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Kids Today

I'd just shoot him. No need to ask why.

Problem solved.
 
Some people have been watching too much Breaking Bad.
 
Greylien,

Still doing Brubeck impersonations ?
 
At face value, this appears to be an overly elaborate approach to simply running away.
Teen girl sneaks into small plane, drives it into fence

A 17-year-old girl was arrested Wednesday after authorities say she sneaked into a small plane at an airport in central California and drove it into a chain-link fence.

The teenager breached the fence of Fresno Yosemite International Airport, started up the plane and crashed it into a fence, airport spokeswoman Vikkie Calderon told The Fresno Bee.

Airport officials said officers found the teen in the pilot’s seat, wearing the pilot’s headset.

No one was injured. No passenger planes were in danger, Calderon said.

The teen was arrested on suspicion of theft of an aircraft. She will be booked into the juvenile hall after officers finish questioning her.

The girl’s mother told Fresno news station KFSN-TV that she hadn’t heard from her daughter since Tuesday night.
SOURCE: https://apnews.com/730bb62c320d0890a8a0f303c261a4d6
 
I can't help feeling a bit concerned for young people sometimes. Walking on the beach at the weekend, I heard a father having a conversation with a small child on his shoulders. He was saying that you couldn't make nature safe and that it wasn't supposed to be safe. Where is such a young child getting the idea that the beach is not safe? A few months ago I also overheard another child, a little older maybe 8 or 9, explaining to his older brother that he shouldn't be thrown into the sea as he had to look after his mental health. How did they get so worried about everything?
 
I can't help feeling a bit concerned for young people sometimes. Walking on the beach at the weekend, I heard a father having a conversation with a small child on his shoulders. He was saying that you couldn't make nature safe and that it wasn't supposed to be safe. Where is such a young child getting the idea that the beach is not safe? A few months ago I also overheard another child, a little older maybe 8 or 9, explaining to his older brother that he shouldn't be thrown into the sea as he had to look after his mental health. How did they get so worried about everything?
Just take a look at the headlines in the newspapers and the news on TV... if the destruction of our climate, the growth of international terrorism, economic collapse, the growing number of murders and other violent crimes (most fuelled by drink and drugs), political unrest, spread of diseases, pollution, poverty, and the dumbing down of our media, don't give reason for worry -- then what does?
 
We're actually living in safer times than we realise, though the climate is a pressing concern, but the prevailing mood is one of anger stoked by social media. You get comfortable, you find something to get angry about, seems to be the pattern. Fortunately, channelling the hatred online is about the extent of it - it's when people are guided by it IRL that it's a worry.
 
Nothing is worse, the world's always had awful shit going on. We just hear about it all now.
I think that's essentially true. The Internet and social media enable us to see the world, warts 'n all.
Before, we were kept blissfully ignorant.
Politicians don't like it as their every failing and indiscretion is exposed on a daily basis.
 
I think that's essentially true. The Internet and social media enable us to see the world, warts 'n all.
Before, we were kept blissfully ignorant.
Politicians don't like it as their every failing and indiscretion is exposed on a daily basis.

Not just politicians - everyone's failings are obsessed over. If we could just accept we're all fallible then that could be the basis for progress. Hark at me - the idealist!
 
Just take a look at the headlines in the newspapers and the news on TV... if the destruction of our climate, the growth of international terrorism, economic collapse, the growing number of murders and other violent crimes (most fuelled by drink and drugs), political unrest, spread of diseases, pollution, poverty, and the dumbing down of our media, don't give reason for worry -- then what does?
That is not what they were worried about though. It is more fundamental than that. They should be able to walk (or be carried) on the beach or throw each other into the sea without being worried about health and safety or their mental health. I wonder if children are being so over-protected now that it is just making them fragile?
 
That is not what they were worried about though. It is more fundamental than that. They should be able to walk (or be carried) on the beach or throw each other into the sea without being worried about health and safety or their mental health. I wonder if children are being so over-protected now that it is just making them fragile?

Do you mean that idea that kids get so many allergies now because they're not allowed to go out and play and get dirty and bolster their immune systems? Could that be applied to their mental health as well?
 
I asked for a show or hands from a (small) class of ten-year-olds: not one had climbed a tree.

I'm resigned to the fact that the world is and will continue to become quite a different place to the one I grew up with, and I appreciate that these were city kids and I had a semi-rural childhood, but this surprised me and troubled me slightly.

Also, swimming in the sea: increasingly not a thing parents let kids do.
 
Do you mean that idea that kids get so many allergies now because they're not allowed to go out and play and get dirty and bolster their immune systems? Could that be applied to their mental health as well?
Yes, I think so.
 
Those of us trapped in the system have no alternative other than to try to increase the awareness of young people about dangers. If we don't, we may find ourselves paying a high price personally. Potential litigation, especially of the opportunistic no-win, no-fee variety, means we can not supervise a class with the complacent confidence that most kids are made out of rubber. We are meant to foresee problems. God help us, when multiple problems within an environment require repeated warnings . . .

Bear in mind that the majority of kids* now come from homes where mom or dad play on their phones, rather than look out for them.

I am reminded of the Victorian attitude to child-insurance. It got banned as a far too easy way to make money. :(

*A hard statistic to verify but it should be easy to illustrate, if it were legal to do so.
 
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Do you mean that idea that kids get so many allergies now because they're not allowed to go out and play and get dirty and bolster their immune systems? Could that be applied to their mental health as well?

Yes and yes.

