It says that REASONABLE parenting, with love, affection, attention, and fun times spent together is sufficient to let your child make the most of their potential. You do not have to be a SUPER parent, just a loving attentive normal parent, to achieve the same results.
What the book IS saying, is that in the LONG RUN, into their 30s and later, THAT is when your upbringing with begin to fade away. It doesn’t matter how you bring up your kids, they’re likely to end up with roughly the same earning power, roughly the same IQ, roughly the same level of happiness, and a couple of other measures, whether or not you insisted on taking them to ballet class when they objected, or to practice team sports even though they hated it. And THIS is why the book says (see point 1), RELAX. Have FUN with your kids, rather than stress them and yourself out over activities neither one of you is enjoying. Give them your attention when you’re happy and relaxed, and if you need to let them watch TV for an hour to get some quiet time for yourself so that YOU can relax, and then spend QUALITY time with them, allow yourself to do that. You won’t be hurting your kid’s future income.
Certainly “love your kids and have fun with them, the rest will work itself out” is an attractive message. It contradicts my anecdotal short-term observations, but they don’t claim any short-term effects, only long-term.
It is worth pointing out I think that the baby boomers were far more violent that the current generation and were dysfunctional in many other ways. They also produced the biggest bubble and the worst financial crash since the great depression, and a marked decline in many aspects of American life such as the economy (rampant deficits and declining living standards for average people). And look at the ethical standards of the politicians from the baby boomer generation.
The fact that most people mostly recover from their childhood by their thirties does not mean that it did no damage. Your teens and 20s are supposed to be the best years of your life.
Your teens and 20s are supposed to be the best years of your life.
(blink)
I assume you mean “supposed to be” here in the sense of conventionally understood to be, rather than some kind of obligation. Even so, though, it seems like a poor convention to endorse.
I assume you mean “supposed to be” here in the sense of conventionally understood to be, rather than some kind of obligation.
If not, anyone who had lousy teens and 20s but are going great in their 30s should be ashamed of themselves and start making self destructive decisions so as to rectify the situation!
Parents in the 1960′s were “bad” by today’s standards*, and the kids turned out fine.
Well, it takes a lot of hate and/or abuse and/or neglect to screw up a child royally. For example, simple spanking just doesn’t do it. So probably the average difference from 1960s is not that large.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. In the 1960s, a mother could just send the kids out to play on their own, which kids normally did if they weren’t at school. Such things are unthinkable these days, and it looks quite plausible that today’s standard way of helicopter parenting has increased the total amount of parents’ time spent doting on kids so much that even if fathers did only a minority of it, they’d still spend a larger amount of time that the total time normally spent back in the sixties.
‘Unthinkable’ seems like an exaggeration. I played outside by myself as a kid (though that’s 20 years ago), and I have the distinct impression that my bosses’ kids have a group of neighborhood kids they play with unsupervised.
Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.) See the “Free Range Kids” blog for numerous stories illustrating the modern mentality and jurisprudence about leaving kids alone and unsupervised.
In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it’s definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.
In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it’s definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.
One of my professors lives in a cul-de-sac where literally every house has ~2 kids of roughly the same age, and so most of the parents allow their children to just go outside and play with the gang until dinnertime. I believe at least one of the parents is typically watching, which is also a departure from the old days.
Hearing him describe it to the grad students / other professors, though, it was clearly a “this is an abnormal neighborhood which is like where I grew up, which is fantastic,” and he’s the only person I know of with a neighborhood like that (though certainly similar neighborhoods must exist).
Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.)
But why? I thought crime rates in America had actually declined significantly since 20-25 years ago. If so, then why would it be more unacceptable today to let children play free than it was twenty years ago; has irrational helicopter parenting grown for other reasons, e.g. status competitions, with no correlation to actual danger levels? (Or is there something subtle I am missing, for example has violence declined in ghettos/low-class areas but the middle and upper areas we are talking about are less safe?)
News media has improved. Once, abductions in small towns were news in that town (and nowhere else) - now it is possible for the abduction to be news everywhere. Without calibration for the change in availability of information, the obvious response is to believe that we are not safer.
Additionally, there have been changes in societies attitudes towards certain crimes. Increasing beliefs that certain crimes were bad (DUI, domestic violence, various sex crimes) has led to increased reporting of those crimes and stronger reaction to those crimes when they are reported in the media. This exacerbates the availability bias discussed above.
