In my opinion, there's a real sweet spot we seem to be missing as parents, where we can still be compassionate and empathetic toward our kids' genuine emotional responses AND ALSO teach them that managing discomfort is a very normal and expected part of being human. A few weeks ago in my nine-year-old's parent teacher conference, his teacher mentioned that she had seen how upset my son was when he didn't get chosen to perform in the school's ukulele concert. "Sam's a kid who excels at a lot of things," she said. "It's good for him to practice managing disappointment and failure. I gave him a hug and told him it sucks that he didn't get picked, but sometimes people are just better than you at certain things." I was blown away by her response, which so perfectly mirrored my own to the same situation. To me, THIS is what we can do for our kids: show them compassion ("yeah, that really sucks") and also remind them that a) feelings are normal and b) they are perfectly equipped to survive them.
I work in the public school system. Most of us would agree with you. But a lot of these kids get “diagnosed” by doctors with ADHD , autism, generalized anxiety disorder, etc. by their pediatrician based solely on interviews with parents , who at the parents’demands write us letters requesting special education services or 504 accommodations, when the majority of kids in school these days have issues with socializing, persisting with academic tasks that require any attention or work, following directions, etc. Half the kids in our school ( I work in an elementary school) are in therapy for crying out loud and their therapists just agree that they have these disorders and we are all supposed to give them “accommodations” that just continue it. The medical establishment is part of the problem. We get more and more kids who aren’t toilet trained coming into kindergarten, etc etc. It’s crazy. How do we fix this?
Well, when it comes to the most troubled of the kids, this is true-which I don’t think is great either. I am talking kids who are no different from their peers, whose parents and therapists push this ( it’s crazy to me how many elementary school kids are in therapy these days). The problem is, kids in general don’t have the attention span, stamina for learning or social skills kids did even ten years ago. And I agree with all the points in this article, because as an educator, I am seeing the same thing. And pediatricians should be taking what parents say with a grain of salt before diagnosing all these kids with all these disorders. We as a society really need to re-examine how we are parenting children, educating children, etc. We are doing them great harm.
Ex-teacher here. I echo your observations, Ellie. One of the major problems I saw was the complicity of paediatricians, ed psychs and their ilk. Parents will ask other parents, “Which ed psych do you recommend to get an ADHD/autism/whatever diagnosis for my child?” They don’t want an *assessment* for the “disorder”; they just want the diagnosis. Of course, professionals who don’t hand it over lose business and get a bad name on the mum grapevine. I’ve heard mums badmouth practitioners who failed to affirm the mum-dictated diagnosis.
Thank you! Exactly what we see! It’s crazy. The vast majority of these “diagnoses” are from the same 2-3 doctors. And it looks like you are English? ( based on spelling), so I guess not just a problem in the U.S.
I have written about this for years from a nutritional aspect. Parents want to be best friends with their children. You cannot “Parent” your child while being their best friend. If a child is eating a “crap-food” diet, they are going to have some mood/behavioral issues. But guess what? The majority of parents are “ afraid” to take away little Johhny’s junk food or tell him dinner is eaten at the table with family, not while playing video games. The main comment I hear from parents is that by doing so, it will make their child feel or act “ worse.” it applies to childhood obesity as well. It's very frustrating.
"These aren't medical conditions we're seeing—they're the predictable endpoint of a parenting culture that's gone terribly sideways."
This essay is so critically important. The fragile, angry state these kids are in makes them impossible to educate, employ, or function in a family. To avoid discomfort, they are leaving school, failing at their jobs and getting fired, cutting off their entire family and, in a thousand ways, ending their chance at a decent life.
They get on IG and TikTok and they rage about the unfair economy, which they say makes it unlikely they will ever own a home, but at the same time, they defend their entitlement to carry unprecedented levels of debt, spend money at whim, and walk away from any job that isn't comfortable. They blame society, they blame the economy, they blame their parents; and they are responsible for nothing, not even for fixing their own life.
