Radar Identified wrote:ManlyMinute wrote:I even believe video games help people cognively progress. Any takers?
Yeah, I'll take this one on. I've got a Psych degree. Playing video games incessantly and spending a lot of time on the computer has been linked to higher rates of ADHD.
Incidentally, if you volunteer, good for you, but don't assume that none of us volunteer, or make significant contributions to society. This post and thread is nothing personal, so don't take it that way.
Marquisse pretty much summed up what I'm seeing right here:
Marquisse wrote:Many of the techie generation and beyond suffer from Entitlement Elephantitis, and are far beyond any help your local rugby team volunteers may offer. However, by far the most interesting to me is how they want to be President and CEO in their entry-level positions, and get miffed when they are sent fetching coffee, indignant that their English Lit degree hasn't offered them the corner office. I will give them this though, they have created a new texting language because it was just too darned frustrating to communicate in proper English. Kudos on that.....who's lazy again?
In my opinion, technology itself isn't the problem. It's the way society has decided to raise the next generation. Technology is great, but it's no substitute for parenting, and getting them regular exercise.
ManlyMinute wrote:Usually when people have an issue about something and like to complain about it, I like to ask those people what they're doing about it.
Well that's good, trying to get people to solve a problem. Everyone has to take responsibility for themselves, and for raising their kids... and what hwybear expressed in the original post that started this pissing contest was that a lot of parents are not. And, the problem is, you can't really go over and parent someone else's kid for them. I can lead a horse to water but I can't make it drink.
We're all dragged down by their lack of parenting, though. Society does not benefit from having people who are lazy, immature and have no sense of responsibility, but an inflated sense of entitlement, try to take the reins to lead us into the future.
Marquisse wrote:Speaking of having to figure things out ourselves and maturing, Radar Identified, my cousin went to war with a cab company because her 24 year old was so drunk one night that she couldn't take money out of her ATM, so the cabbie took her iPod as payment. Rather than cousin's daughter call and fight it herself, her mother did for her! At 24, she is old enough to put out her own fires.
This is exactly what I was referring to in parents fighting their kids battles for them. At 24, she's more than old enough to deal with that. Good grief. No offence to your cousin, but WTF?!
Awesome response.
I'm 24. I grew up in one of very few households with Internet - both of my parents are academics and affiliated with the local university, which offered dial-up in the early 90s. We've always had several computers and many games.
With that in mind, I was incorrectly diagnosed as having ADD as a child but it turned out that i just had an exceptionally high IQ and school activities were not intellectually stimulating enough to keep me from being bored.
I did a lot of volunteering, participated in sports, rebelled against authority, played road hockey, rode my bicycle everywhere, played the occasional video game and watched a bit of TV, with millions more activities in between.
Today I fight my own battles and (like to think) I make good decisions for ONE reason and ONE alone:
Parenting.
My parents understood the value in not giving me everything I wanted all the time. There was discipline and a very strong sense of authority with them. I couldn't bargain with them and once a decision was made, I was unable to argue with it (no matter how good I was at arguing).
Don't get me wrong, I had everything I needed, but my parents understood that they knew better about what I needed than I did, and were not afraid to say no to me.
When I got myself into trouble, my parents guided me on the correct course of action. If I was wrong, they told me why they would not support my actions and would often punish me accordingly. If I was victimized, they took my side only after it became obvious that it wasn't by some fault of my own, but if I was able to fight the battle myself, they often let me.
Now that I'm a little bit older, some of my friends and family members are starting to have kids, and it seems so bizarre to observe people bargaining with their kids, or treating a 2-year-old like an adult and trying to reason with them, giving them more authority than they know what to do with.
Currently, I'm entrusted to make important decisions for my family, but if I mess up, the onus lies on me to correct my actions. Responsibility/accountability has been a running theme in my personal experience.
I absolutely blame the parents for I'd say probably 80+% of behavioural issues that arise in today's youth.
In fact, some of the uber-spoiled kids that I envied (and who probably made fun of me) when I was younger, are incapable of doing anything for themselves now, or live in a perpetual sense of entitlement, and have the idea that everyone/society/the world owes them things.
At the end of the day, as much as kids need to be creative and express themselves effectively, they crave structure at a young age. The problem is simply that they are too young to know that. They WANT play time all the time, but what they need is some sense of structure. An excellent way to gain this sense of structure is through sports, proper scheduling, some rules, and consequences for inappropriate behaviour. Play is important but it should not dominate any person's life.
Anyway, that's my opinion FWIW. I like to think I'm a pretty well-balanced young person, and this has been my interpretation of why.[/u][/i]