That’s… seriously counterintuitive to me. I’m certainly not deeply embedded in parenting culture, and my childhood memories date to the early 1990s as well as being unusual in some ways, but I’m skeptical of drawing strong conclusions from an advocacy site. What else are you basing this on?
I would just ask my relatives about parenting standards, but unfortunately they’re divided between having very young and adult children. And that’s a pretty small and biased sample anyway.
Just common everyday observation of people’s attitudes. (I’m not a partisan of the FRK approach; in fact, I have no kids as of yet, and I’m still not quite sure what to think about it.)
One piece of evidence in support: The local Children’s Museum does not allow adults to enter if they are not with a child. The adult:child ratio is approximately 1:1.5. Further, I’ve never been more than ten feet from my son when visiting—and I estimate I’m within one standard deviation of the norm (it’s hard to tell, in part because children from 2-8 are there, and the distance-to-child norm varies naturally by age) In short, there is no reasonable likelihood of stranger abduction. Yet the policy is in place—a response to fear mongering, as far as I can tell.
and if you need to let them watch TV for an hour to get some quiet time for yourself so that YOU can relax, and then spend QUALITY time with them, allow yourself to do that.
I’ve seen recently a kenote (french) on the effects of TV on people. While this sentence seems reasonable, I would say (if the keynote is as solid as it looks) that you should go real easy on TV. 1 hour a day is already much too much. During the very first years of development, this would be a catastrophe. (To name just one example, we have reasons to believe TV is almost entirely responsible for the recent 10% drop in SAT scores — from the 60s to the 80s. I don’t know how many IQ points that would be.)
(Now the effects of TV do not all come from the screen itself. There are priming effects (smoking, violence, food), there are attentional effects, there are sedentary effects… Those different effects can be addressed differently.)
But if you’re already a “good enough” parent, you probably cut TV for quality time anyway.
I heard a horror story (anecdote from a book, for what it’s worth) of a child basically raised in front of a TV, who learned from it both language and a general rule that the world (and social interaction) is non-interactive. If you could get his attention, he’d cheerfully recite some memorized lines then zone out.
It certainly could be—I read the anecdote from a book I picked idly off a shelf in a bookstore, and I retained the vague impression that it was from a book about the importance of social factors and the effects of technology on our social/psychological development, but I could have been conflating it with another such book. After reading an excerpt from “The Boy who was Raised as a Dog”, the style matches, so that probably was the one I read. Would you recommend it?
I like the summary given by one reviewer:
Certainly “love your kids and have fun with them, the rest will work itself out” is an attractive message. It contradicts my anecdotal short-term observations, but they don’t claim any short-term effects, only long-term.
You don’t even have to be a “reasonable” parent. Parents in the 1960′s were “bad” by today’s standards*, and the kids turned out fine.
*The book talks about how parents spend far more time on childcare today than they did in the 1960′s.
It is worth pointing out I think that the baby boomers were far more violent that the current generation and were dysfunctional in many other ways. They also produced the biggest bubble and the worst financial crash since the great depression, and a marked decline in many aspects of American life such as the economy (rampant deficits and declining living standards for average people). And look at the ethical standards of the politicians from the baby boomer generation.
The fact that most people mostly recover from their childhood by their thirties does not mean that it did no damage. Your teens and 20s are supposed to be the best years of your life.
(blink)
I assume you mean “supposed to be” here in the sense of conventionally understood to be, rather than some kind of obligation. Even so, though, it seems like a poor convention to endorse.
If not, anyone who had lousy teens and 20s but are going great in their 30s should be ashamed of themselves and start making self destructive decisions so as to rectify the situation!
Yeah, that seems to follow. Of course, the alternative reading simply means we should look forward to life getting worse and worse.
Me, I only really started getting the hang of this life in my early 40s, and am looking forward to seeing what comes next.
Well, it takes a lot of hate and/or abuse and/or neglect to screw up a child royally. For example, simple spanking just doesn’t do it. So probably the average difference from 1960s is not that large.
A 2010′s dad spends more hours taking care of children than a 1960′s mom.
Wow. This is counter-intuitive.
Is that true? That sounds surprising, but plausible—do you have a source for that?
