I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much?
* That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.
After I graduated college I worked for the same college doing IT for housing and dining. I worked with a fellow alumnus who was in a fraternity in the late 60s. He told a story about their fraternity running a paid bar in the basement every Friday and Saturday night. The brothers would drink so much that they couldn't be bothered to successfully run the bar, so they split the profits with the sorority next door and the sorority sisters would take care of everything for them.
The reason why this is relevant is that he would often rail against the same university that was cracking down on underage drinking because parents were worried about their kids. It was typically the same parents who partook in these shenanigans about 40 years before - yet didn't want their kids to have the same experience.
Not that it diminishes the point, but many of those parents were likely in university during the 70s to early 80s, when the drinking age was as low as 18 in many (but not all) states. Hypothetically many of these parents drank legally as freshmen in college but do not want their children to drink illegally as freshmen in college.
I'd still call them hypocrites, or at least accuse them of lacking in the critical thinking department, but hypocrites to a much lesser extent.
Legal smeagle. I would bet that 99% of people (including boomers) think that 20 year olds should be able to drink. The oft cited argument that "we let 18 year olds man nuclear subs that could take out a city" is just too obvious.
This argument is so bad. We don't let 18 year olds run a nuclear sub. Sure, they're on board sometimes but important decisions are made by significantly older officers with years of training. That's like having a drink with your parents.
(I got drunk first time when I was 14 and have no strong opinion on when it should be legal to buy alcohol.)
Maybe. Mixing legality and morality is popular enough though. In other words: "the drinking age should be 18, but it isn't, and you should respect the law".
I suspect many would also oppose dropping the legal age for MADD inspired reasons (god I hate that organization.... bunch of neo-prohibitionists...) even though they think their kid is responsible enough.
I do agree though, most probably do think that the age could be lower.
No, you can certainly change your mind. But there is definitely a line where something is crossed.
An example is with the revelations about the concussions in football. Some parents, even ones who may have played football in their day, may not want their kids playing football. This doesn't cross that line and is not hypocritical.
Another example is with a fair number of religious fathers that I've met as a young man and and adult. I dated a girl who's father was overly concerned about her safety. Fair enough. We met at a Dairy Queen so I could ask her to a dance. He proceeds to tell me that he knows 'how boys are' because he partied and caroused when he was younger, before he found 'the Lord'. Now, I know how boys are as well - I was one at the time, heh - but I wasn't that boy. I wasn't him, yet, I was lumped into a group I wasn't a part of and lectured on how to be a gentleman. That's hypocritical.
Another example. I fucking hate 'The View' yet still end up seeing way too much of it due to my wife. One of the hosts has said that she's had multiple abortions in her lifetime but now that she's had a kid she leans pro-life. So while it was fine when she was poor and had no way of supporting a child (multiple times I remind you), now that she's rich she would've chosen differently. That's hypocritical.
I guess the line is where you don't own your previous decisions instead of making excuses for them. I think we can all accept the 'we didn't know the consequences' as not hypocritical but the 'I just don't want you to do what I did' is right out.
Your definition of "hypocrisy" is off. A hypocrite is someone whose current actions and professed moral standards don't agree. The father was simply wrong about you, not a hypocrite. And the The View host simply changed her mind due to a new perspective, for right or wrong.
The hypocrisy appears when they don't pass the same judgement on themselves. Do they disapprove of what they did when they were younger, or do they think "oh, well that was all fun and games, but these kids should not be drinking"?
I had this discussion with my mother (who went to school in the early 70s) when I entered school. Her position boiled down to it being reasonable for her to drink because it was legal, and unreasonable for me to drink simply because it was illegal. Now, I don't equate legality to morality, in no small part because she didn't raise me to do that. When pressed to actually explain her disapproval, she relented and admitted that her position was hypocritical.
Hypocrisy isn't about changing your mind. It is about holding yourself to a different standard.
I don't interpret that as hypocritical. Whether legality equates to morality doesn't matter. If you get caught, there can be serious consequences (legal penalties, kicked out of schools, etc.. all depending of course on the circumstances of the party, the party-goers, the school, the state, etc.). These risks didn't exist when she drink in college. They do now, and it's not unreasonable for a parent to want to prevent these things from happening to their child. Their opinion can be 0% percent judgement based (in the sense of "passing judgement".
I think we both knew that, in practice, there is no real risk in being kicked out of school for hitting up a party on Fridays so long as you act with some baseline level of responsibility. In my case it wasn't even a dry campus (and few people other than freshmen were in school housing anyway, so the parties were on private property), and nobody had cars (campus was in the city). In this specific case, her judgement was based on mixing the legal and moral signals, but she does not normally buy into that.
I would describe her position at the time as slightly hypocritical, or at least poorly considered. To be clear, I don't think anti-kids-these-days-drinking attitudes are categorically extremely hypocritical, just often so.
It's not hypocritical, regardless of whether the risks existed then. To say "I was wrong, even if I didn't know it. You should avoid being wrong as well" is in no way inconsistent or hypocritical.
Err, let me give you another example - abortions. I love it when women (that have had abortions) or men (that encouraged women to have abortions) are becoming anti-abortions as they age.
