American Kids Still The Worst
Children, according to “Life at Home,” are disproportionate generators of clutter: “Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a family’s inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone.” Many of the kids’ rooms pictured are so crowded with clothes and toys, so many of which have been tossed on the floor, that there is no path to the bed. (One little girl’s room contains, by the authors’ count, two hundred and forty-eight dolls, including a hundred and sixty-five Beanie Babies.) The kids’ possessions, not to mention their dioramas and their T-ball trophies, spill out into other rooms, giving the houses what the authors call “a very child-centered look.”
—Nothing especially new in this Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker piece on the shitshow that is American parenting, but it’s still totally worth a read for anthropological observations of the phenomenon. We suck so much.
My favorite part of the article is where they slyly mentioned how much better the French are at raising children who are not incompetent brats. The French: doing everything better since the dawn of time.
What is up with American’s big chip on their shoulder about France?
Also: Jesus Christ. I don’t think I had that many toys and clothing in my entire childhood. Though I was more of a book kid. I still didn’t own that many books (I have more than made up for that in adulthood).
@Megano! People in France appear to be happy and get full enjoyment out of life without turning into fat, depressed, lonely basketcases whose children hate them. Nevermind whether this is true! The very existence of the French feeds into all of our insecurities.
I don’t know, but it irks me to no end. Am I really supposed to believe that, in addition to being ultra stylish and eating croissants without getting fat, French women magically raise perfect children? I don’t buy it.
And shouldn’t this article be titled “American Parents Still the Worst?” Terrible kids are the direct result of terrible parents (i.e. those who buy their children hundreds of toys.)
@elysian fields They might raise better children, but in my experience French teenagers/20ish year olds are the wooooorst. Their education system makes little French robots who cannot possibly imagine how one can take notes without three different coloured pens and a ruler to ensure perfectly straight lines.
Oh, wonderful. Yet another article about how horrible American kids and parents are. “Nothing especially new” in the hip fashionable world of people who read New Yorker and pride themselves on ‘anthropological observations’ of that strange and foreign phenomenon called ‘parenting’.
Indeed, what better way to illustrate the sheer tendentiousness than by comparing “life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles” with that of a third world country. Why, the similarities are so apt! Nowhere within America (or, at least, in 32 families in Los Angeles) will you find a child so ‘self-possessed’. The author had to fly all the way to France to witness the perfection of parenting from those svelte, well rested beacons of familial skill.
Yes, it’s true. We could learn much here in America about raising kids. The first thing would be to ignore any advice from people who write books the the words “Authentic Success” in the title.
I always find these pieces really interesting, but also really frustrating. There’s nary a mention of the amount of privilege and financial stability that has to exist before most of these worst-case scenarios can happen; there’s a world of difference between giving up on getting kids to do chores because you don’t have the time to chase after them and make them do it right, having the time to do or re-do your kid’s homework or projects every single night, and having the disposable cash necessary to sue your kid’s school over a failing grade. Do families with parents who lack that kind of time and money still end up with kids that amount of spoiled?
@allreb
The short answer is probably, “no.” It costs a lot of money to raise an entitled little boor.
@allreb I would agree that this is mostly a problem of the overly privileged, but not always. My husband’s much younger half-siblings are being raised by parents with very little time and very little money, and while they are not entitled brats per se, they are completely sheltered and helicoptered, to the point where they can hardly function. Both parents work full time, but the kids (ages 7-15) are not expected to do any chores, nor even read quietly or play outside unsupervised. As a result they seem much younger than they actually are, and I sincerely worry about what will happen to them once they get into the real world.
This is really interesting, because I’m currently seeing the results of an anthropological study right in my own home. My boyfriend’s parents divorced when he was young and he and his brother were raised by his mother and grandparents, who expected a lot from him as far as helping out, let him have an enormous amount of autonomy etc. His dad remarried and had two more kids, who from the sounds of it had their butts wiped until they were 18.
Now? My boyfriend and his full brother both went to good universities, and now his brother is a doctor and he’s hugely successful professionally.
His half brother didn’t really properly graduate from high school, and now at age 22 he’s moved out of his parents home for the FIRST TIME and is living with my boyfriend. He doesn’t know how to do laundry, use any basic appliances, write a CV, or even SEND A LETTER.