People are admitting that these 15 parenting trends need to end ‘immediately’ |
After politics and religion, parenting might be one of the most hotly-debated topics online. Parents get super passionate about the differences between gentle and authoritative parenting or how parents interact with teachers. It’s not hard to find people with strong opinions about parents sharing photos of their children on social media, allowing them to use screens at a young age, or their diets.
Parenting touches on many social, political, and cultural issues, so it makes sense that people are passionate about the topic. Further, our kids all have to play together at school, so we have to live with the consequences of other people’s parenting decisions.
A Redditor posed a question on the AskReddit subforum: What’s a modern parenting trend that needs to die immediately? And over 2400 people responded with the contemporary trends they’d prefer to end sooner rather than later. Many of them are concerned about how children are affected by technology, including social media, AI, and tablets. Others are concerned that modern children are far too sheltered and need to be challenged so they aren’t eaten alive when they enter the adult world.
The roundup includes some complaints about modern parents, but many of the responses offer good food for thought. Parents can easily get caught up in prevailing ideas of the time, before it’s too late to course-correct. So there’s nothing wrong with a bit of thoughtful criticism to make sure that we’re all doing right by our kids.
15 parenting trends people want to end now
1. Kids on social media
“Kids’ Instagram accounts.”
“Or Facebooks. Any social media, really. There were a few parents I knew had Facebooks for their kids as online “dairies.” They were public and shared almost every detail of the kids’ lives up until they either gave up on them or deleted them. Bonkers.”
“I’ve long since lost touch with them but I knew someone who started a Facebook page for her unborn child. She had pictures of her ultrasounds on it and would write posts in the tone of her unborn child along the lines of ‘mommy I can’t wait to be born and come meet you.’”
2. Kids need unsupervised play
“Heard an interesting segment on a radio program recently about how children NEED unsupervised, unstructured play (ideally outside with other kids). Helicopter parenting and turning every activity into organized competition is robbing kids of important developmental skills and independence.”
One of the most significant problems in the modern world, where kids’ lives are overly structured, parents are involved in........