
The disintegration of the parent-child bond - the-enemy
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/the-disintegration-of-the-parent-child-bond/article28191786/
======
ksenzee
> One cause of [children and teenagers'] fragility is a weak parent-child
> relationship.

I don't buy that the relationship between parents and children has changed all
that much in the last 25 years. I certainly don't believe parents love their
children less, as the author is implying ("they cannot get unconditional love
and acceptance from their peers or from a report card"). Plenty of Gen-Xers
were latchkey kids and we don't seem to have suffered for it.

The explanation I personally favor is that children and teenagers aren't
allowed to do anything the slightest bit dangerous anymore -- even the
playgrounds are padded -- so they can't calibrate their sense of what really
is dangerous, and therefore everything feels dangerous.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> I don't buy that the relationship between parents and children has changed
> all that much in the last 25 years.

Certainly social workers in some countries (including my own) think otherwise.
When we got our child there were heaps of "how to bond with children" guides
given to us.

> The explanation I personally favor is that children and teenagers aren't
> allowed to do anything the slightest bit dangerous anymore -- even the
> playgrounds are padded -- so they can't calibrate their sense of what really
> is dangerous, and therefore everything feels dangerous.

Even if playgrounds are padded, children have plenty of opportunity to learn
the cause of their actions with their parents in a safer environment. I don't
see how children would develop any less just because they don't end up being
disabled due to playing in dangerous environments.

~~~
jacquesm
> I don't see how children would develop any less just because they don't end
> up being disabled due to playing in dangerous environments.

Speaking from my own experience, I really wonder how I would have developed
the way I did without being allowed to handle (very dangerous) tools from an
early age, roamed all over Amsterdam from the ripe old age of 6, toyed with
chemistry, explosives, electronics, household power and petrol engines all of
which could have easily killed me.

I'm probably _more_ careful rather than less careful because of this and none
of my friends or me ended up disabled. Long before we got to the stage where
we could have become disabled we learned how to respect the stuff we played
with.

Trying to imagine the alternative universe where all my tools had been
plastic, safe imitations, where I was only allowed to work with batteries,
being limited to the local playground (supervised, of course) and chemistry
would be limited to playing around with salt & vinegar.

I'm treating my own children in much the same way, I _trust_ them to use their
heads when it matters and I show them the consequences of failing to do so in
as controlled (but very real) a way as possible.

Of course other parents think I'm nuts but that doesn't overly bother me.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> Speaking from my own experience, I really wonder how I would have developed
> the way I did without being allowed to handle (very dangerous) tools from an
> early age, roamed all over Amsterdam from the ripe old age of 6, toyed with
> chemistry, explosives, electronics, household power and petrol engines all
> of which could have easily killed me.

Neither, but that does not mean that your parents did not bond with you. Here
is what happened in my generation: the time I spend with my parents and family
was significantly bigger than most children today. For me personally the
reason for that was that my parent took me to their office and I could spend
time there. For many others in my generation it was because one of the parents
stayed at home. Here is what's happening right now: children enter
Kindergarten at 6 months of age or when they turn one. The only person that
can tell them what to handle or not is most of the time a randomly assigned
caretaker.

Note that when people talk about bonding they do not talk about a 6 year old
child, they talk about a newborn to toddler of less than two years of age.

You're from the Netherlands where there is a proper maternity leave. Not
everybody is in that fortunate situation and I assume the article is written
with this in mind.

//EDIT: also to leave another note on older children: I'm not sure how it was
for you in the Netherlands, but parents and teachers used to be proper
authorities to me. This is something that is becoming less and less the case.
There are brats around our flat that would not even listen to police if it
came to it.

~~~
jacquesm
> Neither, but that does not mean that your parents did not bond with you.

You have no clue.

------
haberman
My impression of the general trend is the opposite. When I think of parenting
50 or 100 years ago, I think of it as more formal and detached. Children
addressing their parents as "sir" and "ma'am". Fathers who were emotionally
distant and leaving much of the parenting to their mothers. Discipline that
involved respecting the authority of all adult figures.

When I think of parenting now I think of extensive concern with kids'
emotional well-being, parents who take kids sides in quarrels with teachers,
etc.

I don't know if these impressions are broadly true, but it's interesting that
my impression is of an opposite trend.

