| Spilt milk? I don't think it is all lost. I think the solution is to start reverting it from TODAY. Educating children has always been tough, but it used to be the case that for a parent to fight against the other influences their kids had growing up meant to be against a few friends. And making sure that their kids resonated with the parents values instead of the "bad influences" ones used to be a full time job. It would have been UNTHINKABLE for me and my peers to do some of the shit teenagers find acceptable today to another kid. And that was thanks to the values our parents gave us. We were not special. We were the average kid being raised 30 years ago. In the age of social media, a modern parent is up against hundreds of video hours of the Andrew Tates of the world, the manosphere, the crypto grifters, the gym bros, the makeup divas, the get rich quick scams, etc... All examples of a society compensating rubbish ideas. Hundreds of thousands of examples of people doing the wrong things, and staying on top and being granted lambos, and money and fame. If you are a parent (not you personally, generic you) your job us to scream louder than all that influence. To spend every single minute, every single ounce of energy telling your kids that all that shit is not ok. That doing the wrong thing is not ok even if it nets positive to you. And lead by example. That independently of your political views, the recent behaviour of elected officials is not acceptable. That those influencers are in the wrong. That they are not examples to follow. You need to stay on top of all that. You need to make them clear that all that people they are constantly exposed to are despicable human beings and that this behaviour at scale would be our global doom. If they get all that from 4 hours of instagram and facebook a day, 30 minutes of daily parenting is not going to cut it. You need to be the biggest influence. And if you are not doing that, sorry, you are a shitty parent, and I blame you for the current state of our younger generations' principles. If you are too busy with your life to scream louder than the rest of the influences, you should have thought twice what kind of resources (time in this case) you had before having a kid. This is an education problem. And I think we are beyond tactical wins to reduce harm. Either we start taking responsibility collectively as a society, or this cannot be fixed with laws, and rules, and age checking OSs and porn ID checks. In a society where your average fellow citizen is a Karen, or a gym bro, or political or religious fanatic that cannot name 3 continents, then it follows that their kids are going to have the same level of literacy, critical thinking, empathy and ideas. |