Writes David Brooks in "What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young" (NYT).
May 5, 2023
"Gen Z-ers grew up with hypercautious parenting that exaggerates the dangers in life."
"They grew up in a media culture that generates ratings and clicks by generating division and anger. They grew up in a political culture that magnifies a sense of menace — that presumes that other people are toxic — in order to tell simplistic us/them stories and mobilize people’s fears.... People who grow up in this culture of distrust are bound to adopt self-protective codes of behavior.... People who grow up in a culture of distrust are bound to be pessimistic about life....People who grow up with this mentality are also less likely to believe they can control their own destinies.... As a certified middle-aged guy, I’m glad that the members of Gen Z behave... responsibly.... Politically, they lean left, but dispositionally they are cautious and conservative.
But the sense of exaggerated menace has its downsides.... It’s always good to be on guard against a dangerous creep, but you may miss out on meeting the person who could be the love of your life."
Writes David Brooks in "What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young" (NYT).
Writes David Brooks in "What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young" (NYT).
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DIEversity.
My parents let me take flying lessons at 15 but I had to pay for it myself.
"People who grow up with this mentality are also less likely to believe they can control their own destinies."
And why wouldn't they? Do they not have eyeballs? How else do you expect to deal with a world in which all you see is the worst people getting ahead?
The Bidens and their gatekeepers aren't just a few examples of the completely unmerited prospering over those who deserve their positions, they're one example among thousands of examples. The entire system has been turned on its head. Anyone with a brain can see what following the rules will get you, and if you want anything in this life there are tens of thousands of examples showing you that you need to be callous, criminal, ruthless, deceiving, and insane.
What do you do when you realize that following the rules gets you nothing but you know you don't have it in your character to be callous, criminal, ruthless, deceiving, and insane? You end up growing up with a mentality that you do not control your own destiny, callous criminal ruthless deceiving and insane people do.
I walk by a couple of well tended playgrounds on a regular basis here in Oak Ridge. They have baseball and soccer fields, basketball courts, and fairly standard (for today's world) swing sets, slides etc.
The fields and courts are practically never in use (95% of the time), during the week, after school hours, or on the weekends. The swingsets only ever have very small children (with their parents present always). The only time I ever see teenagers outside around town is the running team at the high school who run along the street immediately after school, but I noticed something pretty strange to me, a former avid outdoors runner- they always stop at the intersections with stop signs, and they stop at intersections with traffic lights and wait for the walk sign to change, even if no traffic is in sight. That is just bizarre behavior to me.
I would have killed to have a playground like here in Oak Ridge when I was growing up- my friends (literally all of them) and I would have been in it every single day rain or shine to play baseball, football, or basketball. Something has changed in the subsequent generations of children, and I see it in some of my much younger family members who live like hermits now.
Politically, they lean left
Everything else he describes as a problem, but Brooks doesn't see this as fundamental to the pattern.
Seriously, they ALL lean left. ALL of them?
And it's neither a cause nor an effect of the issues he describes?
NYTimes comments are something to see, Brooks writes an eminently reasonable opinion and the mob goes nuts. Bet you didn’t know that Trump ruined Gen z but it’s true , nytimes commenters all agree it’s the only cause
"bound to adopt self-protective codes of behavior"
Mostly by trying to control other people's behavior. Example: forcing others to use preferred pronouns, as a form of "self-protection," of course.
"But the sense of exaggerated menace has its downside"
Correct. Examples: systemic racism dooms black efforts at improvement, climate change dooms humanity at large--therefore, we must take drastic measure x. Progressivism depends on the cultivation of exaggerated menace.
"It’s always good to be on guard against a dangerous creep, but you may miss out on meeting the person who could be the love of your life."
Until he dumps you for some popsy his boss bought for him.
What a staggering lack of self-awareness. I guess it comes with the territory.
Helicoptered.
No cognizance of the NYT’s role in this.
"Hypercautious parenting" isn't responsible for cultural toxicity. The mass media is responsible.
Also, "leaning left" politically isn't responsible behavior.
Gen Zers will end the Republic. They are historically and economically ignorant children who may not be able to provide for themselves and certainly cannot defend the country.
They will likely find the CCP unsympathetic to their protests, demonstrations and need for safe spaces.
Hence the term "snowflake".
Why isn't Brooks' column titled "What our Toxic Culture -- that I have helped to develop -- Does to our Young"?
Yes, I helicoptered. In my defense my son’s first day of preschool was 9/11. Halfway through his second year of preschool Danielle Van Dam was abducted from her bedroom and later found murdered. Her house was a ten minute drive from our house.
It felt like the world was an extremely scary place.
As a parent of Generation Z children (Daughter born in 1999, Son in 2002), I could not believe the helicopter parenting my Generation X engaged in. Especially after we had so much freedom.
"Play dates" were organized by parents. Juice boxes and snacks at soccer and baseball practice. Kids were paraded on Facebook with victories only...