I agree with the overall premise of the article, which is that kids are more
fragile than they have been in the past. I'm just not sure that a decreased
parent/child bond is the right explanation.

~~~
zeveb
> When I think of parenting 50 or 100 years ago, I think of it as more formal
> and detached. Children addressing their parents as "sir" and "ma'am".

I don't think that's detached, but precisely the opposite. Treating one's
parents like anyone else says, 'you don't matter any more to me than anyone
else does,' whereas treating one's parents as one's superiors says, 'you are
my parents, older and wiser than I am, and I treat you unlike some random
people on the street.'

~~~
cholantesh
Right, but the familial bond isn't expressed by formal, ritualistic practice.
That only creates a relationship of command.

~~~
zeveb
> Right, but the familial bond isn't expressed by formal, ritualistic
> practice.

Seems like human society has for millennia worked by having formal rituals,
and it's bound people together pretty well. I'm more than a little cautious
about throwing all that out.

> That only creates a relationship of command.

What's wrong with that? A 'relationship of command' is _exactly_ what the
relationship between a parent and a three-year-old must be: when the parent
shouts, 'don't touch that stove!' the kid must immediately shrink back;
there's no time for inner reflection or external debate on the merits and
demerits of stove-touching. As the child grows, the relationship becomes less
and less commanding, but a wise adult will always listen to his parents
(because they really do have more experience) and a wise adult will not
command his grown child except as a last resort (because it's the only thing
with a chance of getting through).

------
Kluny
Really? I thought the trouble with kids these days was that they are all
mamas-boys and daddys-princesses who can't accomplish anything on their own
and who's parents micromanage their whole day and won't leave em the hell
alone?

~~~
jonnathanson
I don't necessarily see helicopter-parenting and absentee-parenting as
mutually exclusive. The typical helicopter parent is always nagging,
harassing, and invading the privacy of his/her children -- which is a sort of
omnipresence, sure, but it's not a constructive emotional presence. You might
as well not even be there in that moment; you'd accomplish the same thing
sending a preprogrammed nag-bot into your kids' rooms to chide them and/or
dote on them constantly. In fact, it's possible your kids are actually tuning
your presence _out_ when you're in their faces all the time.

The magic combination seems to be: 1) let your kids discover the world (and
make mistakes) on their own, just enough to let them learn and grow up; 2) be
there for them when they need you. At one point in our history, this
combination seemed intuitive. These days, after several generations of
successive, fear-based sales of self-help books, advice, and programming, our
culture has short-circuited parental instincts.

~~~
scrupulusalbion
I see helicopter-parenting _and_ absentee-parenting as min-maxing; these are
the munchkins of parenting.

Just as in role-playing, the parent gives little to no concern to other issues
that are important for the child's development. The helicopter-parents focus
on something to build into the child or to preserve the kid from; the
absentee-parents merely minimize effort/time spent on the child.

------
dawnbreez
TL;DR:

Do things with your kids. Connect to them. Love them, not " _because_ ", but
unconditionally.

Everything I have read, and everything I have seen, suggests that parents have
to actually parent their kids. This isn't to say they need to discipline, or
treat; it is to say that they cannot be idle. It's too easy to sit your kid in
front of the TV and let them be "themselves", and that doesn't do anything.

------
sjclemmy
30 years ago when I was 13, I experienced all the things described by the
author. I over valued my peers' opinion, I disregarded my parents' words of
advice.

Isn't it normal to feel these things? It's how an individual grows.

My secret to good parenting is compassion, consistency and honesty - the rest
is just detail.

~~~
shanecleveland
Same experience here. I am thankful that I was able to make mistakes and learn
from them. With support and the values instilled by my parents, I was able to
minimize the negative impacts of my youthful mistakes.

------
jaredcwhite
I'm not sure there's a parent-child bond being disintegrated in modern
American culture -- if anything, a lot of parents seem more intentionally
involved in their kids lives than past generations. However, I do think we
need to look at a slightly higher-level problem: an adults-children bond.

As a father of two small children, I have noticed (along with my wife) that a
lot of people in various social settings seem rather uncomfortable having our
kids around. It's almost like this unspoken question is hovering around us,
like "why aren't they in preschool" or "why aren't they with a babysitter" or
"why do you have to bring them in here? This store is for adults only!"

