Parenting Has Gotten Worse.

But we don't like to acknowledge this fact -- because we might be telling on ourselves.

This one is a complicated topic and every person’s interaction with said topic is very different based on their age, generation, upbringing, belief in success markers, whether they’re a parent or not, etc. I will try to paint the edges here as best I can. And yes, my own sperm is slow and I can’t impregnate my wife and she probably resents me deeply for it and that does color some of my writing, absolutely. I’d admit that upfront for anyone.

Let’s start with a David French column

French has done some good work since he went to New York Times, as an aside. Better work than a lot of their op-ed columnists.

In that column, he’s talking about gender differences and parenting and whatnot, and this part stands out:

But whenever we lament “kids these days,” it’s always important to look at parents. And Generation Z is in many ways the product of Generation X parenting trends that substituted the extraordinary freedom of our own upbringings with a stage-managed childhood that inhibited free play, discouraged independent conflict resolution and channeled much of childhood into a series of micromanaged activities that help build glittering college applications but deprive kids of much of the spontaneous joy and fellowship of youth.

Yes.

The most ironic thing about people saying “kids these days” is that the people who say that are usually the parents or grandparents of those kids.