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Comment by Fraterkes | Hacker News Reader

Your first point is a favorite of a lot of people, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: how is your generation with the ostensibly correct culture producing a generation with the wrong culture?

Parents are apparently raising their children wrong en masse, so was the parents’ generation rotten too? Which raises questions about the character of the generation that raised the parents…

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I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.

Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.

This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.

Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.

I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.

I think this just kinda sounds like a retroactive rationalization if I’m honest. Imagine if the order was reversed: if you had filled your childhood with mandatory activities and todays kids were mostly left to do what they want.

Wouldn’t you just say “When I was young we were forced to adhere to a tight schedule which taught us to be dependable. Todays kids are allowed to do what they want, which means they never learn any responsibility.”

Unfortunately, I don't think we can every really go back.

It wasn't just that kids had autonomy, it's that they also needed to take the initiative to fight boredom and go do something.

Let's say that you give kids today all that autonomy to wander around their neighborhood and explore like they did back in the day -- would they wander and explore, or would they stare at their phones?

And to be clear -- this isn't the kids fault. We've let social media companies peddle their addictive slop and they've eradicated boredom, but it came at the expense of short attention spans, no motivation, no sense of fulfillment.

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them responsible individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on responsibility to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in responsibility don’t really exist

I don’t think you need to be able to clone yourself to raise a child with broadly similar values to yourself. My point is that I don’t think you can simultaneously argue that the older generations were raised in a way that was succesful at making them religious individuals (in ways kids these days aren’t) and that that same generation is systematically failing at passing on religion to their children. Which leads me to believe these generational differences in religion don’t really exist

I think this also applies in the case of religion yeah, in the sense that many people who "fail" to pass on religion to their children were mostly just not actually that religious in the first place. So you've helped me reaffirm how consistent, smart and true my beliefs are.

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