Kidz these days seem stripped of agency, don't know how to build

Akim Reinhardt, Fly, Be Free, 3 Quarks Daily, April 23, 2025.

Reinhardt starts by complaining about over-parenting in the contemporary world, something I've been reading about for at least a decade if not two. He's concerned about the consequences:

The point here is not to criticize modern middle class parents or make them feel bad. That would be hypocritical as I have no children of my own. But as someone who has been teaching college students for a quarter-century, it seems to me that the overprotective parenting style along with other factors, such as modern K-12 education and near constant attention to screens, have had a profound effect. Ask any long time college instructor. They will tell you. Things have changed.

Today’s 18–22 year olds are nowhere nearly as competent as their predecessors. Note: I did not write “smart.” Today’s students are plenty smart. But they are less competent. And they know it. Their ability to do has been crippled. Denied a childhood of self- and peer-directed discovery, problem solving, dispute resolution, and genuine play, many young adults no longer know how to make their way through the world in basic ways.

They’re well aware of this and it causes many of them great anxiety. It has also engendered many of them with very unrealistic expectations about what others will do for them. Because the parents and other adults in their lives constantly directed them in nearly all endeavors, they expect that direction to continue as they themselves become adults.

In the classroom, they now require detailed instructions for every assignment. When I began teaching, I didn’t even bother giving them an assignment sheet, and they were fine with that. They knew what to do when I said “write a paper.” Now my assignment sheets can run as long as a double-sided, single spaced page, and some of them still complain that it’s not enough direction.

Alas, it’s not just in college.

I know dozens of people in management positions in industries as varied as entertainment, software, and auto repair. Absolutely all of them, when I ask, complain about how their new, young workers can’t seem to figure out basic tasks by themselves, or even think it reasonable that they should, instead expecting their superiors to explain everything for them.

Here's my response:

Color me sympathetic, Akim, deeply sympathetic. I grew in Western PA in the 1950s and 60s in a neighborhood that was suburban on the edge of rural. One good friend lived on a one acre lot. As I recall there was a small cornfield in the middle of the lot and plots for various vegetable. At the rear of the lot, away from the street, and next to a small wooded area there was a place where we tunneled into the ground a bit and built a small underground chamber which was central to many of the games we played. I can almost remember shoveling some dirt out of the hole and putting it elsewhere.

There was another spot in the wood where we cleared a small area and carpeted the ground with moss. We would find patches of moss, lift them from the ground very carefully so they didn't break and them move these "tiles" to where we wanted them. In another place we piled rocks across a small stream to dam the water. We then saw the water build up behind our small dam and become a small pool. In middle school we had shop class where we learned to build things with hand tools. We also had mechanical drawing, where we learned how to make precise engineering drawings that could be used in building things.

Johnstown was a steel town. My friends had fathers who worked in the steel mills. When they became old enough, some of them went into the mills as well. The mills themselves were large physical structures that I saw often.

Now, I've spent most of my life thinking about very abstract things, and exploring abstract worlds. But that intellectual activity rests on a childhood of experience where I moved freely about the physical world, worked on it and with it, changed it.

I can't help but think that a lot of the hype and craziness that surrounds AI – something I know a thing or two about because that's a world in which I think – is the result of not having a strong enough grasp of the physical world. I don't know how often I've heard a complaint that we're not a nation of builders. Some of that complaint is directed at the plethora of regulations which makes is much easier to NOT-BUILD than to build. But I fear some of it is the result that too many adults never learned how to build during childhood and so they can't do it as adults. Rather, they want the machines to do it for them.

This is not a formula for a propitious future.