Originally Posted by Relentless

The thing that has changed is parenting. 30 or 40 years ago it was COMMON for one parent to be a full time at home parent and the other to work M-F from 9-5. Now a situation like the is exceptionally rare. Most families are either single parent or both parents working full time. Many parents are now working 60 or 70 hours each week. Plenty of kids are put in 'day care' full time before they are one year old. Those kids are raised by minimum wage 'teaching assistants' with little or no credentials.

Those kids are then put into public schools that are dominated by standardized test scores. Gifted kids do fine anyway, average kids muddle through and learn how to pass tests rather than substantive education. Lower end kids get shuttled around and pushed through barely literate. The only thing that can occasionally help them is an exceptional teacher taking a personal interest in their development... Otherwise they get a C- and a diploma they can hardly read. Then they graduate to a world with no jobs or security and are constantly told by the media that things will only get worse, that they should fear anything they don't understand (which is most everything) and their parents are often in their late 50s or sixties by that point, unable to do much to assist them.

On top of all that if they are hard to handle, imaginative, different or nonconformist, they are 'medicated' by people interested in making them compliant rather than creative or exceptional in any way... And their parents accept horrible 'advice' from 'experts' rather than doing the hard work of advocating for their own children or researching things in full detail on their own.

The video games they played while all that happened to them were not the problem.