What is happening to the kids?

[ckBejug]

Many people fret over the loss of 'influence by the brain' aka intelligent, thought-provoking matter, on/in anything that 'matters' anymore these days. But, after thinking about it, I think the intelligent have lost nothing. It's the younger generation who is gaining less, instead of more, as opposed to 'back in the day' when more was left to the brain and imagination...

It's not like popular culture society has changed much, even with advanced technology. Society is still pretty much the same, just a lot more technologically advanced. Hollywood churns out lots of crap, but that's always been the case. The brilliance of 'Star Wars' is matched today by that of 'The Lord of the Rings'. We seem to be suddenly tolerating the fact that our leaders are unethical crooks, but again, this is nothing new-- for Bush fixing elections, there was Nixon. For Clinton 'entertaining' Lewinsky, there was Kennedy 'entertaining' Monroe.

We clearly haven't lost anything. The works of Picasso, Steinbeck, Shelley, Keats, Mozart, etc., are still with us. While it's true that are not being appreciated as much as they used to be, nobody holds a gun to our heads and forces us to buy, listen to, or watch all the crap that people are buying, listening to, and watching. Popular music is pretty unoriginal, it's true, everything seems like a carbon copy of the things that came before it, this is mostly because of the major buyers market that is now 10-14 year olds whose parents, it seems, have too little time (since they are working to make money to buy their kids whatever they want). These are the people who use TV as a 'babysitter' and are willing to buy 'love' from their kids and give them attention by buying 'toys' for them.

Spend time with someone who is several years younger than you, kids today, and you'll find that they seem to lack the creativity of thought you or your parents had at their same age. They seem to be hypnotized almost by all the distractions available: internet, thousands of TV channels, video games, play play play, everything boxed up, processed, nothing left to the imagination.

I don't think we're being dumbed down, I also don't think we're doing anything to make society better, smarter, more creative, because we're letting our kids grow up with too many distractions, too much digital world and not enough time in the real world....

What do you think?

[clubbin714]

I think you bring up some good points ckBejug.

We are no longer able to trust our own children anymore. Over-parenting has produced a situation where children are seen as extensions of the parents dream of what is good for themselves (thus it must be good for their kids), but as a consequence, are unable to become fully independent adults in their own right.

It is a mindset that demands that we become not simply a child’s parent, but its teacher, its advocate in the barren world of proper education, its therapist, its best friend, its dietitian, and more.

All this work must be squashed into that misleading phenomenon “quality time”. We parents are inevitably spoken of as time-starved because of our long working hours; we must therefore compensate with this sort of intense and intrusive, but obviously, educational focus.

Is this what parenting is? Being with a child is often full of banal, repetitive activities. It is monotonous, because small children often like to do the same things over and over again. They do not want to do a jigsaw and move on, they want to do the same puzzle 20 times. Sometimes they like to do very little other than sit and stare. Boredom can breed creativity. Look at how kids can play imaginatively with just a few cardboard boxes or
how a pillow can become a teddy bear, a baby, or how your cassettes become cars, houses and how the tape inside becomes long, long snakes.

The current culture of compulsory learning and creativity leads to overloaded boredom, with kids being hauled around museums and forced to produce works of art on demand. Allowing a child to be bored requires a degree of trust that is no longer the norm. We fear that their boredom will lead them to unhealthy activities.