Canada-Man
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- Apr 16, 2015
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comment under the video by Karen Straughan
I'm going to reproduce part of a comment I left elsewhere, with some additions:
The reason it is these kids banging on about safe spaces is probably because they are, in fact, the most sheltered and privileged in society. They're the victims of helicopter parenting, Dr. Spock, permissive parenting, the self esteem movement and "structured time", and an approach to public education that emphasizes constant supervision and guidance of kids, and adult intervention into every tiny conflict on the playground.
Your childhood, and mine, would be considered abuse now by a lot of social workers and "experts". In Canada, one family was investigated by CPS for allowing their two kids, aged 10 and 5, to walk 1km to play unsupervised at the park. When I was 10 and not in school, I was riding my bike all over god's green acre (occasionally coming home scraped and bloody), and the primary rule was, "be home before the streetlights come on".
When school was in session, I'd come home to an empty house most days, tidy up, wash dishes and get dinner in the oven, then peel potatoes and prep vegetables so my mom could throw it all together when she got home. My older sisters were sometimes home, but often not. If I had younger siblings, I would have been babysitting them sometimes. I was babysitting other people's kids a fair bit at 12.
This is not the typical upbringing for millennials born into the kind of privilege that allows them to attend Ivy League schools. In fact, the legality of raising your kids like this today is in dispute, as evidenced by that case in Canada.The satanic day care scandals of the 80s caused a lot of parents to start overprotecting and over-supervising their kids. While we know now that the entire debacle was bogus, our thermostats regarding child abuse and the "stranger dangers" out there never returned to baseline. Incidentally, this seems to be a terrible approach to raising kids. In New Zealand, one researcher who noticed the stark contrast between his own freewheeling, knee-scraping childhood and what kids' lives are like today did an experiment with 4 schools.
The rules of recess became "there are no rules". Kids were given old tires and scrap wood to play with, were allowed to skateboard without helmets and climb trees, and play on equipment in ways that had previously been prohibited. Counterintuitively, rates of injury decreased, and more surprisingly, bullying decreased even more dramatically. We do not give children enough room to explore the world on their own anymore. Instead of letting them explore with the knowledge that there is a safe home base to return to when they're scared or hurt, we've tried to turn their entire world into that safe home base, and to restrict access to those parts of it we can't sufficiently pad in cotton wool.And the higher up you are in the socioeconomic hierarchy, the more likely you are to have been over-sheltered in this way.It often feels morally righteous to do things that, due to lack of understanding everything (or being able to understand everything), actually harm the people you were intending to help.
All those parents who bought into Dr Spock and the self esteem movement, and went to DEFCON1 during the bogus satanic day care trials and then only went back down to DEFCON3, didn't think they were harming their kids, but they were. They thought they were helping their kids, but in reality, they were crippling them, like keeping someone "safe" and "comfortable" in a small cell lined with bubble wrap until all their muscles atrophy and their spine is permanently deformed.And I can't even be angry at them--like any parent, they wanted to give their kids a kinder, gentler, better, safer life than the one they had growing up. And because of the way we are (instinctively looking out for dangers in our environment), and the nature of our new life in the here and now with 24 hour news stations where you can hear about all the atrocities in the world on a 15 minute cycle of soundbites, they felt the world was more dangerous and cruel, not less, than it was when they were kids.
If we are programmed such that dangers in the environment stick out at us, and to see dangers that do not exist, because "better safe than sorry" helped us survive in an environment that actually was incredibly dangerous, then we're going to see dangers whether they exist or not. The safer we are, the less it takes to trigger a negative reaction. Very few people who grew up like I did would be concerned with a micro-aggression.If some of the people pushing for these things actually have been seriously traumatized (and this may be the case), it's entirely likely that their sheltered upbringings did not provide them the tools to cope.
Many of the others, I believe, are hypersensitive entirely due to the fact that they've never encountered anything remotely like a real difficulty or unsafe situation in their lives. It's one thing to be triggered by "I hope you get raped" on Twitter if you actually were raped. It's quite another to be triggered by it because you've spent your entire life never being exposed to unpleasantness. The latter seem to be using the former as justification for their own inability to cope with life.
And then there are others who just want power and will latch onto a cause like this to get it. If you look at Melissa Click in other videos from that protest, she's strutting around like Boudicca or Jean d'Arc working up her own personal army.
https://news.nationalpost.com/news/when-one-new-zealand-school-tossed-its-playground-rules-and-let-students-risk-injury-the-results-surprised
