100% agreed. Turning a parent a few years ago, has completely changed my personal experience of car-dependent cities, from a more intellectual curiosity into why it came to be, to something that I feel innately as a great malevolent force. Technology is not divorced from value-systems, and car-technology is inherently sociopathic.
> Where were the grandparents and extended families that could watch a kid so that they don’t have to go to daycare?
It's heartbreaking really.
> When that toddler turns to a teen, how has our world of “share this” and “retweets” that changed our sense of truths affect that teen?
While I have an unbridled confidence in my children, I still worry about their teen years. Adolescence has always been hard, how much harder will it be for them, with pervasive social media, and rudderless and overwhelmed adults at the helm.
Yeah, I remember the early years of Wired magazine, and buying into the idea of technology being value-neutral. And it's not. And this has been observed before. Marshall McLuhan lived through mass-electrification, broadcast radio and TV and talked about it extensively with "the medium is the message".
> Adolescence has always been hard, how much harder will it be for them, with pervasive social media, and rudderless and overwhelmed adults at the helm.
I have a teenage stepdaughter and got a view into how destructive social media has been -- close contact with behavioral hospitals. It's worse than the reports about teenage girls having low self-esteem and have suicidal ideation. My wife's aunt has been in special-ed for years, and has mentioned a rise in kids who are not resilient, lack grit and growth-mindset; don't even mention being anti-fragile. An example being, a cell phone was taken away during classtime from a high school kid, who proceeds to roll around on the ground in a toddler fit because his world has crumbled without a cell phone.
Two recent articles that had been posted here on HN comes to mind:
That second article describes a fake conspiracy theory that had enough of the Gen-Z markers where the Zoomers know it is fake and ironic, but the conspiracy theorists don't. In a lot of ways, stuff like that is how the Zoomers look like they are coping with a world where we can't agree on basic truths, undermining of social institutions across the political spectrum, and fractured values.
With my toddler, my wife and I are making some conscious choices about values, and even world views and paradigms. Emotional intelligence is just as important as being able to reason; we've been working our way through Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (the successor for Mr. Roger's). I've been slowly absorbing and integrating the Living Systems World View and Regenerative paradigm (Carol Sanford, Regenerative Life). I've already got things I learned about grit, growth mindset, anti-fragility that's encapsulated by a traditional Chinese cultural value of gongfu, and will be passing on to my toddler. We're already going to implement something from traditional cultures, and expressed in Daniel Tiger's as "everyone's big enough to help with something" (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...). That is, I want my kids to grow up knowing they can voluntarily contribute meaningfully to the greater community and society, and that drives the development of growing their capacity to do so.
Great, thank you for all the links, looking forward to dig more into it.
> Emotional intelligence is just as important as being able to reason
+100
Side-note wrt. McLuhan, I think we'll look back at the 70s as a time when we already had these most perceptive understanding of modernism and its fallout, e.g. it's amazing how relevant Wolfe, Jacobs, Lasch, McLuhan, Baudrillard, ... still are today in understanding the current condition. But then nothing really changed, if anything, we just doubled down for another 50 years. Keeping fingers crossed for grassroots change this time around.
> Where were the grandparents and extended families that could watch a kid so that they don’t have to go to daycare?
It's heartbreaking really.
> When that toddler turns to a teen, how has our world of “share this” and “retweets” that changed our sense of truths affect that teen?
While I have an unbridled confidence in my children, I still worry about their teen years. Adolescence has always been hard, how much harder will it be for them, with pervasive social media, and rudderless and overwhelmed adults at the helm.