i think the majority of parents are still like that….
I tend to agree with this also. I don’t see a big difference between the parents of today and my parents growing up. I also feel that having an option like the “Teen Help Industry” makes it easier for some parents to off load the problems their children are having prematurely if they don’t feel like working at it. But what I see more clearly is that kids now are exposed to more at a younger age. Kids are smoking and drinking in grade school now and knowing someone who shoots up coke or heroin is no big deal so trying it themselves is a shorter step. When we talked about Hendrix doing heroin we thought wow this guy is cool, but way out there. Heroin, crack etc. was not part of an 8th graders life back then and most kids didn’t know anyone who shot up. We were no strangers to drugs ourselves but getting high on the weekends and then going back to school on Monday seems to be an activity in the past. Kids are getting high, doing drugs every day, using needles and are putting themselves at a tremendous risk of contacting any number of diseases, overdosing getting raped etc.
The risks are higher but there doesn’t seem to be any intervention or education in place that is effective. Most parents, I know, aren’t looking to have perfect kids and know they are going to screw up many times over, like we did, kids express themselves with body jewelry, tattoos, hair style and clothing the same as we did and we understand that it is a natural process, but we all also know the parents who have lost a child to rape, drug overdose , suicide etc. which wasn’t as prevalent when I was young. We would hear of someone overdosing on drugs and it was a big deal even though it wasn’t anyone we knew or even in our school and it effected us. Now kids are raped in the class rooms and worse.
So it does put the parents off balance and makes them step back a little more than ours had to. Most of the parents of these kids in TBS’s are good parents that are engaged in their kids lives and have their kids happiness and future in mind when choosing this step for them. It may be a control issue for some but I see this as a small minority.
Once again, I think you watch too much TV. I was smoking pot and licking blotters at age 12. That was 1973. I lost my virginity at 14. I was also considered a shy geek. So I contend that as kids we knew as much, if not more, about drugs and sex than kids do now.
In fact, parents these days should be better prepared. My parents were clueless about sex and drugs and teen stuff (they were teens in the 1940s). My generation often says our kids really can't do anything we ourselves did not try. Shouldn't that make us better prepared and more tolerant?
Also, what intervention did they have in those good old days? Straight Inc? I earned a ride home in the back seat of a police cruiser now and again, but pot smoking only earned me detention hall and a lecture, not the jail term they now give kids. I was never suspended because it was commonly believed in those days that the goal was to keep kids in school, not throw them out.
The kids have not changed, Who. The parents have changed. Quite frankly, I think the current crop of young people are, by and large, far more conservative, hard working, and less prone to trouble making than my generation ever was. Drug use, teen pregnancy, and crime statistics seem to bear that out. Here in SC, I am taken aback that teenagers call me 'sir.' It sounds weird.
The fact is that society has become far less tolerant of teen behavior than it used to be. A fight at school was broken up. The police were not called. Pot got you detention hall. Some high schools had smoking areas for students. We had no dress code at my high school. Children could not be tried as adults. It was expected that kids would experiment with sex and alcohol. When the police caught us with alcohol, they'd just confiscate it and leave. Zero tolerance had not been invented, yet.
It is a much more demanding world now. There are far more rules for kids and far stiffer penalties. Kids are required to do way more homework and be scheduled all the time. I heard a woman on the radio (NPR) and she said with a straight face (voice), "Today's young people are used to doing volunteer community work. After all, many high schools require it." Huh?
Another point is that parents these days expect their kids to be perfect students destined to Ivy League schools. In my day, parents understood some of their kids were not rocket scientists and accepted that C's were good enough for that kid. Not everyone was college bound. That's why we had vo-tech schools.
I hang out with men older than I am (50s and 60s), but we all agree that we feel fortunate that we grew up when we did and not today. We agree it pretty much sucks to be a kid these days. At least compared to the freedoms we had when we were young.
And as for options. Let's face it, the very suggestion of seeing a therapist when I was a kid would cause eyes to roll. There was a huge stigma attached to admitting, let alone treating a mental health issue. Only nut cases did that. Other than varsity sports, there are were no after school programs for kids. We were called 'latch key kids' because we let ourselves into our homes and were on our own until the parents came home.
If we did something strange or acted weird, our parents assumed it was just a stage. They did not jump overboard and rush us to doctors and shove pills down our throats. They did not ship us off to emotional growth schools.
These days, all a kid has to do is squeek and someone wants to shove Ridalin into them. It's ridiculous and most parents I talk to agree with me that schools are intervening way too much and way to soon in the psychological, psychiatric sense.
We have too many interventions, Who, not too few.
The bottom line, Who, is that I think society is far more demanding of its young people than when we were kids and the strain sometimes takes it's toll on some of them.