Who is parenting when the TV is on? Who is parenting when the parent is emotionally absent? Who is parenting when everyone hides in their rooms, often seemingly from a very early age?
I think many children nowadays crave, hunger, are desperate for, honest, genuine understanding and feedback. The essence of love is attention and compassionate understanding. Not getting it is what makes them angry, but they don’t know why. Yes, I think many parents are overly indulgent, but I think in many cases this overindulgence is the result of laziness and disconnection. It is simply easier to let the kid do whatever he or she wants, even if it is not in their best long term interest.
This laziness, in turn, is taught by example to the children, who become less able to meet their own needs, less able to care for themselves. In many cases they don’t know what their needs ARE, since never having had them met, they are at a loss as to what the question is, and what an answer might feel like. As I have said a number of times, it is hard to know something is missing when you have never experienced it.
This basic process of emotional disconnection, combined with being lost in mass media, is a principle factor in what I see as the loss of HOME for many Americans, a loss of a place where one unconditionally belongs. This is why so many enter into and stay in fantasy worlds. This is the basic process which underlies the premise (in my superficial understanding, having only scanned it) of “Reality is Broken”.
I do not oppose video games in principle, but it does not seem to me that they teach kids how to be present in the present; how to be where they are, calmly. They are simply better than lonely silences filled with the sound of emotional hunger.
All of these kids covered in tattoos, painful piercings, sad or angry eyes: who raised them, if anyone? Have many of them not been orphaned by mass media?