Considering their changing minds can lead to people being convicted for crimes they themselves were guilty of, does that count as hypocrisy?
Of course it does, because such opinions don't come with a disclaimer. Any conversation with a child or a school principal about drinking should start with "You know, I got wasted several times in college...".
I think what you're asking for is intellectual honesty. There's nothing hypocritical about judging people for crimes you were guilty of in the past. You can't take a word and just change it however you like. Actually, you can, if enough people agree with you. But in this case the dictionary doesn't.
Is that actually relevant? I think a lot of those folks would recall their own memories of doing those things in a fond light, even while they deny it in the present for future generations.
Woah, hold up there. I am a little before the OP poster (70's) and we most surely did not do what you said. It was the f'n generation before us (born in the 60's) that did the freak out and made everything "safe first". They started their crusade in the 80's and really got going in the 90's. The OP and even someone born in the 70's were a bit young for it.
Now, I do see this schedule-every-second-vibe from my generation and am not liking it one bit[1]. My younger brother is trying to find or build decent play equipment for his boy as he grows up.
1) some organized sports is fine, but this scheduling every waking minute of your child's time is psycho
You make a very good point. The Boomers (myself included) had freedom to play, explore, and get into trouble. But as a generation we have royally screwed up our own kids.
I've lived in East Asia for the last 25 years and was appalled to see what educational systems in Japan and Hong Kong did to children, and the kind of employees they make later in life.
Later I moved to SE Asia and in the countryside you still see children leading healthy childhoods, while the middle class, especially in the cities seem hellbent on screwing up their children's lives. When I first moved to Thailand things were okay, now they are terrible. Now that I live in Cambodia I am seeing the same processes happen. It's very sad.
The exception, and it's a very small exception, is in some of the International schools you see scattered around Asia. There are a few very good schools out here, where children are brought up in a mixed culture and linguistic environment, are given a great deal more freedom to explore and time to play, and choose for themselves. International schools are set primarily to educate children of expat families living abroad. But it's becoming common to see more and more local children being enrolled in the better of these schools. I know a school in Hong Kong who has had to limit the number of local children that they enroll because otherwise there wouldn't be any expat children in the school at all.
Because I so rarely visit the States, I didn't realize until the last five or six years how bad things had become. Most American children now are subject to the worst of the old American industrial education system and the worst of the eastern, the student is an open vessel for the teacher to pour his wisdom into, all in one package.
I would never raise a child in the States, because IMHO it would be tantamount to child abuse.
When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”
His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.
Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).
Plus, policies are not made by a generation but politicians and social and economic circumstances. There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. The narrative is in the "not even wrong" category.
I can't make any sense of your perspective. Policies very much are made by a generation; they are very much not made by politicians. Look at the discussion of drinking -- politicians have decided that no one shall drink before the age of 21, the masses have decided something different, and the masses are having things 100% their own way. The society reflects what the populace wants.
> There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere.
Of course there's never been a meeting. The generation doesn't meet. But it does decide policy. Who meets to set the price of copper?
On the topic of clildren freedom and modern day restrictions etc, I always found this small article from the Austin Chronicle about life in the fifties very illuminating. It also explains the origins of the saying "This is where I came in" (and we have the same saying in my country, with exactly the same origins!):
"In today's America, where parents chauffeur kids to "play dates," only on the poorest streets do 7-year-olds still roam free ... but they don't go to movies much because tickets are so pricey ... the concession stand is even more expensive ... and you can't just walk into any movie (it might not be rated for kids) ... and you have to know the exact time a film starts ... and shopping-mall movie theatres are rarely within walking distance. Today you're blitzed by TV ad campaigns and product tie-ins in fast-food joints, so you know all about a Hollywood film before it starts ... and today's urban parents panic if their grade-school children disappear, unaccounted for, for hours on end.
Fifty years ago, none of that was so. In the larger cities, two or three movie theatres were in walking distance of most neighborhoods. Each had but one screen. The program began with a newsreel, a few cartoons, and brief "coming attractions" (not today's compilations that tell the whole story). Then the "features" began -- plural, features, for all neighborhood theatres played double, sometimes triple, features, two or three movies for the price of one ticket. Nothing was rated, there were no sex scenes or obscenities; anyone could go to any movie. Admission price for a kid was rarely more than a quarter. Popcorn for a dime, a Coke for a nickel. They weren't supposed to sell kids tickets during school hours, but they did. As for kids roaming about -- "Go play in traffic," our parents would say, and they wouldn't be surprised if we didn't walk in 'til dinnertime, which in our immigrant neighborhood wasn't until after 7."
50 years ago the movie business was a vertical market. The movie distributor was the producer, studio owner, the cast and crew were employees, and they owned the theater. Look at the old spaghetti westerns and the opening credits were studio, producer, cast, major crew, and that was it. The movie simply started. And the end credits were just as short.
Now the cast and crew are contractors, producers, studios, and theaters are separate entities with each one having to grow 10% annually. The last movie I watched had 10 minutes of end credits. Movies have gotten far more complex in production and there are a lot of hands in the pot now.