I have anecdotal evidence of this: my husband is a college professor and he is constantly faced with students who crumble in the face of a challenging assignment; go entire semesters turning in no work and then resorting to various manipulations to get extensions (and even then they often don’t have the follow-through to get the work they’ve been avoiding all semester completed); and even parents reaching out on their (adult!) kids’ behalves.
The upside is that he also has students who sincerely work hard and want to learn, who pursue extra opportunities to lay the groundwork for their future careers—well-adjusted adults.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how they were raised?
I am a child psychiatrist and asked the same question about the differences in child rearing that you ask. I asked and observed my patients for 40 years. My findings went into my award-winning book, “Living on Automatic.” I wrote it with my mentor, Homer B. Martin, MD. We found two opposite ways of rearing children that begins in infancy. We learned the 2 ways were due to differences in the ways parents emotionally condition their children. This has to do with the emotions parents show children when they interact with them. It’s a lot like how we train our dogs.
I remember that Time magazine cover when it came out in 2001 - and I was closer to the age of the kid depicted in the picture than to the parents it was criticizing. The reality is that those kids the Time article was pointing out are now the parents, and let's face it, most of their parents weren't that great at teaching the skills you outline in this article either. We may not have had smartphones until adulthood, sure, but I've never seen a toddler demand a smartphone for the first time--it was the parent that gave them one, and then laments later how "spoiled" the kid is.
I have been more afraid of judgement from other people to be honest.
I realized what a disservice I was doing to my kids and how that fear was subtly making them act worse in public.
They deserve to have a childhood and to learn their lessons in public too. I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of kind people who have witnessed meltdown, injuries and frustrations and moments that I couldn’t parent because I was tending to my own needs and stepped in to protect, support and care for my kids and me. The mom who quietly watched my kids until I exited the bathroom- just wanted them to be safe, the people chatting in the cafe who joked about their own falls and trips when my 6 year old embarrassed as hell fell off a chair, the dad who overheard what toy I was looking for and pointed it out.
I’ve slowly taken away electronics and stopped using snacks and food to busy my kids.
I’ve accepted that there may be judgement but I am not raising my kids to be addicts. I’m in it for the long game.
I was at dinner a few months ago and I saw a married mom of two clapping, engaging and playing with her kids while they waited for the food. But she wasn’t genuine or authentic. She was play acting so they wouldn’t meltdown.
She drank most of a bottle of wine with her steak and she looked exhausted and alone.
My family looks a little disheveled but we are fully here together and I won’t trade that for anything. I won’t pretend I’m not tired and I won’t say yes when I mean no.
Excellent article. The pendulum has swung too far. Before the 1980's, our culture denied the reality and the devastating consequences of childhood abuse and neglect. However, it has passed through the midpoint, and now every negative emotion the child experiences is labeled as unhealthy, or even traumatic. As you point out, experiencing negative emotion is a fundamental part of life, and learning to navigate through it is essential.
My 18-month old daughter only gets to handle our smartphones to look at pictures of herself, which she enjoys immensely. We're talking mere minutes per day. Even this is enough to trigger a mini meltdown when you take it away and tell her that's enough. I shudder to think what would happen if I just handed it to her or let her watch videos on it. This limited interaction has provided opportunities to tell her no and teach her that screaming and stomping her feet does nothing to change things. She usually gets over it within a minute so I'd say we're doing alright.
Kids crave direction , loving authority, and parental stability. Replacing this with screens is simply wrong. I see so many teens and young adults with failure to cope. It's very sad indeed.
I'm in my 25th year of teaching. I am also a mother of two well-adjusted children, 29 and 26. Sometimes I wanted to cry, telling my children "no" or making them do things they didn't want to do, such as practicing the violin or going to tennis lessons. I knew discipline and practice are good things, and you don't need to be master class level to gain the confidence one does with life experiences, good or bad.
Re school, I have also seen children become increasingly unregulated, but now that I switched last year from an inner city public school to an affluent private one, I am seeing astonishing levels of "anxiety" and "ADHD." It's the first thing other teachers diagnose, even though we aren't in the diagnosis business. The poor children I taught spent far too much time on video games, but the wealthy children have meltdowns if they are officially reprimanded (documented misbehavior) or receive a low grade. It's always someone else's fault, or they whine about how I am not doing anything about student X, who's "doing the same thing!" I tell them to just worry about themselves. The discomfort with being called out on one's own behavior is off the charts.
