(03-03-2020 06:48 PM)JRsec Wrote: Generation Y are also echo boomers, they were distinguished from Millennials because they had Boomer parents.
I was born in the early 1980s. Not sure what that means as far as Y goes, though I thought Millennials and Y were the same thing.
Quote:The Helicopter phenomenon was directly related to suburbs. In the Boomer's life span most families lived in neighborhoods where the homes didn't look like carbon copies of one another with just the trim painted differently. With Suburbs keeping up with the Joneses took on a whole new dynamic. Everyone drove similar cars, had similar homes, and the children were pressured to perform at school and in their hobbies because it related to the status of the parents.
Yep. And you see some sort of pushback to that in the form of hipsterism, but it's just superficial interest in things, unlike the deep subcultures and countercultures you saw from the 50s to the 90s. The pushback is very Millennial in that it's narcissistic, half-assed and superficial.
Quote:Naturally that bled over to high school and unfortunately College where I've known many professors who had problems with helicopter parents, and my wife had them come to her lab to push 20 year old children's performance ratings. Totally an eye-rolling absurd experience. We always felt sorry for the kids. How were they ever going to individuate and get comfortable in their own skins with that kind of mania happening.
They never do, but their constant reliance on those above them and lack of self-esteem does make them into wonderful cube jockeys.
Quote:We had parents that if we didn't have a good grade the teacher was never question but our bottoms got torn up. If we got paddled at school we got it when we got home too. And all of the guys in my high school class (save 2) knew we had to pay for our own college and buy our own cars when we turned 16, providing insurance and gas. But then almost all of us had worked since we were 10. It started mowing yards, harvesting crops, and graduated to mill work in the Summer. By today's standards our parents would have been found to be abusive, only they were great!
Well, stuff's just more expensive nowadays and work like that doesn't really exist in cities, or really anywhere anymore.
https://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/123...9794166785
The local Walmart just did away with all of their cashiering kiosks and replaced them all with self-serve terminals. Soon everyone will. That's going to be a lot of 16-year-olds out of work. I worry about the next generation. It's not getting any better for them.
Quote:My dad and his 1st cousin built their first car out of Studebaker parts they bought at a variety of local junkyards. They alternated weekends with the car to date. But in fairness before computerized ignition systems and engine diagnostics it was absolutely easier to work on your own vehicle. I grew up changing my own oil, setting my timing, replacing my own points and plugs, and greasing the fittings (now contained inside boots). Heck we even changed our own brake shoes and linings. Forget about most of that now!
Yep. Now consider that most appliances and such are highly computerized and you even have smart locks for your front door and you'll see why basic home improvement stopped being so basic.
Quote:I don't know what changed to put so much fear into parents and through them their kids but it was a rotten day for life n this country when it happened. I'll tell you this though a lot of it started when we quit having state run mental institutions and real crazies were loose on the street, and then came the drugs, and then came the illegals. It's definitely a different world and although I enjoy poking fun at millennials you really did inherit a much bigger mess than we did.
I think some of it was technology. Something like what happened to Johnny Gosch wouldn't have made the rounds back in simpler times. The resulting pushes regarding stranger danger are some of it. Dr. Spock and the shift to a more humanistic approach to parenting is another. Also, somewhere along the line parents started to see children as reflections of themselves rather than progeny to raise and guide. That's the mindset that helicopter parenting came from. It became a matter of instilling authority and living vicariously through your child rather than building them into a functional adult.
What's really troubling is that it's hard to pin down how it got to this point, and without understanding that we won't really quite know how to fix it, even on a micro level.