Tomorrow is Father’s Day (I count myself among dads since I’ve helped raise many ducklings), and in honor of the day, Bill Maher did a bit on Real Time about the decline of parenting. Here, despite his own dearth of offspring, he argues that dads today are “doing it wrong.” By that he means that child-raising has gone awry: parents seem to be overindulging their children in ways that don’t prepare them for the real world. One pet peeve is the new method of “gentle parenting” (e.g., do unto your children as you would want done unto you).
Here are four facts he gives (I’ve looked up the references):
From Robert Leahy in Psychology Today: “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s.”
This one creeps me out:
From the New York Post: “About one in five college graduates brought their parents with them to a job interview”.
That one is used to explain why employers aren’t hiring recent college grads.
From the National Institutes of Health: “An estimated 49.5% of adolescents have a mental health disorder at some point in their lives.” This is the lifetime prevalence for children between 13 and 18.
And finally, from the NYT: “PTSD has surged among college students”. From the article we see that it’s more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, and I presume the criteria used to assess the condition in the two years are the same:
Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.
The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.
Maher is a bit curmudgeonly here, especially for a non-parent, as he calls for more discipline and the setting of boundaries for children. He doesn’t want dads who were emotionally distant and beat their kids with a belt (that’s my own experience), but does want a “trad dad” who sets rules, givin as the reason “because I said so.” (Note, though, that back in the Fifties I had a leash like the kid who shows up at 7:45. That was because I was unruly in public places. But the fact that I was leashed like a dog still makes me squirm.)
Finally, Maher touts the misogynistic Andrew Tate as the totally inappropriate role model that young boys are seeking these days. I’ve never heard of Tate, but perhaps some readers have.
This isn’t as funny as the usual bits, and has a flavor of “get off my lawn,” but he might be right. See below the video.
Remember this book? (Click on icon to go to the Amazon site.) I thought it was good, and offers an explanation for the fragility of young people today. It sold very well.
Now Jon Haidt, writing by himself, has a new one, and it’s sold like gangbusters, rising to the top of the NYT bestseller list. It’s about precisely what Maher’s talking about above, so before you dismiss Maher’s lucubrations, perhaps you should read the book. I haven’t yet, but I bet it’s a bestseller because parents or would-be parents are buying it. And that probably means it contains stuff that rings true. If you’ve read it, weigh in below.
For those who may not wish to read Haidt’s new book, he has appeared twice in recent months on C-SPAN discussing his sensible ideas concerning the effects of screen time and of the unfortunate choices of many parents on those youngsters who have grown up with (and, sadly, often become addicted to) smartphones, the very technology which has, according to many recent reports, wreaked havoc on the Marubo of Brazil, although questions have been raised about the accuracy of some of the articles.
Lukianoff and Haidt’s book was really excellent. I’m looking forward to Haidt’s new book.
It’s crazy that college graduates bring parents to job interviews! A few years ago I thought that the closeness that young people have with their parents was a good thing, thinking that the generation gap had narrowed. But now it seems that this closeness is in part a form of dependency that isn’t so good after all. (I’m not a parent, so I don’t have first hand experience.)
Maher is wrong, for the simple reason that he proposes a one-size-fits-all solution.
Children are individuals. Stop looking for simple solutions to complex problems.
L
One contemplates the significantly greater complexity with which K-12 teachers in their in loco parentis position deal in a classroom of 18-27 students.
Re: http://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/27/a-dwindling-number-of-new-u-s-college-graduates-have-a-degree-in-education/
Whatever reasons people have for not going into education, possibly they include not wanting to deal with this complexity and the in loco parentis responsibility of dealing with students unable or unwilling to behave, or who have not been taught to behave.
Not that I need to drop another title to add to those great picks, but this book is IMHO the wake-up call for parents :
Leonard Sax
The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups
Basic Books
2017
… the title does it all : confuse, maybe cause anger, but the book makes a strong case and makes sense of things – and it’s all downhill from there… or uphill, as it might be.
Abigail Shrier’s new one too – esp. chapter 4 on Social Emotional Learning shows it’s not just me here or James Lindsay saying unfavorable things about SEL… like how it is (this is not Shier’s claim) a New Age religious doctrine designed to propagate outwards from school to the parents (Whole School Child Community model)…
/conspiracy theory rant
Do you think some kids might be hurt by being treated as dunces when they are individuals who are ready for more responsibility and more privileges?
