
The Fragile Generation - kareemm
https://reason.com/archives/2017/10/26/the-fragile-generation
======
ukulele
One thing I appreciate about the internet is that it will make articles like
this searchable for future generations, so that they can see that every
generation says the same things.

Kids these days are weenies, politics are worse, prices are too high, etc etc
etc. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
ruytlm
Yes, there's always an element of that; there's the classic Socrates* quote to
fall back on.

That said, there does appear to be a noticeable shift in children's
upbringings, away from the unsupervised 'free range' approach.

I quite liked the take I saw a few years back, that blamed much of it on
lawyers; whether they're actually to blame is another question:
[https://abovethelaw.com/2012/11/lawyers-made-your-kids-
fat-f...](https://abovethelaw.com/2012/11/lawyers-made-your-kids-fat-fearful-
and-bored/)

[edit: allegedly not Socrates:
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-
childre...](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-
ancient-times/) ]

~~~
dragonwriter
>I quite liked the take I saw a few years back, that blamed much of it on
lawyers; whether they're actually to blame is another question:

Blaming lawyers for anything is always popular, but this is pretty much
entirely a result of the media (and politicians, for different reasons) doing
things to portray a number of risks to children as having much greater
incidence than they actually have _and_ being increasing in occurrence when
they were in fact decreasing, and sustaining that over a period of several
decades, creating a popular perception of the risk profile (and consequently
the responsible actions given that risk profile) very divergent from reality.

Insofar as lawyers were involved at all, it was simply leveraging the popular
perception thus created to get favorable outcomes in cases, but they weren't
the ones creating the beliefs in the first place.

