
Reasons Today’s Kids Are Bored at School, Feel Entitled, Have Little Patience - alphydan
http://deeprootsathome.com/kids-bored-entitled/
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existencebox
Christ. I take a decent amount of pleasure in poking holes in topics here, and
this is one of those "where do I even start", as well as continuing to lower
my opinion of self-identified therapists.

(EDIT: To clarify: I don't mean to detract that the author is a Real(tm)
therapist, but the "self identified" part is key to me as the author conveys
that as their angle of expertise, as opposed to a physician who may also have
a degree in therapy but tries to speak primarily as the former. I've found my
Bayesian prior of agreement to correlate inversely when someone opens with "as
a therapist...")

Let me pick a few points out. "ENDLESS FUN". Because that clearly defines the
childhood of most of the people I grew up around in a Philadelphia public
school. (My sarcasm should be VERY heavy right about here.) Quite to the
opposite, children spend ~half (usually far more if you count transit,
extracurriculars, and homework) of their waking hours in a situation one can
honestly describe as "penitentiary-like". Yet the article NEVER touches on the
far more likely hypothesis that children, like most semi-sentient creatures,
don't want to do highly unpleasant things with no feeling of autonomy? We
recognize this for our food animals but not our own children?

"KIDS RULE THE WORLD" This isn't even defended in their own paragraph, if I'm
reading it right (it's a bit "fun" to dig through the spurious rhetoric and
anti-youth slant); and in all of the quotes they give, I would argue as
examples that they _don't_ rule the world, given that the response in most
situations is "you don't get a choice, I'm your parent".

"TECHNOLOGY" This has been the mantra of parents as long as I've been watching
news. It just used to be Phones, TV, Radio, Rock Music, Swing/dance halls, all
the way back to the turn of the century. The statement about parental
emotional availability may have some merit but is in no way supported, and
seems distinct from the section header.

Now, I'd like to ask _why_ the author paints a slant that so entirely deprives
children of means and mentality, so allow me to apply my typical cynicism with
a quote from the author bio: " She is founder and director of a
multidisciplinary clinic in Toronto, Canada, for children with behavioral,
social, emotional and academic challenges."

If you convince parents their kids are broken, they'll pay you money to try
and "fix" them. As a kid who had decades of adults trying to "fix" me, and has
turned out "pretty damn OK" I still resent that; and find the article entirely
lacking in substance or legitimacy.

~~~
MrZongle2
Do you have children?

~~~
Sag0Sag0
As a 16 year old this article is pathetic. This refrain that the children are
terrible has echoed down the centuries and repeating it does not make it any
more true. “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of
exercise.” - Socrates

~~~
tpeo
Nor does repetition make it any less true. Also, that's a misattributed quote
[0].

[0] : [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-
childre...](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-
ancient-times/)

------
eat_veggies
Were kids ever _not_ bored at school? This feels like yet another article
about those gosh darned spoiled kids these days.

~~~
monk_e_boy
Students find it almost impossible to stop checking their phones.

If you take a phone from them you can see the anxiety rising, they are unable
to work or concentrate. There is a real difference in how a classroom feels
these days to how it was before every student had a mobile phone.

------
DavidAdams
This is not a very rigorous article. It's a series of observations/opinions of
one particular expert who's worked with one particular set of kids. Not
useless anecdotes, but anecdotes nonetheless.

That being said, I think there's some truth in there. I'm very dubious of the
endless technology moral panic that's cycled through parenting ever since the
invention of the sharpened stick. ("In my day we just bashed the gazelles with
a blunt stick. These kids today have no character") Nevertheless, I tend to
agree that the human mind needs unstructured periods of boredom and social
interaction to thrive, and that parents are too quick to mollify their kids
with entertainments instead of helping them learn to occupy themselves. Also,
kids should be able to play outside, away from parental supervision.