It’s in the book.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. In the 1960s, a mother could just send the kids out to play on their own, which kids normally did if they weren’t at school. Such things are unthinkable these days, and it looks quite plausible that today’s standard way of helicopter parenting has increased the total amount of parents’ time spent doting on kids so much that even if fathers did only a minority of it, they’d still spend a larger amount of time that the total time normally spent back in the sixties.
‘Unthinkable’ seems like an exaggeration. I played outside by myself as a kid (though that’s 20 years ago), and I have the distinct impression that my bosses’ kids have a group of neighborhood kids they play with unsupervised.
Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.) See the “Free Range Kids” blog for numerous stories illustrating the modern mentality and jurisprudence about leaving kids alone and unsupervised.
In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it’s definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.
One of my professors lives in a cul-de-sac where literally every house has ~2 kids of roughly the same age, and so most of the parents allow their children to just go outside and play with the gang until dinnertime. I believe at least one of the parents is typically watching, which is also a departure from the old days.
Hearing him describe it to the grad students / other professors, though, it was clearly a “this is an abnormal neighborhood which is like where I grew up, which is fantastic,” and he’s the only person I know of with a neighborhood like that (though certainly similar neighborhoods must exist).
But why? I thought crime rates in America had actually declined significantly since 20-25 years ago. If so, then why would it be more unacceptable today to let children play free than it was twenty years ago; has irrational helicopter parenting grown for other reasons, e.g. status competitions, with no correlation to actual danger levels? (Or is there something subtle I am missing, for example has violence declined in ghettos/low-class areas but the middle and upper areas we are talking about are less safe?)
News media has improved. Once, abductions in small towns were news in that town (and nowhere else) - now it is possible for the abduction to be news everywhere. Without calibration for the change in availability of information, the obvious response is to believe that we are not safer.
Additionally, there have been changes in societies attitudes towards certain crimes. Increasing beliefs that certain crimes were bad (DUI, domestic violence, various sex crimes) has led to increased reporting of those crimes and stronger reaction to those crimes when they are reported in the media. This exacerbates the availability bias discussed above.
That’s… seriously counterintuitive to me. I’m certainly not deeply embedded in parenting culture, and my childhood memories date to the early 1990s as well as being unusual in some ways, but I’m skeptical of drawing strong conclusions from an advocacy site. What else are you basing this on?
I would just ask my relatives about parenting standards, but unfortunately they’re divided between having very young and adult children. And that’s a pretty small and biased sample anyway.
Just common everyday observation of people’s attitudes. (I’m not a partisan of the FRK approach; in fact, I have no kids as of yet, and I’m still not quite sure what to think about it.)
One piece of evidence in support: The local Children’s Museum does not allow adults to enter if they are not with a child. The adult:child ratio is approximately 1:1.5. Further, I’ve never been more than ten feet from my son when visiting—and I estimate I’m within one standard deviation of the norm (it’s hard to tell, in part because children from 2-8 are there, and the distance-to-child norm varies naturally by age) In short, there is no reasonable likelihood of stranger abduction.
Yet the policy is in place—a response to fear mongering, as far as I can tell.
I’ve seen recently a kenote (french) on the effects of TV on people. While this sentence seems reasonable, I would say (if the keynote is as solid as it looks) that you should go real easy on TV. 1 hour a day is already much too much. During the very first years of development, this would be a catastrophe. (To name just one example, we have reasons to believe TV is almost entirely responsible for the recent 10% drop in SAT scores — from the 60s to the 80s. I don’t know how many IQ points that would be.)
(Now the effects of TV do not all come from the screen itself. There are priming effects (smoking, violence, food), there are attentional effects, there are sedentary effects… Those different effects can be addressed differently.)
But if you’re already a “good enough” parent, you probably cut TV for quality time anyway.
I heard a horror story (anecdote from a book, for what it’s worth) of a child basically raised in front of a TV, who learned from it both language and a general rule that the world (and social interaction) is non-interactive. If you could get his attention, he’d cheerfully recite some memorized lines then zone out.
Was the book “The boy who was raised as a dog?” Because I remember reading the same story in that book.
It certainly could be—I read the anecdote from a book I picked idly off a shelf in a bookstore, and I retained the vague impression that it was from a book about the importance of social factors and the effects of technology on our social/psychological development, but I could have been conflating it with another such book. After reading an excerpt from “The Boy who was Raised as a Dog”, the style matches, so that probably was the one I read. Would you recommend it?
Yes yes yes! An awesome book!
Well! I may have to take a more in-depth look at it sometime this summer.