Experiences. Entertainment. Expectations. Reading your text, which - as so many times - is just within my convictions, I stumbled across the thought that there is one more connection.
While the boomers and in my opinion up to GenY/Millenials had that "hard access" to entertainment, they had a lot more experiences - in both the negative and the positive. Meanwhile, every generation that comes after, was way more exposed to entertainment, which is by definition only positive experience. The worst that can happen is that a movie is bad, but no broken bones for doing stupid stunts in that.
The overload of positivity in the "entertainment" generation generated a whole different set of expectations. A more positive one, aka higher one, which is way easier to be unfulfilled.
The more I think about that, the more I could write a post :-D What do you think?
Oh, and just in case:
What does it mean? WHAT DOES IT MEAN???!??!?
Absolutely. A couple decades ago, parents were told they had to introduce disappointment for children, but that is new. Before, children experienced disappointment through living and a parent's job was to help them process it. Now, all that positive entertainment experience, and parents that are doing the same, where is their disappointment and learning how to cope strategy coming from?
Ah fuck. lost my train of thought... Now I don't know either!
Noooooo... Why??? It'll be a mystery forever. The most brilliant thought, forever lost. It could've changed the world to the better, but the universe decided it was too much power for one man to share in a post.
I'll keep thinking about what you wrote there. I didn't know that we're supposed to artificially introduce disappointment. I just let the kid get there itself, and she's not the worst at it.
The problem is that if they are spending most of their experience time online, what kind of disappointments are they getting, and how can a parent monitor and understand it, when they don't even talk?
I'd say that those parents who let their kids spend a lot of time online don't have much interest in parenting, in even wanting to understand, nor would they think about disappointment as an important part of life. So many parents just wing it, with no further thought. Here comes the loss of narrative into play, the loss of community where our behavior is influences by the stories of our grandparents and neighbors. These days, nobody cares about stories anymore.
I reckon this has largely been the case in history, with the difference being that in history society used to teach many of the skills parents would need. Now, people are conditioned to stay immature children, and then become parents.