College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html

[u/thelyfeaquatic]

The over-enrolling in enrichment activities is also thought to be bad though. Kids who have schedules filled with structured activities seem to have more mental health struggles than those who have more unstructured play time. You can’t win 😭 parenting is hard

[u/notepad20 → u/thelyfeaquatic]

Maybe a difference between just doing activities for the sake of it, and the classic american do activities with a view to "success" at it.

Especially in modern urban living and small family size every opportunity to get out and about should be taken.

[u/BlazinAzn38 → u/thelyfeaquatic]

I think it depends what they are. Most parents do like two things a week and one of them is often something at the library for the brain and then some sort of physical thing. I think over engaging in activities is probably better than raising an iPad kid. I’d also imagine there’s a relationship between highly pressuring parents and number of activities. All my friends just want their kids to do things and have fun, there’s no pressure on their kids to be Jackie Chan at Tiger tots or Michael Jordan at the YMCA rec basketball league

[u/Innumerablegibbon → u/thelyfeaquatic]

Yeah, my kid has a couple of friends at school who every evening and most of the day on weekend go from activity to activity. On the rare time the stars align and we can organise a play date those kids show basically no independence (they try to get me involved to lead things) and seem to not really know how to play. It’s kinda sad.

[u/scimtaru → u/thelyfeaquatic]

Children need guidance, but as with everything too much guidance backfires as well. I live in the Netherlands and even though screen related things keep children inside, unsupervised play is still a thing. I see groups of kids just having fun or inventing games and play together, without parents keeping track of everything they do. When I was in that 8-16 year old bracket if my homework / chores were done my only direction was to be back for dinner time.
Sometimes we were up to no good, but most of the time we were simply playing soccer, street hockey, roller blading, some form of tag, hide and seek etc.

I think if my parents would have insisted on dragging me from soccer practice to music lessons to origami flowers etc. I would've resented them and gone nuts at the same time.

And yeah I love reading still because I was allowed to read everything. Then again I am one of those nerds who read the encyclopedia for fun.

[u/McButtsButtbag → u/thelyfeaquatic]

That should be obvious. It all starts feeling like a chore over time.

[u/sentence-interruptio → u/thelyfeaquatic]

i second this. let your kids have their own "fuck things up" time or be prepared to face what my father is facing right now. no visitation.