Do You Believe We Are Living Through a Pandemic of Terrible Parenting

An individual on an online platform was concerned that we may see parenting in the earlier years with rose-tinted glasses.

According to them, parents are now too tolerant, entitled, and rely too much on technology. Grocery stores are now a war zone of ungovernable children and their bad parents. Here’s what thread contributors had to say about this observation.

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It’s a Different Manifestation

What lousy parenting looks like today differs from how it looked ten years ago. One says that while parents left their kids at home unsupervised in the past, parents now bring their kids everywhere to be a nuisance to everyone. Both are cases of bad parenting, just that one affects other people.

Nobody Believes in Discipline Anymore

Another commenter shares there’s a weird thing about not disciplining kids. When they were little, there was a good chance a random stranger would chew them out if they threw a tantrum in a public space. Sometime in the 90s, this was no longer acceptable.

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Parenting Has Always Been Trash

There’s never been a golden age of parenting. One acknowledges that parenting has never been good. Before labor laws, most parenting was not beating your kids until they couldn’t work. Parenting today is terrible for other reasons.

People Misinterpret Gentle Parenting

Gentle parenting doesn’t mean the absence of discipline. A parent writes gentle parenting is about listening to children and teaching them how to handle emotions. Parents need to acknowledge their child’s feelings and help them understand why they feel that way and how well to process that.

Society Has No Value for Human Life

Another suggests that people are getting poorer and poorer and need to work more. Parents spend less time with their kids. The cost of living needs a full-time investment, and no one has the emotional energy to handle kids.

Since birth, guardians shuffle kids into the faceless child-minding infrastructure of daycare. Most daycares are underfunded, understaffed, and do not have the child’s interest at heart. It’s an awful world to raise kids.

Everyone Is Winging It

A speech therapist agrees that most parents don’t know how to parent. It’s not a surprising trend since nobody taught them how. However, most are willing to learn, which is a good sign.

It’s Getting Worse

Numerous thread contributors think that the situation is getting worse. A teacher said they talked to other veteran teachers, who agree that things have been slipping in the past ten years. More schools are falling apart, and most teachers want out of their careers.

Teachers Are Glorified Babysitters

A commenter who has teacher friends shares that the attitude towards teachers has switched significantly in the past ten years. Parents no longer teach kids how to respect people. Teachers are also afraid of disciplining or scolding kids due to the numerous cases of trouble arising from unfair punishment. 

They explain a situation in their country where a teen shot a BB gun at a high school professor and filmed it for TikTok. The court of public opinion stood with the professor until she filed assault charges.

People shifted to the moan and dance of “he’s just a kid.” Adults bending backward to justify poor behavior doesn’t help. While kids may lack adult-like emotional intelligence, nobody needs a master’s degree to know they shouldn’t hurt others. Kids need to learn social behavior. 

Let’s Blame the iPads

Finally, a 41-year-old contributor says that when growing up, they always went out on their bikes and returned at the end of the day. Today, parents allow their kids to stay glued to their iPads, to avoid tantrums. As a result, kids do not learn how to socialize and talk to other people. 

They had an incident where their partner’s nephew was found trolling and bullying kids at his school. After a meeting with his parents, he was grounded. A week later, his parents were called back to the school since he complained that sending him to his room with no gaming devices for seven days was too cruel. They’re afraid that there is no hope since parents cannot set boundaries, and parenting experts call this abuse. 

This thread inspired this post.

This article was originally published on STEM Education Guide.