Support Loss

Sad reading about kids and their mental health crisis. Depending on how its measured, it seems like girls and boys get disproportionate coverage. Boys being left behind in school, not going to college in the same proportion as girls and generally being lost in their 20s and 30s is talked about a fair bit. But how they cope with social media generated peer pressure and anxiety is likely not covered as much. This problems girls have to contend with is depicted as the bigger more urgent one to solve. Increasingly families are on their own as far as outcomes for their kids. Used to be a village that raised kids - extended family, friends, neighbors, school and more. 

Those sources of support are not what they used to be. I see parents with younger kids try to do it all themselves. If its a two-parent household then there are well-defined pick-up, drop-off duties to make sure the kid is able to be in daycare for the parents' aggregate workday. There is not much support available from the grandparent generation in most cases because those folks are still working and not able to retire. They don't feel financially secure quite yet. The public school system seems to have gone through a great crisis of identity during the pandemic and coming out on the other side they haven't sorted out what role they are meant to play in the lives of their students in the time of AI for everything, where homework and testing to standards is largely irrelevant. What does knowledge even mean what should education be about. 

While these questions are being sorted, chaos reigns supreme and kids are not being served well. So only the parents can save them if they have time, capacity and the ability to do that. Even without the bane of social media, these would be incredibly challenging times to be a parent:

Children and teens were finding the normal challenges of growing up “totally distorted” by the pressures of social media, the rise of the influencer and the 24-hour nature of communication, said de Souza. “In many ways I’m worried that we’ve gone backwards as a society,” she said.

But wider social norms and outdated structural systems, such as parental leave entitlements, were letting both girls and boys down, said Joeli Brearley, a maternity discrimination campaigner and host of the To Be A Boy podcast. “Something is going badly wrong,” she said. “The old systems don’t stand any more, but this generation needs help and support to create a society that doesn’t leave them feeling like they are looking into the abyss.”