I would also note that poor children have nowhere near the number of allergies that wealthy ones do, despite lesser access to healthcare, sketchy nutrition, and cockroaches in many homes. Interesting, isn't it?
Yes..... I would love to hear more about this. I really get the feeling inner city schools may be better option, for the indoctrinating psyop that comes with affluent private ones lol. No perfect solution, but...
Every. Day. I see this crap in my store every single day. These brats are out of control and no one does anything. We spot them throwing things, playing ball in the toy aisle, knocking crap over, etc. I tell the kid and the parent this is not ok. One mother audibly gasped when I told her brat to stop bouncing a basketball around the (glass) nail polish bottles. An old fart said his grand-brats were not doing anything wrong by playing catch in the store, but did tell the brats to stop. A father got mad because I told his 15 year old brat, who should know better by now, to stop bouncing the balls all over. 15 and the brat has no discipline whatsoever! What kind of an adult will that one make? I get dirty looks and more than likely, one of these non-parents has reported me to headquarters. Or they will.
I am so glad I will be dead of old age by the time these brats grow up. They are going to be even worse than their non-parent parents are. They have no manners, no self discipline, no concern for anyone else and absolutely no concept of the word “no”. Some of them have looked at me with bewilderment like they have never heard the word before and I bet you they have not.
I can’t go on without saying there are good kids and parents out there. One girl, probably 11 or so, started tap dancing with her athletic cleats at checkout. Her mother immediately stopped her and told her just because this was not her floor does not mean she could damage it. That’s great. The sad thing is it seems to be for every 1 good kid (with decent parents) there is, there are 9 that are destructive and complete brats. Not a good ratio.
This may be a push, but I think the unrelenting sense of entitlement is tied to some element of the trans plague we are seeing. You have the "right" to decide whatever gender you want to be regardless of what sex you are. Starts off with pronouns and then escalates from there. The biological reality of your sex is secondary to your entitlement to self identify.
I think the trans epidemic for sure a predictable outcome of this inability to face discomfort. The discomfort of puberty, the discomfort of realizing you may be gay, the discomfort with your developing sexuality. Don’t worry our modern society has a magical cure given to kids as an escape from this discomfort. Just change your sex!
I agree with all of this. There is another colossal aspect of what is contributing to this inability to regulate, think critically and figure things out, and rightly assess situations. Can we please start recognizing and removing the near constant stimulation and entertainment that these kids for 25 years have been exposed to? From Baby Einstein videos to teens sleeping with their phones and consuming 10 hours a day of Instagram and Snapchat? Even the ones who aren’t allowed “social media” have basically only learned to communicate through screens. Compulsively texting dozens of people simultaneously but when mom wants to have a conversation the level of frustration just from the necessity of having to be quiet, listen, think of understand, defer to another, wait; the capacity for conversation is gone. Smartphones and Parents that won’t read the writing on the wall are doing this. We don’t need the tech moguls to regulate their products, we need parents with a modicum of discernment and the most basic vocabulary necessary in parenting, “no” and the backbone to use it. Parents are being manipulated near constantly and tyrants are running the household. Emotional babies that don’t stand a chance in managing their own households well. We need to defend our homes and the hearts and minds of children better and I think we’d find this problem pretty much resolve itself.
When did parents become so thin-skinned? There’s no such thing as a perfect parent but unless your life is truly dysfunctional—e.g. homelessness, drug/alcohol addiction, etc—making a parenting mistake is not going to destroy your child. The key is consistency and consequences for undesirable behavior. And if your kid says, “I hate you” you laugh it off. What I see a lot of is children emotionally manipulating their parents because the parents allow it! Eff that noise! You can be friends with your kids when they are fully functioning, independent adults. Until then, you are the authority figure.
