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You dont appreciate how stupid you were until you are older. Then you realize you were stupid when you were younger, and are stupid now, but over different things. If this isnt a persons experience in life, they are almost certainly a Republican. (Joke… Mostly)

This is because with a lot of things in life, you have to actually experience them to figure out if and how you could have handled it better. You dont regret everything you do, but the things you eff up, stick with you…

Former stupid kid, current stupid middle ager.

To set the stage, I HATE when people complain about younger generations, because EVERY generation did the equivalent at their age.

Young adults that just finished school, whether that includes college or not, have had a very limited perception of the world. It’s not their fault, they’ve only lived “the tutorial of life” up until that point. Having a job, paying bills, getting married, having kids, watching loved ones die, and all the other experiences that don’t occur until later give you me perspectives and lessons.

I’ve met some wise kids that have lived through things that I have yet to experience, but it’s a pretty safe bet that an 18 year old is probably not the best person to give parenting advice. They could absolutely help give additional perspective, or share ideas you hadn’t thought of, but as far as real world experience, they just don’t have it yet.

At 18 you are still stupid but at least you are legally adult. That is it.

Because you don’t have the experience to have any wisdom at that point. You might have knowledge, but knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

most of the times you dont need twenty thousand rules for your kids they will learn what makes them feel like krud and work on it

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screen time is just a limit on time to learn if the kid is using it for the right purposes which you should teach them to

Even if all you were using your screen time to do is learn, it is still unhealthy.

At a certain point, the ability to affect change or implement what you want on a large scale requires being a leader of others. It turns out that leadership is a skill best learned through practice. A lot of leadership skills come from interpersonal skills which also come from practice relating with others.

You don’t learn these skills staring at a screen or a book, but interacting with people.

Ultimately, I think it’s a convenient excuse to cover for how truly difficult it is to teach people important things.

The adult mostly doesn’t actually remember the specific logical and/or experiential steps that contributed to whatever understanding they now have. The events are too disconnected in time, and too large in quantity to really parse that way. You need that background info to teach well, though, otherwise you can’t handle questions, you can’t explain, etc, which are all genuinely important parts of teaching.

So, it’s easier to just handwave the problem away and focus on going to work, whatever is for dinner tonight, what’s going on in the neighborhood, cleaning the house, etc etc etc, and leave the teaching to the ostensibly qualified people.

If you want to attempt to do things differently, when you learn something life-lessony, remember that to teach it to a teenager someday, it’s not good enough to have just learned the thing. You’re also going to have to be able to offer a decent-enough explanation and answer any questions.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same. Wisdom is knowledge compounded by experience. The examples you list are not wisdom, nor are they necessarily knowledge. They are parenting techniques with obvious flaws.

As for 18 being the magic number, that’s pretty societally arbitrary. Sure, one is legally an adult at 18 in many societies, but that doesn’t mean they have life experience to amount to having wisdom. Many 18 year olds know enough to function in society, but they’re realistically still children from a developmental standpoint. There’s no magic age for anything.

because most (or at least too many) people do believe they become wiser getting older. Which is… a bit optimistic, to say the least, and at least as simplistic.

screen time is just a limit on time to learn if the kid is using it for the right purposes which you should teach them to

That too is a bit simplistic.

Screen time is (supposed to be) a teaching/control tool. Like school used to be about teaching kids limits and the value of hard work. Screen time is supposed to help kids learn there is a life outside of that phone… a very worthy motivation that completely fell flat when those kids can see adults around them waste their entire life on said phone, doing more or less stupid things like some junkies do their drug things.

But no matter how stupid adults can be around kids, the idea of giving kids some help in learning selfcontrol is great…A bit like putting safety wheels on a bike is a great idea when a kid first learn to ride a bike.

As far as “the right purpose” goes, like we would all agree that learning stuff would be one such right purpose, I would be devastated to see kids only get their knowledge through a phone. Even more so realizing kids can’t focus on a single task much anymore. Here in France, the gov recently published a study revealing that something like 40+% (if not 50+, I can’t recalll the exact number) kids that are reading books (on their phone or on paper) also use their phone at the same time to do other things (social, or videos like TikTok, or even play games). And then one will wonder why school results are collapsing…

The thing about wisdom is that it requires understanding, which is different from knowing. I can know a rule without understanding the motivation or underlying reasoning of the rule, and crucially, I can still follow the rule even if I don’t understand it. This is useful for children because there are a ton of things they don’t understand about the world that can hurt them if they’re not prepared for it. Take for example the rule: “look both ways before crossing the street”. It’s a rule that is taught to children because running into a street without looking out for cars can get kids killed. There are a million situations like this. Not all of them are as starkly life and death, but kids who have a good set of rules can move through the world more safely and comfortably than kids without, and they can learn rules faster than they can learn the underlying logic of them. That can and should come later.

