One of my last posts on Reddit was related to this. I frequented the r/teachers sub because I’m a teacher. But I hated that sub. So many burnout educators blaming parents, and only parents, for their students’ poor behavior. There was always a thread about “why are kids so poorly behave nowadays!?” The main complaint about parents was the letting smartphones raise their kids. But like you said, they miss the point entirely.
To paraphrase myself, there is a clear through line that links poor parenting skills to economic precarity and social atomization. Parenting takes a lot of physical and emotional energy. If you’re overworked, under-employed, worried about the next paycheck, uncertain about the future, or whatever AND you have a precision engineered, scientifically perfected, rectangular instrument of distraction in your pocket at all times it’s no wonder to me kids’ social/emotional needs are being neglected. Overworked parents in ages past might turn to the bottle. Now we’re all overworked and our liquor cabinets fit in the palm of our hands.
Liberal teachers love to complain that parents are too entitled now. Parents want teachers and schools to solve their kids’ problems, prepare them for the future, protect them from the scary real world, to raise their kids, blah blah blah. Teachers complain, but continue to show up to school day after day because they’re stuck in the same precarity as the parents. But even they know, deep down, that it shouldn’t be this hard to raise children. They just can’t figure out why it’s so hard.
Absolutely.
I don’t think I articulated my point about parents being entitled well enough. I assume their entitlement is born out of an unconscious understanding that child rearing requires community support. But we are so atomized by capital infused lifestyles that some parents seem very entitled when their kids enter school. I think that us educators have to realize that school is, for some of parents, their first interaction in their adult lives with community support. So we get parents who want us to raise their children because they might be exhausted by their own efforts. They’re trying to impart the labor of child rearing onto the education system. And I don’t blame them at all for that. That entitled behavior can be very negative though.
In a sane society, we would attempt unburden the education system by providing housing, free childcare, walkable neighborhoods, health insurance, etc.