In my opinion, there's a real sweet spot we seem to be missing as parents, where we can still be compassionate and empathetic toward our kids' genuine emotional responses AND ALSO teach them that managing discomfort is a very normal and expected part of being human. A few weeks ago in my nine-year-old's parent teacher conference, his teacher mentioned that she had seen how upset my son was when he didn't get chosen to perform in the school's ukulele concert. "Sam's a kid who excels at a lot of things," she said. "It's good for him to practice managing disappointment and failure. I gave him a hug and told him it sucks that he didn't get picked, but sometimes people are just better than you at certain things." I was blown away by her response, which so perfectly mirrored my own to the same situation. To me, THIS is what we can do for our kids: show them compassion ("yeah, that really sucks") and also remind them that a) feelings are normal and b) they are perfectly equipped to survive them.
I work in the public school system. Most of us would agree with you. But a lot of these kids get “diagnosed” by doctors with ADHD , autism, generalized anxiety disorder, etc. by their pediatrician based solely on interviews with parents , who at the parents’demands write us letters requesting special education services or 504 accommodations, when the majority of kids in school these days have issues with socializing, persisting with academic tasks that require any attention or work, following directions, etc. Half the kids in our school ( I work in an elementary school) are in therapy for crying out loud and their therapists just agree that they have these disorders and we are all supposed to give them “accommodations” that just continue it. The medical establishment is part of the problem. We get more and more kids who aren’t toilet trained coming into kindergarten, etc etc. It’s crazy. How do we fix this?
Thank you for this reply- very important observations
I see the opposite. Teachers push for children to be diagnosed and medicated on a regular basis.
Well, when it comes to the most troubled of the kids, this is true-which I don’t think is great either. I am talking kids who are no different from their peers, whose parents and therapists push this ( it’s crazy to me how many elementary school kids are in therapy these days). The problem is, kids in general don’t have the attention span, stamina for learning or social skills kids did even ten years ago. And I agree with all the points in this article, because as an educator, I am seeing the same thing. And pediatricians should be taking what parents say with a grain of salt before diagnosing all these kids with all these disorders. We as a society really need to re-examine how we are parenting children, educating children, etc. We are doing them great harm.
Ex-teacher here. I echo your observations, Ellie. One of the major problems I saw was the complicity of paediatricians, ed psychs and their ilk. Parents will ask other parents, “Which ed psych do you recommend to get an ADHD/autism/whatever diagnosis for my child?” They don’t want an *assessment* for the “disorder”; they just want the diagnosis. Of course, professionals who don’t hand it over lose business and get a bad name on the mum grapevine. I’ve heard mums badmouth practitioners who failed to affirm the mum-dictated diagnosis.
Thank you! Exactly what we see! It’s crazy. The vast majority of these “diagnoses” are from the same 2-3 doctors. And it looks like you are English? ( based on spelling), so I guess not just a problem in the U.S.
It seems you've bought into the anti parents Communist theory of Education. Bill Ayers is proud.
I think both parents,teachers and administrators participate in this charade.
I have written about this for years from a nutritional aspect. Parents want to be best friends with their children. You cannot “Parent” your child while being their best friend. If a child is eating a “crap-food” diet, they are going to have some mood/behavioral issues. But guess what? The majority of parents are “ afraid” to take away little Johhny’s junk food or tell him dinner is eaten at the table with family, not while playing video games. The main comment I hear from parents is that by doing so, it will make their child feel or act “ worse.” it applies to childhood obesity as well. It's very frustrating.
"These aren't medical conditions we're seeing—they're the predictable endpoint of a parenting culture that's gone terribly sideways."
This essay is so critically important. The fragile, angry state these kids are in makes them impossible to educate, employ, or function in a family. To avoid discomfort, they are leaving school, failing at their jobs and getting fired, cutting off their entire family and, in a thousand ways, ending their chance at a decent life.
They get on IG and TikTok and they rage about the unfair economy, which they say makes it unlikely they will ever own a home, but at the same time, they defend their entitlement to carry unprecedented levels of debt, spend money at whim, and walk away from any job that isn't comfortable. They blame society, they blame the economy, they blame their parents; and they are responsible for nothing, not even for fixing their own life.
