How you feel about the children of today?

[Dju]

Yeah, we all heard about these sort of thing at least once in our life time. I'm actually growing tired of this sort of talk, but I never really discussed it with someone, just heard complaints.

There are complaints about the so called "new generation" since Socrates walked the Earth and even before that, maybe because when we are kids the world looks perfect and we just can't notice our behavior and when we grow up, we realize how others offspring can be...noisy. But I often hear young people having bad impressions of the upcoming generation (they call it 'Y', for some reason) so maybe it is something worth looking more into rather than admitting that it's all natural. Do you think the new conditions offered to parents in raising their children are not the best they can be? 3 year old holding Ipads might be a problem to their creativity and development? Is the problem with this generation of parents or the constant amount of information showered at these children? Or is nothing wrong at all, maybe the problem is in fact in our heads and there always be complaints? If you're a parent, do you think television/adds/toys get in your way far too often when it comes to raising your child?

I wish to make some notes myself but I'd rather wait for the actual discussion to start. XD

oh, and here, have a gif because gifs are fun. :3

SPOILER: Click to show

[Coaster]

I think the behaviour in general is pretty similar; from what I can tell, it's mostly the quality of technology that's changed since I was a kid. (You know, back when games were just coming out of the 8-bit era and phones were still mounted on the wall.) I did see Angry Birds kids' shampoo at the store today, and that caught me a bit off-guard, but it's no weirder than the Winnie The Pooh shampoo that was around when I was a young'un.

If anything, I'm more alarmed by the (at least seemingly) wider gap between parenting styles--everything from outright and frequent abuse to the saying-no-to-your-kid-is-suppressive mentality. Again, though, it's probably just the same as it was "back in my day" (like, what, 10 years ago?) except with more awareness and higher technology.

[Jacob]

I say we should be taking cues from Star Trek and how they tend to handle upbringing with the fact technology and understanding have not only taken care of a lot of our issues, but also made our world completely transparent. People being able to communicate with folk 1000's of miles away by touching a button on their chest just to say lol? Continually ordering cakes and candies from the replicator? Spending too much time in the holodeck playing Warcraft 12?

But really, technology and communication is greater than ever, and only going to get better (that is if government keeps their hands off it). It used to be that those with wisdom and understanding were the elderly, because they experienced more than the young. Now any kid with a computer and Internet connection can learn what the elderly know and then some. I like this, because culture is capable of reaching a point of equilibrium all the faster. We just have a lot more, "kids these days," moments before that happens.