I can’t tell you how many families I worked with where the parents started out sessions with, “We treated them all the same, and this one reacted badly”.
I WAS that kid. I never fit into the theory. I was a good student and didn’t cause trouble, though, so any attempt I made at communicating how bored/denigrated I felt was either ignored or dismissed.
Books may provide some insight, but they will never replace the hard work of treating kids as the individuals that they are.
L
An example of treating kids like grown-ups despite sounding like a great idea – is (this is just me here) the school giving them laptops from ~2nd grade as the foundation for all academic work. Especially as Google “Chromebooks” using Google Classroom.
Sounds great – is not (IMHO). Has a lot to do with sorta “making them into” adults.
I’d have to re-read Sax’s book again, but it is not really arguing to do the opposite … if there is an opposite.
The individuality topic is absolutely important, but I gotta restrain myself here… except maybe agree (?) that “one size fits all” for .. well, any of this : parents, kids, school, growing up… will be a disservice…
Ah – and I see we do agree – against “one size fits all” (so now I’ll actually have to listen to ‘ol man Maher’s spiel…)
Abigail Shrier hits the nail on the head yet again.
Her second act/latest book “Bad Therapy” even tops “Irreversible Damage” which is impressive.
D.A.
NYC
The most influential thing a parent can do for their children is steer them as best they can towards friends and peers who are a good influence themselves. I wasn’t a religious kid but I sure did get a lot out of going to the YMCA for several years rather than taking up smoking with the cool kids.
Girl Guides was the best place for my daughter to get this kind of peer and mentor influence. But I’m so glad she aged out before the reckoning of the last few years when they changed the name of the 7-8 year old group from Brownies (too racialized somehow) to Embers, and everything became pride flags and rainbows.
IDK – I thought the blow jobs line was pretty funny.
My kids were naturally reticent look-and-think-first types and they talked early and lots so parenting them was pretty easy in some ways. They could be free range because we were pretty sure they wouldn’t get into trouble or cause trouble for someone else. Normal amounts of anxiety & depression – only a psychopath never experiences these things as a teen.
I agree with Linda @3 there’s so much personality variation among kids and parents that it’s hard to point to one thing and fix it. But agree with Lukianoff smart phones & social media have been bad especially imho for boys.
“From the New York Post: “About one in five college graduates brought their parents with them to a job interview”.
This doesn’t sound plausible. I’ve been in corporate America for over 20 years and I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but 20% seems too high. I wonder if it is concentrated in certain industries and/or areas of the country.
Actually, what the Post said was that one in five hiring managers had experienced an applicant bringing a parent to an interview.
When I managed a small business, I frequently got phone calls from parents saying “My kid’s looking for a job. Are you hiring?” I would tell them that if their kid wanted a job, they needed to come in and apply themselves. I never hired anyone who didn’t. If the kids aren’t motivated enough to ask for the job themselves, they don’t really want it. Parents would sometimes show up with their kid in tow, and do all the talking while their kid stood there in silence. These were usually high-schoolers, not college grads, but still, don’t parents realize what a bad impression this makes? If your kids are old enough to have a job, they are old enough to apply in person without Mommy and Daddy.
I certainly would have thought so.
Yes, thank you. Big difference.
Kids now grow up with tracking apps like Life360 as the norm. I recently discovered that many (most?) parents keep them active once the kids go to college.
When does one stop? There’s always the safety excuse, but it seems a bit much to me. Though I guess it’s convenient; if you can’t actually go to the job interview with your child, you can track them and make sure they got there on time.
My daughter has installed it on the phone of her 80 year old mother!
My brother has it with our mother, but I don’t think he’s micromanaging her life. Though there was the time I was driving her cross country and my brother texted for me to slow down.
I mean, we were in west Texas.
Perhaps your brother was concerned that your vehicle might have an issue with “handling” the speed you were traveling? (JK\LOL) The positive flip-side effects of your experience for me is how I catch myself thinking, ” I better watch my speed since my wife (or oldest daughter, the “Principal Account” of our Life 360 arrangement) is probably checking my ETA by monitoring progress about now. ”
Also, if someone were to chastise me for going too fast (including my youngest daughter, who has a similar app which I Can’t see her but…(rules for thee-not-for-me), my go-to response ( and “white-lie”) is usually “Traffic was busy and I was just going with the flow.”