I have anecdotal evidence of this: my husband is a college professor and he is constantly faced with students who crumble in the face of a challenging assignment; go entire semesters turning in no work and then resorting to various manipulations to get extensions (and even then they often don’t have the follow-through to get the work they’ve been avoiding all semester completed); and even parents reaching out on their (adult!) kids’ behalves.
The upside is that he also has students who sincerely work hard and want to learn, who pursue extra opportunities to lay the groundwork for their future careers—well-adjusted adults.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how they were raised?
Angela,
I am a child psychiatrist and asked the same question about the differences in child rearing that you ask. I asked and observed my patients for 40 years. My findings went into my award-winning book, “Living on Automatic.” I wrote it with my mentor, Homer B. Martin, MD. We found two opposite ways of rearing children that begins in infancy. We learned the 2 ways were due to differences in the ways parents emotionally condition their children. This has to do with the emotions parents show children when they interact with them. It’s a lot like how we train our dogs.
Christine B. L. Adams, MD
I train dogs and no one likes the comparison, but I know full well what kind of dog results from a no-structure, stress-avoidant upbringing.
I remember that Time magazine cover when it came out in 2001 - and I was closer to the age of the kid depicted in the picture than to the parents it was criticizing. The reality is that those kids the Time article was pointing out are now the parents, and let's face it, most of their parents weren't that great at teaching the skills you outline in this article either. We may not have had smartphones until adulthood, sure, but I've never seen a toddler demand a smartphone for the first time--it was the parent that gave them one, and then laments later how "spoiled" the kid is.
I have been more afraid of judgement from other people to be honest.
I realized what a disservice I was doing to my kids and how that fear was subtly making them act worse in public.
They deserve to have a childhood and to learn their lessons in public too. I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of kind people who have witnessed meltdown, injuries and frustrations and moments that I couldn’t parent because I was tending to my own needs and stepped in to protect, support and care for my kids and me. The mom who quietly watched my kids until I exited the bathroom- just wanted them to be safe, the people chatting in the cafe who joked about their own falls and trips when my 6 year old embarrassed as hell fell off a chair, the dad who overheard what toy I was looking for and pointed it out.
I’ve slowly taken away electronics and stopped using snacks and food to busy my kids.
I’ve accepted that there may be judgement but I am not raising my kids to be addicts. I’m in it for the long game.
I was at dinner a few months ago and I saw a married mom of two clapping, engaging and playing with her kids while they waited for the food. But she wasn’t genuine or authentic. She was play acting so they wouldn’t meltdown.
She drank most of a bottle of wine with her steak and she looked exhausted and alone.
My family looks a little disheveled but we are fully here together and I won’t trade that for anything. I won’t pretend I’m not tired and I won’t say yes when I mean no.
Excellent article. The pendulum has swung too far. Before the 1980's, our culture denied the reality and the devastating consequences of childhood abuse and neglect. However, it has passed through the midpoint, and now every negative emotion the child experiences is labeled as unhealthy, or even traumatic. As you point out, experiencing negative emotion is a fundamental part of life, and learning to navigate through it is essential.
My 18-month old daughter only gets to handle our smartphones to look at pictures of herself, which she enjoys immensely. We're talking mere minutes per day. Even this is enough to trigger a mini meltdown when you take it away and tell her that's enough. I shudder to think what would happen if I just handed it to her or let her watch videos on it. This limited interaction has provided opportunities to tell her no and teach her that screaming and stomping her feet does nothing to change things. She usually gets over it within a minute so I'd say we're doing alright.
Kids crave direction , loving authority, and parental stability. Replacing this with screens is simply wrong. I see so many teens and young adults with failure to cope. It's very sad indeed.
I'm in my 25th year of teaching. I am also a mother of two well-adjusted children, 29 and 26. Sometimes I wanted to cry, telling my children "no" or making them do things they didn't want to do, such as practicing the violin or going to tennis lessons. I knew discipline and practice are good things, and you don't need to be master class level to gain the confidence one does with life experiences, good or bad.