A lot of businesses don't have good facilities for taking care of kids
(changing tables, etc.). Only recently have we seen local malls remodel and
include private nursing areas, etc. So sure maybe there's some progress here,
particularly as a result of greater awareness of the needs of breastfeeding
mothers and so forth, but I think there's still plenty of prejudice against
kids in certain sectors of society.

Somehow, and I could be mistaken, it seems to me that in past cultures
(particularly in rural or tribal settings), it was a given that children were
heavily involved in the "business" of home and community. Children would work
the same farm as the parents, for example. Obviously a lot of that kind of
family cohesion was lost during the Industrial Revolution, so maybe it could
be argued that things were worse off in 1916 than 2016. I don't know. It just
"feels" to me, subjectively, like children and teens need to feel more
included in "adult" society, and adults need to be more actively interested in
the world of children across the board.

------
vilhelm_s
"some [teenagers] are more concerned about what their peers think than what
their parents think. Others are more concerned about their inflated self-
concept than about what their parents think. Kids need to value their parents’
opinion as their first scale of value, at least throughout childhood and
adolescence."

It turns out that this article is written by a parent, rather than by a
teenager.

------
FreedomToCreate
This is an extremely complex issue that can't be broken down into a few bullet
points and fixed. Beyond generalizing all parents, the author of this article
overlooks many factors that form children relationships with them and others.
For example, how is the parents relationship with there parents, economic
class of the family, culture, etc..

------
Kapura
I'd like to open with this tweet which I think captures some of the issues
perfectly [1]:

\---

my aunt: why u kids always on them phones cant u have a real conversation

me: _puts down phone_ _crosses legs_ why did u melt the ice caps

\---

I'm a young adult, and I can say that anecdotally, if there's a strain in the
relationship between my parents and myself it happens because I grew up in a
world which is fundamentally different from the world they knew. This is
partially due to technology, but it also comes from the fact that I (we) need
to live in the world that "they" created.

My mother didn't understand why I wanted to sell the stock in Exxon Mobil that
I was given by my grandmother. But I am the one who will have to come of age
in a world of rising sea levels and global temperatures, at least partially
created by that firm's wilful deception[2]. I avoid animal products in meals
for the same reason. But in trying to tell my parents this, they seem to
believe I am disingenuous, or they don't take the issues as seriously as I do.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into these issues. Perhaps that this is just the
most recent iteration of the generational conflicts that have occurred
throughout time. But it feels like the world I will inhabit is radically
different from my parents', and I just don't know if there will ever be a good
way to bridge that gap.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/what_eve_r/status/681246826746523649](https://twitter.com/what_eve_r/status/681246826746523649)

