[Maru]

That type of parenting you've specified Ashley really backfires imo, because then those parents are stuck "parenting" grown adults well into their 20's and early 30's... sadly, I have seen this with some of my peers. There are people older than me who have not moved out of the home, and make every excuse for lack of independence... I think it comes at the cost of their mental health in long-run...

I think some autonomy is better, relative to age obviously... but it helps to give children a chance to develop healthy codependency (which they'll need later to form social connections)... versus children who become sheltered and are expecting to have their decisions... boundaries are very important to instill too between parent and child...

The US lifestyle in general does tend to mean we are more often coddling kids at the expense of society... there was an article I read recently... will have to search for it again. But one comparison... in places in Europe, kids are allowed to walk to the store... that doesn't really happen all that much here, especially if the kids are raised middle class and higher.. it's been culturally ingrained over the past few decades for parents to fear every possible thing that could go wrong... so while my neighborhood when I was growing up, we would walk to the shops and we were a bit more "fearless" as children... many suburbs now look like ghost towns here because parents are simply afraid to take the chance and people have become unnecessarily paranoid imo...

It isn't very good, especially when we don't really have public transportation the way that Europe has it or certain areas of the country... everything is by car, so it just puts more strain on the parents. Moreover, we tend to have larger homes and as a result, much more privacy... so very easy for a child to go into their bedroom and just hide out for an entire summer... I remember going outside all the time when I was younger... but when I have kids, I worry about that because it has become so ingrained in our culture to be overprotective... my allowing kids more reign, like walking down the block... without parents who are on board, they'll have to do it alone and it's not really possible when people call the law here in suburbs for every silly reason... and then add in things like Nextdoor where people publicly shame parents/individuals for doing things that social deems "taboo"... is it even worth it with that taken into consideration?

I think the trend will go backwards as the next generation comes into the realization that with social media creating a lot of anxieties for the younger generation, and our tendency to be so easily manipulated by fear-mongering... something will have to give there with the rise in mental health problems for our younger folk... imo.

To my benefit, I live in a tropical climate with ample sunlight year-round. That can be a major boon for our local culture and I think it does help people to get more people outdoors... and with a higher minority pop, there's a more relaxed culture that does tend to focus around the families and neighborly get togethers... so my neighborhood is much more social as a result...

Anyway, food for thought... obviously consider my locale.

Related:

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ration/534198/

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.” She finally got her license six months after her 18th birthday. In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

Oh good, I found that article... you might find it interesting, Ashley

How cultures around the world think about parenting
https://ideas.ted.com/how-cultures-a...out-parenting/

Craziness? Culture. In Japan, where Gross-Loh lives part of the year, she lets her 4-year-old daughter run errands with her 7-year-old sister and 11-year-old brother — without parental supervision. Her kids don’t hesitate to take the Tokyo subways by themselves and walk on busy streets alone, just like their Japanese peers. But when she comes back to the States, Gross-Loh doesn’t allow the same.

“If I let them out on their own like that in the U.S., I wouldn’t just get strange looks,” she says. “Somebody would call Child Protective Services.”

Both in Japan and Norway, parents are focused on cultivating independence. Children do things alone early, whether it’s walking to school or to the movies. The frames, however, are different. In Scandinavia, there is an emphasis on a democratic relationship between parents and children. In Sweden especially, the “rights” of a child are important. For example, a child has the “right” to access their parents’ bodies for comfort, and therefore should be allowed into their parents’ bed with them in the middle of the night. If a parent doesn’t allow them, they are both denying them their rights and being a neglectful parent. In parts of Asia, meanwhile, co-sleeping with a family member through late childhood is common. Korean parents spend more time holding their babies and having physical contact than most. But within a family, obedience is key — not democracy.

“We’re supposed to be raising our children to leave us,” she says. “They must develop self-reliance and resourcefulness and resilience, which is a challenge, because we must allow our children to make mistakes.”

I would've loved that lifestyle as a young'un ... I'm hugely independent... but very nurturing... will be a weird mix as a parent Lawnmower definitely parenting wouldn't work for me... I think the last paragraph in one of your quotes, Ashley, is quite sad... but it doesn't have to be at that extreme for a young to become emotionally stunted... maybe even semi-permanently.

Lawnmower parents are compared to the gardening tool because they cut down any obstacle that could stand in their child’s way. Notably, this is a parent who may no longer have the ability or access to remove their child from a problematic situation, therefore they do their “mowing” from a distance.

“At the college level, the physical presence required to hover may be limited, so we are now observing a different parenting style,” Karen Fancher, a professor at Duquesne University’s School of Pharmacy, wrote in the Pittsburgh Mom Blog. “These are the parents who rush ahead to intervene, saving the child from any potential inconvenience, problem or discomfort.”