That's why it's the parents'/guardians' job to ease them into stuff like that, knowing it's out there and the dangers it poses to developing minds.
For far too long, parents have been looking to the public school systems to basically serve as surrogate parents and government-run day-care centers. I see it all the time when I go to parent-teacher conferences and other school events. Sure, it's difficult when both parents are working (or just the one, if in a single-parent family), but I personally have seen way too many parents just write off their kids and leave them to their own devices. Some of my daughter's friends are dealing with this - and not very well. It's like they (the parents) just look the other way and hope for the best. Lots of these kids do musical and dramatic presentations (my daughter is one of them), and far too often they are there on their own after their parents just drop them off or, worse, just leave them there the entire day through the night and then pick them up after.
In the worst cases (which are thankfully super-rare), we have people who leave their kids in cars during extreme temperature conditions to go to bars and party, only to find them dead in the back seat from heat stroke or hypothermia, if they're even sober enough to notice. Again, these occurrences are highly uncommon, but still make the evening news on occasion when they happen. I mean, why have kids if they're never going to at least pretend to have a vested interest in their well-being and development? Then they genuinely wonder why, later in life, their kids hate their guts.
The song "
Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin is actually quite a poignant representation of this phenomenon. It's obviously something that's been happening for a long time.
Over-protective "helicopter" or "bulldozer" parents are just as damaging to a child's development. The kids are never allowed to grow up and discover things on their own as the parents make everything in life as easy as possible. This breaks down once they enter the "real world" where nobody is interested in giving anyone a free ride. A delicate balance is required and I've found that many people who call themselves "parents" seem to have have zero patience for that, more's the pity.
Why can't we be better than this for our kids? That was more of a rhetorical question... I don't expect anyone to answer because I don't think there really is one, other than "people gonna people".