Over the decades I've been struck by how frequently and how substantially the children of my generational peers - most all of whom were raised in circumstances far more "hyper-hygienic" (both figuratively and literally ... ) than I - have been afflicted by allergies, syndromes, and disorders that weren't even recognized as specific issues when I was a kid. Now that I (and my peers) are old enough to see the second following generation the situation seems to be every bit as evident, if not worse.

I associate the key pivot point with the very late 1970s into the early 1980s. This was the time when members of my "boomer" generation were hitting their strides vocationally / financially and finally settling down to start and raise families. I found it strange that friends and similarly-aged relatives approached parenting in a manner akin to adopting a new hobby or undertaking a project. They obsessed about getting everything "right" and ensuring their children always had a maximally safe and enriched environment. Examples of this mania ranged from micro-managing the child's daily schedule to subscribing the child to all sorts of activities to keeping the entire house as clean as an operating theater.

It appeared to me the kids had lots of toys and social activities, but very little personal / alone time. They did a lot, but they didn't personally develop at a concomitant rate or extent. In effect, they were brought up as relatively passive little consumers who rarely had to adapt, be creative, fend for themselves, or deal with resistance or adversity.

The two most common deficiencies I've perceived are (a) a relatively low degree of self-development (i.e., generation of one's singular and own personality and personal style) and (b) an utter lack of imaginative capacity because they were constantly bombarded with face-value / explicit cues and never had to creatively generate their own games and stories.

Very generally speaking ... I see the same problem in both the physical / medical and the psychological / emotional dimensions. One learns from adversity, pure and simple. Smooth sailing is never informative and never educational. This is a general principle I've leveraged for decades in my own vocation(s), and it's a cornerstone of certain methodologies for which I'm credited as the originator.

Insulating kids from failures / troubles cannot help but insulate them from some (or at least some degree) of life's most critical learning experiences. This applies to their bodies (e.g., immune systems) as well as their minds and psyches.
 
By the time they reach 16, 50% of UK kids will have seen their parents divorce.

(The only reasons that divorce rates seem to be falling are that (a) the rate of marriage is falling, and (b) the divorce courts are backlogged).

More than nine times out of ten, mum will get custody.

82.4% (and rising) of primary school teachers are female.

l shan’t even touch on issues of curriculum and p*l*t*cs.

Being raised in an all-female environment is not conducive to being encouraged to participate in “risky” activities.

maximus otter
 
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That is not what they were worried about though. It is more fundamental than that. They should be able to walk (or be carried) on the beach or throw each other into the sea without being worried about health and safety or their mental health. I wonder if children are being so over-protected now that it is just making them fragile?
I agree that the children on that occasion weren't worried about all those major issues (although it must create a background sense that the world is a dangerous place), but their parents obviously were, and even if they don't verbally instruct their offspring what to fear the emotion can be sensed and absorbed, as it is with prejudices of various kinds. Now, I'm not so sure about being allowed to throw each other into the sea though...
 
By the time they reach 16, 50% of UK kids will have seen their parents divorce.

(The only reasons that divorce rates seem to be falling are that (a) the rate of marriage is falling, and (b) the divorce courts are backlogged).

More than nine times out of ten, mum will get custody.

82.4% (and rising) of primary school teachers are female.

l shan’t even touch on issues of curriculum and p*l*t*cs.

Being raised in an all-female environment is not conducive to being encouraged to participate in “risky” activities.

maximus otter
All very relevant points. I spent 5 years doing playwork, which was mostly a very enjoyable job, and it was a shock to me that out of a staff of 50+ in that "1st and middle" school, there were only four males -- two teachers, the site superintendant (i.e. janitor) and me! Luckily the lady who ran the after school club made the same point that you do, that an all female environment is unhealthy for the children, so she always looked to get male staff if she could. Another issue came up during the health and safety training that we received (and we had to take a worst case viewpoint for every possible source of harm and eliminate it) which was that in that London borough we weren't allowed to put plasters on children's injuries in case they were allergic to them. Obviously we knew from the parents which children did have allergies, and I never knew a child that wouldn't tell you not to put a plaster on if they were allergic or even just didn't like them, so I thought the dangers of letting them wander around with open wounds far outweighed any dangers. I sought advice from all the top authorities (BMA etc.) and received unequivocal backing for use of plasters. When I was discussing this with the local head of playwork, she remarked that her team had got the "no plasters" advice from just one particular lady "expert". She said, "I thought she was a bit strange because she told us that if children received a possibly fatal injury, we should always tell them that they were dying..."
 
A tad bizarre.

A group of teenagers entered a hospital in Naples and forced staff to drive an ambulance to a nearby neighbourhood to attend a boy suffering a minor knee sprain, Italian doctors say.

The boys targeted an emergency ward in the city centre to demand their friend be collected for urgent treatment. The incident on Sunday was reported on a Facebook page established by doctors to highlight violence against staff. It is not clear if the teenagers had initially tried to call an ambulance.

"A group of boys entered the emergency room and took the crew by force... to board the ambulance," the Facebook post by the group Nobody Touches Hippocrates reads.

"The vehicle arrived at the location and was immediately surrounded by a group of angry bystanders. Fearing the worst, the [doctors] made their way through the crowd and, to their surprise, found a 16-year-old boy with a knee sprain."

According to the Facebook report (in Italian), the ambulance staff explained to those at the scene that the boy's injury was not serious, but were then threatened again for refusing to transport him to hospital.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51006756
 
They're acting a bit 'entitled' aren't they? :)
 
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