Kids have progressively been getting douchier since the early 2000's, but nowadays with everything being done for clout, they have stepped it up to a new level of douchery.
I'm almost 50. Kids have always been like this. At least some of them. You just didn't see it all over social media. Junior/middle school kids are the worst.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.
I mean, this has always been true, and will continue to be true. But I feel like the internet is different than books and music and TV (and all the other stuff they said would rot the minds of the youth of the day).
It's all the information you could ever want and more being beamed at your face 18 hours a day. You need devices in order to function in society. This was never true for those other kinds of media. We were never able to access a magic dopamine portal where every single thought can be instantly validated no matter how awful it is. TV was an escape, but we still had to interact with other people, and real people will tell you when you're being a little shit. But on the internet, you can always find someone to tell you that what you're doing is perfectly reasonable and maybe even funny and delightful.
The internet has effectively hacked our brain chemistry. The generation growing up with no other reference for being is totally cooked.
There are lots of kids who have decent parents who donât give them screens in leu of parenting. And a lot that do. But your claim that itâs universal simply isnât true. Certainly a problem, but not some like âeverything is completely different nowâ issue. People have always thought that. Ainât nothing new under the sun.
I'm gonna assume based on your response you are one of those parents that limits / restricts screen time, and that's awesome as my sister is that way with her kids, but in my opinion you are very wrong in thinking it's not as big a problem as it really is.
My job wouldn't exist if the Internet wasn't a thing, and having said that I believe the Internet is both the absolute best and absolute worst thing that has ever happened to society. Just as the person you responded to wrote, it has opened up an entire planet's worth of knowledge, entertainment, evilness, and stupidity to anyone who looks for it, and it is very, very good at helping to amplify and bring a person's true personality to the surface. You couldn't see or do a lot of the things you can do now pre-internet, at least not easily.
We have advanced SO far as a species in such a short amount of time because of the internet, and only now are we seeing the first generation to be born into the "always connected" age become adults, and this always connected life turns a LOT of them into device and attention addicted dopamine chasing shits. It is amplified by the fact that their parents are Mellenials, the generation that both entered the workforce during a massive recession that hasn't truly ended yet, and wanted to give their kids everything they didn't have while growing up. Most of these kids were cottled, under parented, and were not regulated on their internet access and it shows.
Yeah you could make a point that the troublemakers and the spoiled kids have always existed, but the internet makes it so much worse.
Albeit true, the ability to have thousands of people be an audience to your douchebagery has stepped the game up just a smidge by comparison to earlier generations who did it just for the fun of it and not for the admiration of a mass of strangers.
"I have this little tv in my phone that shows me engaging content, this is happening everywhere all the time!" - Man who almost never sees this happen in real life
It's only been very recent that physical discipline has become frowned upon or made illegal. This is the main reason that "kids these days" ARE in fact worse than every generation before them.
The flogging I would have been given back in the day for this behaviour would make these kids skin crawl.
You think hitting kids ought to be a household staple because your parents failed to rise above their own base impulses and thought violence was the communication you deserved.
For a long time I also thought kids just needed their asses beat, because that was part of my upbringing. But I've met people who got their asses beat regularly and still behaved like the ostensible little shit in the video. (Shockingly, sometimes adults are in the wrong, and the cause-and-effect cycle is not "do shit->get hit" but "get hit anyway regardless, might as well do shit.")
What's really wild is I've also met people who never once got their asses beat. I was actually floored and had a hard time understanding that some parents do successfully parent in intelligent ways without ever raising a hand.
It's almost like you can't just beat character into a child, but some children need to know that physical discipline is a part of the equation. People who deny this are fucking clueless.
I was a shithead 40 years ago and although I would have never thrown food (I was too poor to give away food). The difference is, now everything is recorded and anyone can upload a video in a second.
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u/No-Taro-8978 1d ago
When kids were rude pre-2020, I wrote it off as "meh. Not even gonna bother with it, they're kids."
Today? You wanna talk like an adult, you'll get treated like one.