There are also rules that aren’t so good. I think “make sure you finish your plate no matter what” is a rule that arose from a well-meaning attempt to prevent food waste, but it’s a rough fit for the purpose and it can make it hard for children to develop their own understanding of their eating preferences. I wouldn’t give a child that rule, I would spend a little more effort coming up with a solution to make sure kids are getting the nutrition they need without resorting to such ham-fisted measures.

Screen time rules are tricky, because we haven’t had constant access to screens for very long, and the way we interact with them (TVs to PCs to smartphones, to say nothing of the media landscape in which these devices are situated) is still changing rapidly. Parents are doing their best to keep up and it is overwhelming because nobody really knows what the best rule is. I think it’s easy to say “just do whatever’s best for your child” if you don’t have kids because it’s hard to grasp the true scope of the problem of parenting: there are simply too many threats or possible threats to a child’s well-being to individually tailor solutions to everything, and you as a parent, have to pick which areas require tailoring and which areas have sufficient rules to fall back on.

I don’t think this is unique to children either. There are plenty of domains of knowledge where knowing a few good rules can make life a lot better even if you don’t understand the mechanisms behind them. I don’t drink pond water even though I am neither a microbiologist nor a public health expert. I wash veggies before I eat them, and I wash my hands before I eat. I take medications exactly as my doctor tells me to and I consult with them before changing things.

You may be thinking at this point, “but I understand all of those rules, why should I follow rules I don’t understand?”. Fair question. For children especially, but also for humans in general, I think the knowing of a rule has to come before the understanding of the rule. Understanding is where nuance comes in. You know the saying “there’s an exception to every rule”? There are some people who take this to mean that rules can be shrugged off when inconvenient. These people are, largely, fools. The exceptions to rules can only really be identified when the rule and it’s motivation are clearly understood. Sometimes when I’m doing emergency repairs on a software system, I will ignore the usual rules about code merges in prod. This has backfired on me before, because I did not take the proper alternative precautions one should take when moving quickly, but most of the time I think my handling of exceptional cases has been pretty good, because I have a good understanding of why those rules exist, the problems they’re supposed to prevent, and when they can be safely(ish) broken.

Which brings me to my final point about wisdom, or understanding. Knowing about a rule, or fact, or domain of knowledge can feel an awful lot like understanding. Most humans suffer under this delusion, in most areas of their lives, for the full duration of their lives. Understanding usually only comes when one is confronted with an undeniable refutation of what one thinks they know. And that always takes time. In most cases, on most subjects, it never happens and we go to our graves never knowing the full extent of our lack of wisdom. Usually the best we can do is sort of grasp around the edges of our towering ignorance and try to get a feel for where the contours are, and the better we can do that, the better we can at least guess about what we don’t understand, and I think that’s the closest to wisdom we can hope for.

wisdom at 18? fuck me, im 61 and the only thing I’m certain about is that humanity, myself included in that venn diagram, lacks any wisdom at all.

Part of it is arrogant bullshit stemming from a complete inability to accurately remember what the experience of being young was like. Most people suck ass at honest self-assessment at every stage of life, so they fall into the trap of thinking they and their cohort were different than “kids these days” and are unable to empathize with or relate to young people because of this.

Part of it is that kids genuinely just aren’t fully developed neurologically, in ways that frequently lead to making shortsighted decisions with negative results. Unfortunately that’s still true way past 18, it’s an arbitrary threshold and the expectation that people should instantly stop acting childish at 18 is just as stupid as assuming that anyone younger than 18 is categorically incapable of making the right decisions for themselves.

The specific examples you’re using have some reasonable claim to option 2 depending on the context. Even as adults most people struggle to some degree with eating healthy nutritionally balanced diets, and children generally have less self-discipline so it can be more of a problem for them. Forcing kids to eat things they don’t want is a bad idea though, you’ll just give them a complex about eating and make them hate that specific food forever. My parents rule was that I never had to finish anything I didn’t like, but I had to try at least one bite of everything before deciding I didn’t like it. Worked like a charm, I eat everything.

Screen time is similar, plenty of adults struggle with regulating their gaming and social media usage, and the companies that make games and websites get paid more when people use their stuff more, so they have an incentive to design things to be addictive and predatory. Adults assuming that all screen time is bad for kids are stupid, but it is possible that an adult might recognize a predatory system that a child wouldn’t have any experience with and save them from being taken advantage of. Best practice is to actually pay attention to what’s on your kids’ screen and discuss it openly with them. Unfortunately a lot of adults don’t want to do that because it’s difficult, they default to either assuming all screen time is bad or to not trying at all, so their kids are either needlessly restricted in their growth or exposed to the worst the internet has to offer. Both bad.

Tldr the adults you’re dealing with aren’t necessarily completely wrong but they’re probably still full of shit