>Now the cast and crew are contractors, producers, studios, and theaters are separate entities with each one having to grow 10% annually. The last movie I watched had 10 minutes of end credits. Movies have gotten far more complex in production and there are a lot of hands in the pot now.
Still much worse cinematography and script-wise than older stuff, from Hitchcock and Capra to Pekinpah and Copolla.
With a few exceptions, like Tarantino, 90% of the stuff coming out are aimed at teenagers with ADD (including 20 somethings that still play GTA). And the more "serious" stuff is usually some bad formulaic (as opposed to good formulaic) melodrama BS.
Part of the problem is that the race for college has been pushed earlier and earlier as admissions has gotten more competitive.
Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply. When success in life in large part is still defined by one's undergraduate institution you can see why parents would focus on that at the expense of everything else.
I'm not a parent yet, and am not planning to be in the near future, but I've been thinking a lot about parenting now that I'm fully out of my childhood and it basically seems to come down to a bunch of tough compromises.
As a parent of an 8-year old, I don't think this is it at all. I think it's a couple things.
1. Cutbacks of "scheduled creativity" time at school. This is a HUGE one. In the 70's, my school had an art class, music class, plenty of PE. Now, that's hugely, hugely cut. If I want my kid to do art? music? sports? (she wants to, after all). After-school scheduled activity time!
2. 2 working parents. We're pretty free range, don't need to hover over playing kids, but we need to be within walking distance (at home down the street, or whatever). Juggling that "freely" as opposed to strictly-set activities? Much harder. Even if you get 1 afternoon free a week, there aren't other parents to trade off with.
3. Basically, chicken-and-egg. If my kid doesn't have anyone to play with because they're all off at activities, better to have them doing these activities with their peers than sitting at home bored and idle (not that some down/idle time isn't good, but there can be too much).
Can't think of ANYONE in my peer group who's worried about college for their kids yet. Maybe in a couple years.
YMMV. I went to school in mid 70's and both parents were working when I was in HS and before. As others have posted, I was unsupervised. Could ride a bike to/from school for 20-30 min etc. Not sure what all changed but the things I read now suggest its way different than when I started. I hesitate to say people seem younger but they do seem nastier and more self-focused. We had stoners and grinds and everything in between. I seem to recall sex. And the drug stories are legendary. Maybe the parents are trying to prevent their kids doing the same?
Which, of course, does wonders for the forbidden fruit aspect of things. Oh, and we had computers too. Big, slow things but they were there and just as fun to play with. But their relative rarity forced us to be social to a degree.
I'll go back inside so you can play on my yard now :-).
As I mentioned, it was two working parents and the move to surburbia. (Well, I said non-walking-friendly neighborhoods, and didn't elaborate). This was what changed.
These suburbs, often designed after 1950s, were designed for car travel, rather than walking or biking. Many suburbs are designed with streets as fractals, often without sidewalks. It might be a "safe" subdivision, but there was a real risk in being run over by cars. Kids living in suburbia had to be driven everywhere for activities.
It's no coincidence that the kids growing up in that environment and coming into adulthood have increasingly moved to gentrified neighborhoods (the ones designed for walking). There has been a decline in buying cars. Whether that means allowing the kids to have free play remains to be seen. (But I suspect, things like the popularity of the books, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls are indicative).
Also have an 8 yo and I can't think of anyone in my peer group that isn't thinking about their child's college. Of course mine attends a private school, so we may have different demographics. As one of the parents told me, who's managed to send his other two kids to elite schools: if you wait until high school (to start working on the admissions resume), it's too late.
> Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply
I do not see how this could be happening in aggregate. College attendance is way up over the last few decades, even at the graduate level. Sure, top schools are more competitive, but that is only because their is more to filter out, and newer schools would seemingly pick up the slack. Many of the less than reputable for-profit schools have pretty much no admission requirements (except $$$). I personally think this new evolving system is still extremely problematic, but not because of admissions.
I wouldn't think that breaking an arm or two while in elementary school would have much of an effect at all on college admissions. I mean, if anything, it should give the kid some more life experiences to draw upon while writing their admissions essay, right?
No, but excelling in high-school extra-curricular activities does. And the perception is you don't excel at extra-curricular activities unless you start young.
In my neighborhood, kids started working with professional strength coaches in middle-school in an effort to make varsity football or basketball. Excessive instruction in music was common. 2-3 sports a season on top of volunteer work or part-time jobs.
It's all in an effort to get a leg up at college admissions time. And it's absolutely insane.
I don't think volunteer work and part-time jobs really factor into the equation with the age group that I am picturing, though with teenagers they are important of course (Particularly I think finding a shitty part-time job that lets you goof off with your peers, then get yelled at by a boss (who honestly doesn't really expect better) is relatively important)
Starting them off in a sport or two seems fine, that's how I grew up anyway, but at least in my case there wasn't an excessively strong drive to excel there. I certainly wasn't going for a sports scholarship, so keeping fit and just being able to write "Sports, k-12" on my college application was good enough. One or two kids had really driving parents and I think the rest of us always felt bad for those kids, but it wasn't the norm.
* That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.