[teekert]

Honestly, in my country (the Netherlands) this whole attitude changed within 1 generation. My parents left met largely alone with my school stuff. Now I hear all my friends complaining that their kid's school "is so much work" for them.

Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."

It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.

My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?

[fransje26]

Unless something drastically changed in the education system the last ten years, I wonder where all that perceived workload is coming from.

Because 10 years back, the homework load, as expressed by the post high-school students I was hanging around with, was significantly lower than in some other European countries.

[teekert]

Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. That's some serious amount of time, putting pressure on everything else.

I was always told: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of leisure. Sure, you have eating and commuting etc. But people nowadays have to take those 5+ hours attention they're giving away from somewhere.

[fransje26]

> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media.

I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.

> That's some serious amount of time

It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.

Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?

And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?

[rerdavies]

And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books?

Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible.

Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it.

Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia.

Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media.

It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.

[Cheer2171]

Come off it. These kids aren't spending that time reading Wikipedia, they're on social media platforms that optimize for engagement and gambling apps disguised as video games.

[autoexec]

> Watching television was much more toxic than digital media.

That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win.

TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.

[teekert]

Sure, my son enjoys high quality content like "Life on our planet", but he also has a Smartphone, which is much more addictive than a TV with, indeed, mediocre content. Moreover, all my friends were outside, on the streets, in the forest. Not so much right now.

[notachatbot1234]

Have you seen what children are doing on their phones? It's not sophisticated discourse on all human knowledge or reading informative articles. It's digital heroin, ads and rage content.

[sickofparadox]

There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.

[TeMPOraL]

> Unless something drastically changed in the education system the last ten years, I wonder where all that perceived workload is coming from.

In Europe? At least around here, in post-Soviet states, 10 years ago is about the time the first generation of people, who experienced the "good school -> good university -> good job" phenomenon on themselves, had kids reaching school age. The rat race is barely picking up steam over here; we're lagging a couple decades of social "progress" compared to our Western counterparts.

[belter]

Your attitude will change as soon as you have an obviously smart pre-adolescent or adolescent kid, going through puberty and other hard times that come before and after, and deciding to viscerally reject school and study, as proxy for other hard upsetting things they have to deal with as you become an adult.

You ready to let them mess up their future, in the name of not being called an helicopter parent?

[throwawaysleep]

> It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean)

At least in North America, this has massively changed within a generation. By a lot. Virtually all of my social circle got help at a young age to buy big houses from their parents. Parents support kids for much longer. Kids live with their parents much longer.

So yeah, the parents are now always there for people my age (mid 20s).

[wholinator2]

Damn, none of my friends can even afford a house now, and there's definitely no parental help with _purchasing a home_. That's such an insanely large amount of money. Parents might help with kids from time to time but monetary assistance ended the moment we first graduated.