I wasn't assigned homework until 7th Grade. 1981-2. My kids had homework every day after school starting in FIRST GRADE. WTF? What were they doing in school all day?? When I was in grade school, you did the work in class, and then the teacher said "pass your paper forward". Remember? When school was done, we played.
If Generation Z in hypercautious, Generation Z and the public schools trained them to be that way.
One of the things I greatly dislike about David Brooks is the way he generalizes from the most preposterous assertions as though anyone should be able to see their fundamental truth.
Thank God that three of my grandchildren were raised by "normal" parents. They are heavily into sports, the oldest just finished her second year of college, and she told us that there is no sign of DIE she can see at U of Alabama. She is majoring in sports marketing and her boy friend is on the football team. Her mother has had a wonderful career in marketing so she is well prepared. The younger two are sports active and both are doing well.
This reads like newspaper-column Mad Libs.
#HateTrumpsLove
#HateLovesAbortion
Diversity is Congruent and Selective... There is a handmade tale that is brayed.
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one.
i just read Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation
by Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel
If you'd like to be Depressed about the future, and SAD for today's youth.. I'd recommend it
On the other hand
If you'd like to be GLAD, that you're going to be dead soon; and not have to witness this downfall..
I'd recommend it too.
We, as a culture; have LITERALLY* f*cked our children in the ass
LITERALLY* you think that i'm using literally in a figurative manner.. But No; i mean LITERALLY
I was enjoying this clip until I saw the dreaded words “David Brooks.”
David Brooks is a worthless Boomer.
His spawn are worthless Millennials.
Brooks is concerned about a "culture of distrust." Gee, I wonder if his employer (the New York Times) had anything to do with that.
I would be interested in comparing this with the mindset of teenagers/young adults that grew up around actual dangers. Articles like this make me think about the handful of people I've spoken with who lived through WWII, specifically England. One was a young 10 year old boy: "we thought it was a game" and the other was a 16-year-old girl: "our tennis courts were used to host anti-aircraft artillery".
I really don't know why Brooks has a job. He's a hack.
I'm the GenX parent of a couple of Millennials and a GenZ. I can promise that we did not exercise any sort of "hyper cautious parenting" - we encouraged reasonable risk taking with all of our children. It was their peers with Baby Boomer parents that were the problems. The GenX parented kids all seemed far more normal - until they got to a university or college. Then they because a bit whack.
I really don't know why Brooks has a job. He's a hack.
@Patrick Henry, that’s easy. Brooks is a lefty extremist’s idea of what a “proper” conservative ought to be.
speaking of overreactions...
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/covid-19-pandemic-is-no-longer-a-global-emergency-who/
COVID-19 is no longer a global emergency, World Health Organization confirmed on Friday.
The deadly virus was declared a global emergency over three years ago, however for the last year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend.
On Friday, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “life has been allowed to return to normal.”
This raises, The Important Question: WHAT EXCUSE will the dems use, for allowing vote by mail Now?
Clearly, The Only Way; that a demcrat can by elected is by harvesting imaginary votes.. So What NOW?
David Brooks and his ilk made the country a more dangerous place. He had the money to shelter his kids and then he criticizes regular folk for reacting to the rotten culture he enabled.
Life is certainly more dangerous now than it was when I was growing up in the 1970s. 100,000 people are dying each year from opioid overdoses/poisonings make it the leading cause of death for people ages 18-45. The digital pillory and the woke mob await anyone who strays from orthodoxy by tweeting the wrong thing or posting an errant video. We didn't have school shootings to worry about when I was in school, or pervs coming into the school in drag to proselytize. So yes, I would say that those parents were justified if they are "hypercautious" about parenting.
We have 7 Gen Z grandkids with Gen X parents. My wife and I were both born a few years after WW2. These grandkids all play/played middle school and high school sports, and worked summers after age 15 or so. The younger ones are outside a lot with friends doing whatever -- hoops, swimming, soccer. Sure, there's a bit of screen-time issue but by-and-large I don't see them growing up much differently than their parents.
Dangers? Decades ago I worked with a woman who, as a child, was burned out of her home in Dresden. The town was obliterated.
Cold War nuclear holocaust seemed ok to me after hearing her ordeals.
We had Nike Missile sites all around our city, as we were among the top ten targets of North America.
Relative?
ALP said, “ Articles like this make me think about the handful of people I've spoken with who lived through WWII, specifically England”
The one person I know was 6 and started smoking cigarettes while sitting in bomb shelters during the Blitz.
A bit of recklessness is a very good thing in most cases, especially when you are young. Risk taking and foolishness is how great things are accomplished. It is also how babies are often made, and that is a good thing.
I raised my two boys in the most haphazard and foolish manner. I also cooked breakfast and dinner for them every day, and we ate together as a matter of course. They have grown into pretty fearless and impressive young men. I can only credit them for who they are, but I doubt their upbringing hurt.
