Sometimes I wonder what they mean by "kids are out of control?"

Frankly, I am not sure it is true.

I am not so old as to have enough memories about enough different generations.

But I have some memories of some generations; and I have all the observations that I can do about parents and children currently.

I still am not sure I realize what the problem is. [suppozed to be.]




Essentially, I think kids are just being kids. Nothing more and nothing less.
I don't think they are out of control.
Or if they are, then I think that being out of control is their natural state, not an abnormal alteration of it (which implicitly needs correcting.)
I think that if kids look out of control now, it is because of external social reasons which change the way we perceive children's behavior, not because they have changed since 10, 20, 50, or 200 years ago.

Essentially:
1. Children are less time alone among children. There are adults watching over them all the time.
2. The same adults are over them for many hours at a time: helicopter parents, or school teachers, or babysitters.
3. The same children hang around with the same other children all the time: siblings or other family, neighbors, school mates; and overlap between these is common. They spend a lot of time together with the same children.
4. Society has convinced itself it has to micromanage everything, particularly if it involves risk, or if it involves children. Worst of all if it involves both.

So, it isn't that they are out of control.

It is that "we" (adults) see a lot more of children than we used to before -- when we allowed them to be alone unsupervized for longer. And we freak out more about what they do than we did before -- when we didn't intend to micromanage them and didn't overreact to everything they do, freak out about risk, or medicalize patterns we don't like. Then made more salient by how children too have a smaller social circle of children.

But kids are not doing anything different. Adults are reacting different. That is what happens.