How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation

To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in.

As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.'

But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors.

Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong.

And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries.

But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?

How do Americans deal with other parents? I've heard so many strange stories about parents getting arrested for things that seem perfectly normal across the pond, like letting your kid walk to school or the store (or that Danish lady whose child was taken away from her by cops because she had it in a carriage outside the cafe, a normal thing to do in Denmark, such an insane response to a simple cultural difference)

1) Some years ago, I lived opposite from a school with children aged 6–18. Some used the bike – the school was reachable by a bike path–, others walked, took the bus or the tram.

Then there was the parent-taxi group, who were hauled into their parents' SUV right after school. I wonder how they were ever able to spend time with their friends, be spontaneous or just ... "explore."

2) 1995. In our village, some children aged 6 took the bus alone. As a child myself, I was amazed by that. I would have never imagined to do that (I lived in walking distance myself, so I walked.)

But these pupils weren't "alone", of course. They might have felt alone at first, but of course everyone knew a six-year-old with a backpack at 7:30 is headed to school. The other children in the bus know. The bus driver knows. Everyone knows. You can't really get lost.

It's accepted for parents to not be reasonable where it concerns their children. Unlike other instances of a person's judgement being impaired, it's not the norm to let another person be reasonable for them - or for them to seek out rational advice.

The outcome is that parents compromise their children's development because they're afraid their child will get struck by lightning under a blue sky. Chances are we're raising a generation of adults even worse than the last few: already many spend most of their conscious thought jumping at shadows, never grew out of relying on a parental figure, and have next to no agency. Luckily there's still enough fully formed adults around to shepherd them through life, but I do worry how bad the next bunch going is going to be.

It's an ad for a non-profit which offers experiences for kids. It takes a while to get to the ad, though.

Focusing on tech or anxiety is too superficial and misses the deeper reason. The nature of parenting has completely changed. For modern parents today kids are really more like a tool for self-actualization (so is almost everything else), personal projects, rather than independent people in their own right.

That's why they're so obsessed with following them around, kids are just an extended version of the life project that is you and so every minute of the day must be spent optimizing it. It's why this phone anxiety isn't prevalent in all classes but this discussion always evolves around members of the middle class and up.

It's also I think one of the most important factors of falling birth rates that nobody ever seems to talk about. If you're obsessed with one kid every waking hour of the day nobody simply has the time to have another one.

This is an ad

> Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years”

Most stuff does not get reported as a crime. If there would be an aggressive dog in a neighbourhood, a few decades ago, it would get solved pretty fast.

Today, murderous beast is not put down, even after disfiguring a person! Instead it gets processed through no-kill shelters, and goes to new family with falsified history!

Today we have many more dogs. No training. Large work dogs who need attention and space, go crazy in tiny apartments!

And attacking kids is somehow normalized. They were "walking a wrong way" on public street, and that somehow confused and scared "reactive" dog!

Maybe there is less gun killing, but that does not mean there are no dangers!