We live in a strange time. North Americans are healthier, wealthier, and freer than human beings have ever been anywhere, with a standard of living that would astonish someone from only a hundred years ago. And yet, many people, including many young people, believe it is all really an evil dystopian nightmare with grave dangers lurking in every corner, and the planet itself (which is 4.5 billion years old) in danger of imminent doom.
@Yancey Ward (10:15), when Child Protective Services show up at your door to label you a bad parent and take your kids away for letting them walk by themselves 3 blocks to a park then of course the parks will be underused. Think I’m exaggerating? Go read
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Lifestyle/free-range-parents-found-responsible-child-neglect-allowing/story?id=29363859
… and note the date.
Curious how Brooks acts like an outside observer rather than being a practitioner of the thing that he complains of.
We were very lucky to move to a neighborhood of about 200 houses in the Philadelphia suburbs (basically the tail end of the Main Line) when our kids were 7, 3, and 1. This neighborhood was like the ones where I grew up in the Midwest: acre lots, no fences, kids ran in packs, in the summer we didn't see them all day and past dark. The main difference for me was that I couldn't do my dad's piercing whistle to call them - but they had cellphones (eventually), so when they were old enough to stray too far for me to call by voice, I could call by phone.
Actually it's not true that no one saw them all day in the summer. At lunchtime, each little pack would descend on someone's house and be fed some kind of lunch. My oldest, 12-13 when I started leaving him in charge so I could go run my preschool half-day camp (followed by a couple more hours of admin work, so he was "babysitting" until 2-3, with a couple of work-from-home and homemaker neighbors on backup), described making mac and cheese for up to twelve kids some days. That kid, at 14, also goaded his 15yo friend into joy riding in his mom's Corvette - the lamest joy ride ever, they never broke 20mph and didn't leave the neighborhood. But they did it.
There were constant baseball games going on in the backyards in the summer, hockey practice in the driveways shooting at the garage doors in all seasons, sledding or even skiing or snowboarding down the hill encompassed by about four yards (one soft-hearted dad not only built snow ramps across driveways to create a second ski hill besides the one that ended in our yard on snow days or weekends, but also would drive the kids back to the top of it to save them the hike), crawfish hunts, incredible games of hide and seek and bloody murder, actual hockey games and just skating for fun on the frozen pond in winter while the parents drank beers around a bonfire on shore, and every friendly house got ding-dong-ditched on summer nights (as did a couple of unfriendly ones until we heard about it and told the kids not to go asking for trouble).
It was heaven.
It is my fond hope that my kids, having grown up in that place, will try to recreate it - and somehow will succeed. Hear that, God?
Oh, and in that Philly suburban neighborhood of mine there was more or less a remnant of a 1970 playground, including an all-metal, 10-foot-high spiral slide that we parents called the Corkscrew of Death. It's still there. One mom tried to get it taken out (she was one of the unfriendly ones for ding-dong-ditching), but she was overruled - too many people had happy memories of it.
Because - 200 houses, about 10 of which were inhabited by people who had grown up in that neighborhood and moved back with their families. That's a pretty high percentage for a modern suburb, seems to me.
Big Mike: "One of the things I greatly dislike about David Brooks is the way he generalizes from the most preposterous assertions as though anyone should be able to see their fundamental truth."
The perils of having to produce content at a regular clip but having nothing useful, insightful, relevant, clever or fun to say for the last 40 years.
We live in a strange time. North Americans are healthier, wealthier, and freer than human beings have ever been anywhere, with a standard of living that would astonish someone from only a hundred years ago. And yet, many people, including many young people, believe it is all really an evil dystopian nightmare with grave dangers lurking in every corner, and the planet itself (which is 4.5 billion years old) in danger of imminent doom.
I teach U.S. History. One of my main goals every year is to get the kids to understand this precise message. I teach several different lessons around it. When I teach about Ford and the Model T, I show pictures of dead horses lying in the streets with kids playing nearby. I talk about all the tons of feces and urine that horses produced in the cities, and how it turned into mud that people had to walk through. I talk about how during the summer the mud turned into dust that caused people who could to flee the city to avoid breathing. When we talk about the introduction of indoor plumbing I talk about the fairly recent introduction of toilet paper, and how Sears catalogs used to come with holes pre-punched through them so they could be hung in the outhouse.
I talk about child labor, and the fact that childhood for those above the age of five is a modern invention, and the luxury of attending school at least until the age of 18 unknown for many just a generation ago.
When they start bitching about how poor they are, or how bad their lives are, I tell them that as they are standing there in $250 tennis shoes, $1,000 phones with $150 air pods, gold chains and cups of $7 coffee they need to shut the Hell up and realize how good they have it.
The worst part of it for me is the fact that these kids have no idea of the bad times, and just how bad they can be. They see no need to worry about them or prepare for them.
Instant, and constant, gratification is their expectation.
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