[2] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-
about-c...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-
climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/)

~~~
eternalban
> a world which is fundamentally different from the world they knew

Hyperbole. Let's hear about these [fundamental] changes. Life is 'a bit'
unforgiving and discounting experience of survivors of this natural regime [is
non-optimal].

> .. why did u melt the ice caps

So you could waste your life obsessively staring into a 3x4 glowing surface.

[edits]

------
xupybd
I have to wonder what impact having both parents in the workforce has? It
would seem that working is no longer a choice but an economic necessity for
both parents. And that's only the families where the parents remain together.
I'd imagine single parents find it even harder to spend time with their kids.

------
pavel_lishin
> _Many teens would be the first to tell you that they love their parents. But
> they are not seriously concerned with what their parents think. Or more
> precisely, some are more concerned about what their peers think than what
> their parents think._

Hasn't this always been the case?

> _As one Scotsman told me, “We don’t even think much about ‘generations.’ We
> just all enjoy doing things together.”_

Unless that Scotsman is 13, that's pointless. He may love doing things
together; his children might be counting down the minutes 'til they can hop
back online and talk to their friends.

> _If you have the opportunity to move closer to your child’s aunts, uncles
> and grandparents, do it. (We did.)_

That's good, but I'm not sure what this has to do with the parent-child
thesis.

------
cholantesh
>The first and most obvious evidence is the extraordinary rise in the
proportion of young people diagnosed and treated today for anxiety and
depression.

I'm not sure why the author hasn't considered the possibility that, just like
in other areas of mental health, recognition that these issues exist and
better means of diagnosing and treating them have come to light. It may well
be the case that there were a great deal of anxious and depressed children
around, but went undiagnosed and untreated for a long time.

------
lutusp
A classic psychology tract, constructed on the default premise:

1\. Here's how things _are_.

2\. Here's how things _should be_ , if only people would listen to
psychologists.

In this way, psychology has occupied the vacuum created by the departure of
religion, in the minds of people who believe life should have a particular
outcome, and who think someone is (or should be) in charge.

Meanwhile, parents, children, indeed everyone, are doing their best to fulfill
personally chosen goals. Those goals are freely selected by independent agents
in a morally neutral universe ruled only by evolution. Some plans will
succeed, some will fail, but consulting authority is always a mistake, because
in evolution, _there is no authority_.

Psychology has a long history of condemning behaviors it thinks the public
dislikes, then changing their tune when public tastes change. It was once a
mental illness to run away from your master in the antebellum South
(Drapetomania). It was once a mental illness to be a homosexual (not very long
ago). More recently, it was a mental illness to be creative and intelligent
(Asperger syndrome). All these and many other imaginary ailments have been
abandoned as public tastes changed.

H. G. Wells said, "Civilization is in a race between education and
catastrophe." It was a positive step to abandon religion. It will be another
positive step when we abandon psychology and begin to think for ourselves.

------
lazyant
"some (teens) are more concerned about what their peers think than what their
parents think." I thought peer influence being as powerful or more than parent
influence in teenagers was already accepted, not something new.

~~~
shanecleveland
Exactly. If by "some" the author means "all," then I'd say the quote is spot
on.

------
jsprogrammer
>His main idea is that many of the problems we see with North American kids
today – _the defiance, the disrespect, the disconnection from the real world_
– can be traced to the lack of a strong attachment between parents and their
kids.

 _We_? _Problems_? Under what calculus are defiance, disrespect, and
disconnection, "problems"? Maybe the current state of the world (or maybe just
Canada) deserves defiance, disrespect, and disconnection?

The observation being made here is purely subjective; one side believes they
deserve something (obedience, respect, attention) that they may, in fact, not.

More likely we are seeing a rejection of the state of the world and many of
the people who caused the state to be the way it currently is.

~~~
zeveb
> Under what calculus are defiance, disrespect, and disconnection, "problems"?

They are not the proper attitudes of those with lesser knowledge, skill and
experience to those with greater such. That they are prevalent is indicative
of, among other things, bad parenting.

Guess what? Your folks were your age once. They experienced the same emotion-
addled thought processes. They believed ludicrous things to be true for the
same reasons that you do (and I did, and sometimes still do). And they can
look at your situation from a distance and say, 'you know what? relax!' and
_be right_.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Adults aren't wiser and more experienced children. They're children with the
creative and vital burnt out of their souls and replaced with a respectable
act that gets put on for other adults.

Defiance, disrespect, and disconnection are absolutely the correct way to
interact with those who insist on destroying a fundamental part of who you
are.

~~~
zeveb
> Defiance, disrespect, and disconnection are absolutely the correct way to
> interact with those who insist on destroying a fundamental part of who you
> are.

A fundamental part of who you were when you were born was crying every time
you were the least bit upset; it was evacuating your bowels without even
trying to contain them. A fundamental part of who you were as a small child
was being a psychopath who didn't fully realise that other people are, well,
_people_. A fundamental part of who you were as a teenager was an
underdeveloped brain — and another was the overdeveloped hormone production
which didn't help your decision-making skills any.

None of those are unique to you: they are the common lot of all of us.

The whole point of good parenting is to destroy all the fundamental parts of
children which are animalistic and contrary to survival in the world as it is,
and to inculcate the development of secondary parts which are humanist and
support survival. Now, many parents fail at those tasks, but those who succeed
produce healthy, functional adult human beings. Bad parents produce selfish,
brutal, cruel, unkind, animalistic demihumans.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
There's a huge difference between showing children a more humane way to
interact with the world, and crushing your child's spirit until they do what
you want them to. Doing the latter is how you end up with breaking people to
the point where they don't notice that they have emotions for a decade.

