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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid, the most advanced tech we had was an electric calculator. If our parents didn't watch us, a babysitter did. At most, we had an Atari 2600 for video games on the spare B&W TV that got replaced with a Color TV for the father and mother. We played outside and kickball in the streets until the lights came on.

Today's kids have smartphones, PCs/Macs, Video Game Consoles, and movie streaming devices and are unsupervised on the Internet. For role models, they have rap stars who sing about sex and drugs. They have no respect for teachers or other adults and don't know how good they have it compared to me and the rest of Generation X. No wonder they are getting ruder.

https://www.chron.com/business/article/Why-didn-t-Steve-Jobs...

Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use iPads. He must have known something of the side-effects in kids and iPads. Just try to take the iPad or iPhone away from a kid and see how they react.

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> Today's kids have smartphones, PCs/Macs, Video Game Consoles, and movie streaming devices and are unsupervised on the Internet. For role models, they have rap stars who sing about sex and drugs.

I don’t know if there are any stats to back this up but anecdotally I know plenty of kids with all kinds of freedoms and gadgets who are extremely respectful, well-mannered, and responsible. They respectfully disagree with their parents on some issues and some of old fashioned parents may consider disagreement as disrespectful. And they might not accept mistreatment from authority figures, but hardly any real misbehavior issues.

Maybe it’s my circle but average gen z kid seems like way more mature than us when we were their age.

Rude kids that I have encountered are mostly from parents who are already rude, entitled, or have macho mentality. Kind of people I rarely hangout with. Many of these kids have more restrictions too, no video games, must play sports, extra tutoring, cannot dress certain ways, etc.

I grew up before internet really and there were always kids that had absolutely no problem with physical violence, you'd get stones thrown at you(good scenario) or punched or kicked(bad scenario) if you did something they did't like. But sure, they didn't swear as much I guess? One time I came back with a bloody nose because I got punched in the face for walking in the wrong place and some kid didn't like it, and my dad's response was "well, did you hit him back? why not?"

Don't get me wrong - I do actually think that kids nowadays are rude. They have no respect for teachers, parents, elders or anyone really. But I'm also 100% sure that my dad used to think the same thing, and his dad before him too.

I had a bully who wanted to copy my answers on a science test, I refused so he said he'd beat me up. After science class, he followed me in the hall and kicked me in the back of the head. He was a black belt in TKD with the spinning roundhouse kick. All I could do was back up to avoid being kicked in the head. Until a vice principal broke up the fight. Sometimes you can't avoid bullies and sometimes they have a black belt in a martial art. Nobody brought a gun to school back then, but now kids bring guns to school.

In some rural areas it used to be pretty common for high school students to bring guns to school so that they could go hunting afterwards. Their families needed the meat.

> Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use iPads. He must have known something of the side-effects in kids and iPads.

The first iPad was released in Jan 2010, and he died Oct 2011. His kids would have been 19, 15, and 12 or so. Even if the kids had access to it before official release, I doubt Jobs has much data specifically on an iPad’s side effects on kids, especially little kids, considering he didn’t have any.

The best source I could find was this interview, which seems far from an indictment of kids using iPads, but rather a general aversion to his kids using modern computing devices:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...

> “So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

> For role models, they have rap stars who sing about sex and drugs

Such topics should really be limited to the opera, Shakespeare, and ancient Greek drama – where they belong.

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