whether verbal or physical, is commonplace in the realm of 'how to raise children' advice and theory --even in clinical psychology.

How do we argue that it is possible to raise peaceful children through violence?