Evil people don't think they're evil - instead, they think things like "spare
the rod, spoil the child". Just... goddamn, be careful with spreading that
line of thinking, okay?

------
brightball
Honestly, I think a serious contributor here is the number of families with
two full time working parents more than anything else. My wife and I were
actually talking about this last night.

We both work til about 5:30 or 6 every week day. Our kids go to after school
programs where they play with friends, do homework, etc before we pick them
up. We get home around 6 and they need to get to bed by 8. That gives us 2
hours every weeknight to make/pickup dinner, do something together as a
family, talk about our day, and get ready for bed.

If either of us got off at around 3 every day both of the kids could come
home. We could go to the store together and get things to make for dinner
together. I could start cooking and they could help or do homework and then
when my wife got home dinner would be ready for us to sit down and have a
family meal. We'd end up eating healthier and being less rushed. On a lot of
days the kids could have their friends come over for a couple of hours until
dinner time and potentially that child's parent(s) could come over to visit
while the kids played.

Instead, we're left with this weekly rush. I honestly don't have much of an
idea who the parents of my kids friends are at school...because I don't ever
see them. I barely see my kids friends. This is before we factor in things
like soccer practice.

On weekends, over 2 days we try to balance house chores with family time with
going to the store to get everything we'll need for meals for the week before
anything else that might come up.

I cannot imagine that we're the only family with 2 working parents that
experiences this. The seeming solution to the problem is for one of us to
scale back, but that means figuring out something at work that will allow us
to do that and ensuring that we're able to adjust costs to take a hit
somewhere (assuming that asking to scale back doesn't put the entire job in
jeopardy). The other solution is to try to invest what's left of that spare
time into creating a side income so you can afford to scale back...which just
feeds the problem.

As I've gotten older I've started to place a significantly larger amount of
respect on stay at home dads or moms, because the longer we've been pushing
this dual career thing the more I realize what we're giving up. It seems like
so much chatter, movie references, TV references, etc over the last 2-4
decades has mocked stay at home parents as either being unimportant,
uneducated, people who sit around watching TV and what not that as a society
we've pressured an entire generation into feeling like raising a family
instead of having a job makes you somehow less.

And I think it's breaking more of society than we want to admit. This isn't a
gender roles thing either. I don't think it matters WHICH parent spends more
time at home as long as one of them does.

We fuel this issue by generally meeting our significant others in
college...where we are both training to have full time careers and taking on
student loans that we'll have to work to repay. All just seems to be a huge,
interconnected mess of a pattern.

I'm not actually sure what you could do to fix it, aside from providing
companies tax credits for allowing "parent friendly" jobs to incentive them to
have positions where the day ends when kids get out of school.

------
elinchrome
Funny how every new generation is so much worse than the one that came before.

~~~
hobs
“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

~~~
zeveb
Some people read that and think, 'Ha! Old fogeys always complain, but nothing
changes.' Others read it and think, 'Huh, folks have gotten a lot worse over
time.'

------
banku_brougham
Lame and unconvincing.

------
danharaj
If I had lived in a household like this, I would have become estranged from my
parents the moment I could. It's authoritarian drivel. This is fodder for
narcissistic parents.

~~~
Zikes
The article uses very broad strokes, making points which could certainly lend
themselves to narcissistic parenting. One stand-out line is "[b]ut your
child’s first allegiance must be to you, not to her best friend". It stresses
very hard that the responsibility is on the child to adhere to the
relationship as defined by the parent, whom is painted as infallible in this
regard. Parents certainly take on a lot of responsibility as caregivers, but
they're never perfect, and aren't always deserving of allegiance.

Children are first and foremost _people,_ and they deserve to be treated as
such. They should be able to define their own relationships, even if that
means forming close bonds of friendship at an early age. Maybe the friendships
won't last, maybe they will, but that's not for anyone to decide but those
involved. Taking that away from a kid, telling them their friendships are
somehow superficial and don't matter because so much of it happens through
"magic computer-boxen and apps" that seem to be the root of all of today's
ills, well that sounds pretty domineering and narcissistic to me.

If a parent wants a strong bond with their child, they can take all the steps
they want to encourage the growth of that bond, but trying to _force_ it, as
with any other relationship, will only lead to the opposite result.