Re school, I have also seen children become increasingly unregulated, but now that I switched last year from an inner city public school to an affluent private one, I am seeing astonishing levels of "anxiety" and "ADHD." It's the first thing other teachers diagnose, even though we aren't in the diagnosis business. The poor children I taught spent far too much time on video games, but the wealthy children have meltdowns if they are officially reprimanded (documented misbehavior) or receive a low grade. It's always someone else's fault, or they whine about how I am not doing anything about student X, who's "doing the same thing!" I tell them to just worry about themselves. The discomfort with being called out on one's own behavior is off the charts.
I would also note that poor children have nowhere near the number of allergies that wealthy ones do, despite lesser access to healthcare, sketchy nutrition, and cockroaches in many homes. Interesting, isn't it?
Yes..... I would love to hear more about this. I really get the feeling inner city schools may be better option, for the indoctrinating psyop that comes with affluent private ones lol. No perfect solution, but...
Every. Day. I see this crap in my store every single day. These brats are out of control and no one does anything. We spot them throwing things, playing ball in the toy aisle, knocking crap over, etc. I tell the kid and the parent this is not ok. One mother audibly gasped when I told her brat to stop bouncing a basketball around the (glass) nail polish bottles. An old fart said his grand-brats were not doing anything wrong by playing catch in the store, but did tell the brats to stop. A father got mad because I told his 15 year old brat, who should know better by now, to stop bouncing the balls all over. 15 and the brat has no discipline whatsoever! What kind of an adult will that one make? I get dirty looks and more than likely, one of these non-parents has reported me to headquarters. Or they will.
I am so glad I will be dead of old age by the time these brats grow up. They are going to be even worse than their non-parent parents are. They have no manners, no self discipline, no concern for anyone else and absolutely no concept of the word “no”. Some of them have looked at me with bewilderment like they have never heard the word before and I bet you they have not.
I can’t go on without saying there are good kids and parents out there. One girl, probably 11 or so, started tap dancing with her athletic cleats at checkout. Her mother immediately stopped her and told her just because this was not her floor does not mean she could damage it. That’s great. The sad thing is it seems to be for every 1 good kid (with decent parents) there is, there are 9 that are destructive and complete brats. Not a good ratio.
This may be a push, but I think the unrelenting sense of entitlement is tied to some element of the trans plague we are seeing. You have the "right" to decide whatever gender you want to be regardless of what sex you are. Starts off with pronouns and then escalates from there. The biological reality of your sex is secondary to your entitlement to self identify.
I think the trans epidemic for sure a predictable outcome of this inability to face discomfort. The discomfort of puberty, the discomfort of realizing you may be gay, the discomfort with your developing sexuality. Don’t worry our modern society has a magical cure given to kids as an escape from this discomfort. Just change your sex!
I agree with all of this. There is another colossal aspect of what is contributing to this inability to regulate, think critically and figure things out, and rightly assess situations. Can we please start recognizing and removing the near constant stimulation and entertainment that these kids for 25 years have been exposed to? From Baby Einstein videos to teens sleeping with their phones and consuming 10 hours a day of Instagram and Snapchat? Even the ones who aren’t allowed “social media” have basically only learned to communicate through screens. Compulsively texting dozens of people simultaneously but when mom wants to have a conversation the level of frustration just from the necessity of having to be quiet, listen, think of understand, defer to another, wait; the capacity for conversation is gone. Smartphones and Parents that won’t read the writing on the wall are doing this. We don’t need the tech moguls to regulate their products, we need parents with a modicum of discernment and the most basic vocabulary necessary in parenting, “no” and the backbone to use it. Parents are being manipulated near constantly and tyrants are running the household. Emotional babies that don’t stand a chance in managing their own households well. We need to defend our homes and the hearts and minds of children better and I think we’d find this problem pretty much resolve itself.
When did parents become so thin-skinned? There’s no such thing as a perfect parent but unless your life is truly dysfunctional—e.g. homelessness, drug/alcohol addiction, etc—making a parenting mistake is not going to destroy your child. The key is consistency and consequences for undesirable behavior. And if your kid says, “I hate you” you laugh it off. What I see a lot of is children emotionally manipulating their parents because the parents allow it! Eff that noise! You can be friends with your kids when they are fully functioning, independent adults. Until then, you are the authority figure.
Excellent article.