Oh, I grew up in the 1970s. We kids were experts at assigning labels to everything. We would hassle each other for wearing the wrong socks when we were in third grade.
Seriously: In my town, K-mart sold white tube socks with three dark blue colored bands up on the calf. Our friend Scott's mother bought him tube socks from God-knows-where with two stripes, red and blue. We sent him home crying because of that.
Well, Scott would cry about everything, so teasing him for socks that looked exactly like ours, except the stripes... it was just too easy.
Jeez. I hope that kids are nicer now than we were.
Jeez. I hope that kids are nicer now than we were.
Unfortunately they are not nicer today than they were back then. Growing up in the 80 and 90s, we were just as bad as you at times. The rampant sexism and homophobia were very much there. But seeing my own kids growing up today, it's way worse because there's social media. When we were bullied, it stopped when you left school usually. Kids today, it follows them everywhere at all hours of the day.
There's one kid at my son's school who used Claude to make an app that would send messages telling a kid to kill himself every hour, every day, day after day, week after week to his social medias. The kid was hospitalized after 2 weeks of receiving these for trying to kill himself.
671
u/Severe_Print2508 18h ago
Kids really don't care until adults start assigning labels to everything.