I now have a Tesla, and I suppose anyone who shares a Tesla knows that the Tesla app shows if the other person is driving the car, at what speed, and where it stops to park. The animated car icon links the tires’ speed of rotation to the speed of the car. Sometimes I have an urge to drive our old Honda just to feel less potentially observed.
Samual R. Delany, in his book “Nova” (if I remember correctly) posited a future society with so much non-authoritarian surveillance that one could step into an analog of a phone booth just to see photos or videos of yourself, showing where you’ve been anytime, anywhere. I think we’re getting there. (China may already be there.)
I leash my dog BECAUSE I love him and know that – being a dog (or were he a human kid) he doesn’t have the capacity to know to avoid dumb things and danger.
A leash makes total sense to me.
I have no human children, of course. But I’d leash them also. Till they’re 25 or so.
D.A.
NYC
with said dog: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
I don’t remember it, but my mother said that she had my brothers and me on a leash when we were toddlers. I don’t see what’s so bad. It is less confining than a stroller.
My one-year older brother had a leash, as he was wont to dash out in traffic. (There was no shame back in 1950, photo is in the family albums.)
I also “have no human children, of course. But I’d leash them also. Till they’re 25 or so.” So would I. One reason why I never had kids.
I’ll be frank. I am not a fan of Maher – too much of a curmudgeon who imagines a past that never existed. I’m particularly appalled by his endorsement of “because I said so” rules. It may work for a little bit, but as children start to think independently, it will breed resentment. My parents didn’t do it with me, nor did their mother and I do it with our sons. And I think we all turned out pretty well.
I disagree somewhat. Sometimes kids need to be told that these are my rules. Eventually they will (probably) have a boss, or at least a workplace, with rules they must follow. Understanding that is an important part of growing up.
You need to be lucky as a child.
I am forcing my way through a book on trauma and what some “dad’s” inflicted on their daughters (usually) but includes sons is hollowing to read. These (now adult) women and men are made of hard cores with fragile rivets holding them together. Therapy has been all over the place but competent doctors and therapist are finding new therapies. In some patients eliminating the trauma but for most, a how to cope mechanism. Some “dads” have a lot to answer for.
We experience similar problems, even as we have tried hard to foster independence and resilience in them.
One difference between our generation and theirs is employment. My wife and I both had jobs at gas stations ( in different states) when we were 12 years old. She was a cashier, I was a full service attendant.
My oldest kid did not really have a real job until he was in college. That means at the same age, I had ten years of getting myself to work on time, saving and budgeting, getting fired once, getting promoted, and all the other adult stuff that comes with employment.
Another really odd thing I have noticed as a generational difference is that my folks were a lot more fretful about my kids than the were for me at the same age. I used to routinely horse pack up in the mountains a days at a time, and by the time I was 14, rode up there on a dirt bike.
My kids go into the same mountains, and Mom would get nervous after five or six hours and send me up to look for them.
My kids are absolutely more careful and responsible in such situations than I was, They never go into abandoned mines, or try to catch rattlesnakes. But my folks treat them like it is not the case. I have to admit also that their attitude is sometimes contagious.
You had an enviable childhood.
Happy Drakes Day!
I would add what I see as a growing tendency to over pathologize kids’ emotions and behaviors. A kid cries and he’s “depressed” (as in clinically depressed). He’s introverted? Must be “on the spectrum”. It doesn’t seem like kids go through the ups and downs of adolescence anymore without being labeled “bi-polar”. I see society as a whole (adults AND kids) turning to psychiatry every time someone experiences an emotion. The obvious corollary to this is the overuse of psychotropics.
Agreed. It seems that the mental health field [of which I was a part for twenty years, before quitting due to woke rot] has forsaken the wisdom of resilience in both kids and adults.
Some resilience-building work which from experience I can recommend to the current inconvenience-/manual labor-allergic younger set: caddying, waiting tables, lumber/feed mill, hay hauling, carpet cleaning, nurse’s aide, military service.
Agree… Too much navel gazing is not healthy.
My parents would have told me to get over myself and then found some job or chore to keep me busy and out of trouble.
Exactly. Same here.
My dad was a kid in the 1950s and would say the idealized illusion presented much of the time was total BS and all the issues of today were brushed under the rug only to build it to the breaking levels of today.
And he’s no snowflake!
Was PCC(E) on a leash as a kid – and given the belt? Maybe I misread about the belt? Now he’s our host: that’s resilience.
Tate appears to be wearing a nappy in that photo. I guess that makes sense.