Do you have a tween at home? A kid grown tired with your pre-packaged, PG rated stuff, yet who’s still too young to be allowed to choose products and entertainment for themselves? Well, guess what – they’re making their own choices and you’re not the only one who are influencing them. It’s not like holding up…
Compared to the countries we increasingly compete with in this globalized world, American educational test scores stink. Everybody knows it and everybody is getting busy looking for culprits and solutions. Which can only result in one thing: nobody can agree to what the cause is. We don’t challenge our kids enough! We challenge them too…
“Kids nowadays! Hmpf!” Whether you’re 5 or 85, at some point you might unwittingly have been dragged into a generational comparison in which your age cohort is made out to look ruder, lazier or more spoiled than the bygone youth of the spokesperson. The statement is often followed up with a sentence that starts with “In…
Social change is often extremely slow, especially when deep seated norms are involved. Gender roles have demonstrated their staying power even in sociospheres where gender equality has long been the official mantra. Haven’t we all met the guy who speaks passionately about women’s rights all while parking the kids in front of the TV and leaving…
Embedded video from CNN Video A blog post at Gen X Files ponders if parents today are ditching their tendency to over-parent. A short CNN clip and a sudden tide of blogs and books of the “bad-mom-confession” type suggest that the helicopter parents are beginning to slow down their propellers a bit. A Times article from 2009 strongly suggests…
‘Tiger mother’ Amy Chua refuses to let her children go to play dates and sleepovers. She protects them from the evils of TV and computer games. She protects them from a whole world outside of violin practice and top grades. Are these types of parents really the opposites of indulgent Helicopter parents or are they rather the…
The Millennials are becoming parents – or at least they are preparing for it. And the children they give birth to are the New Silents. A Pew Research cohort study measured attitudes towards marriage and parenting comparing Generation X and the Millennials in 1997 and 2008 respectively. Since 1997 a growing proportion of young adults responded…
