The Death of Partying in the USA and Why It Matters

Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.

Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.

When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.

When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).

I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!

>I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents

Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.

Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.

At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.

During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.

I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon

I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.

It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.

A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.

One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.

My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.

People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.

That’s it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard, as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because they’re from a different time, maybe because they’re lonely, who knows).

I bet that if the head of the local Air Force wives' club did exactly that today, they'd get the same results.

I am going to assume your grandmother probably didn’t work, and instead took made her and her husband’s social life her full time job.

It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.

If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.

Except the graph shows this was happening way before COVID. The internet and how that has changed how people relate is much more likely the reason.

I'm sure COVID had something to do with it but I think partying is another casualty of social media.

Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off

>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.

Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.

From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.

The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.