It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:
The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.
A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.
And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.
For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.
They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.
And now the machinery is encountering resistance.
Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.
The kids kept playing.
Fucking beautiful.
There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.
And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.
The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.
The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.
They tried to rewrite normalcy.
Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.
Younger people at work don’t really believe the stories about how free we were. The one story that shocks them and is verifiable? Going to Rocky Horror Picture Show armed with squirt guns, toast, TP, newspapers. We were silly and having a controlled party in a movie theater on Friday and Saturday night for a few years.
Now, in my town like many others, teens are not allowed at the theater without an adult or guardian. Even to see a G rated movie.
Comment by Pat McCracken — October 23, 2026 @ 15:33
[…] WITH LANGUAGE NOT SAFE FOR WORK BUT VERY WORTH READING: Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » WITH LANGUAGE NOT SAFE FOR WORK BUT VERY WORTH READING: Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The — October 25, 2026 @ 05:00
Pat, how do you do I. See you’ve met my. Faithful. Handyman.
He’s just a little brought down, because
When you knocked, he
Thought you were the
Candyman.
Comment by Tidewater — October 25, 2026 @ 06:21
My mother was a veritable fountain of motivational wisdom: “go outside and blow some stink off before I beat you to a bloody pulp” springs eternal. And if she didn’t throw in “you little shitbirds” then you know she was merely annoyed.
Comment by Mike Porter — October 25, 2026 @ 07:13
My stay at home lawyer educated Mom would send us outside even in winter and tell us to only come back at dinner time. Riding bikes thru mud puddles, falling thru the pond ice, and thinking it was funny – older playing spin the bottle with parents hearing the bottle spinning on the concrete.
Comment by Jim Blackwell — October 25, 2026 @ 07:51
As a child of the late 70’s other than maybe cutting back on the booze a little I wouldn’t change a thing if I could go back. Out in farm country where I grew up, you turned 16 and the world opened up and I had a blast, you worked hard and you played hard. Just wish I had some of the cars I destroyed back then. If I had told my parents everything I did it would have hastened their demise, but then later I found out they weren’t any better. Karens can go to hell.
Comment by oldfarmer — October 25, 2026 @ 08:14
When I was a teen (1960s/1970s vintage) it was a natural thing for us (my group anyway) to treat whatever the authorities said to us as bullshit.
Our adolescent instincts rightly told us that the controllers and bluenoses were not our friends, and that the values and virtues they preached were inimical to us.
In brief, we rejected authority.
I’ve always assumed that this was encoded into the teenage DNA, and that modern kids felt the same way.
But for many years it seemed that young minds had fallen captive to the absurd indoctrination they received at school (as well as at home from their ex-hippie parents).
So I’m hopeful that the “free range minds” that this article describes is really a thing.
Comment by jbspry — October 25, 2026 @ 08:15
Greatest gift a father can give a son about manhood, other than self-sufficiency, is learning how to accurately gauge risk. Only real way to do that is to encourage scar tissue, and thus wisdom. And please do not read this comment as exclusionary vis-a-vis daughters, I have absolutely zero issue with the female persuasion learning the same, it is simply, from an evolutionary standpoint, males HAVE to know. Bottle rocket wars using a length of PVC duct taped at one end, BB gun wars, building forts in the woods, swimming in rivers and bayous with gators, catching snakes, building BMX/motorcycle tracks with nary a helmet in sight, three-wheelers (ohmygod three wheelers were dangerous as all hell), swimming upstream against flood waters to make it to the next sandbar, back flips off bridges into the river, riding my bike to my friends house 10 miles away on busy country roads, climbing up into tress and onto rooftops just to jump down, riding in the bed of a pick-up just about everywhere, wrestling matches in the front yard, 10+ fist fights growing up, lawn JARTS, staying outside all day well into the night every day during summers, surfing jagged reef breaks, snorkeling with reef sharks and ‘cuda around…list goes on and on. I’m ~12 years old. Down at the river during the summer at one of the little bars/’fish camps’ that sits on stilts on the river’s edge. Big party for some reason. They are having canoe races on the river. My friend Greg and I team up. In the river racing, a water moccasin slithers up and into the canoe. I’m in the bow. I jump up and proceed to beating the hell out of the bottom of that aluminum canoe, ‘WANG! WANG!’ as the wooden oar strikes the hull. Greg and I both screaming at the top of our lungs ‘SNAKESNAKESNAKESNAKLESNAKE!!!’. Naturally I lose my balance and fall backwards over the bow and into the water. Canoe runs me over and knocks me out. I come to a few seconds later, lift my face up out of the water with Greg still in the boat screaming at me and 3-4 adults males in the water almost half way to me from the party on shore. Took 8 stiches to the top of my head.
I just cannot imagine who I would be without those experiences, and I pity the hell out of those young men who don’t have them because they were never given the opportunity to earn scar tissue.
Comment by Chris — October 25, 2026 @ 12:31
I saw something the other day where a man duct-taped his wife so he could watch football in peace. We’re going to need a lot of tape to unkaren the world, but it IS doable.
Comment by Mike — October 26, 2026 @ 04:39
I’m sure the turn toward ‘safetyism’ had many roots, some of them probably more valid than others, but that it went too far no question.
But one speculation of mine, just a speculation, not asserting it as fact: that one reason for the society wide turn toward safetyism is that parents had fewer children on average. Used to be common for a family to have 4 or 5 kids, and not rare to see more.
If you only have 1 or 2 kids instead of 4 or 5, one might expect to see greater tendencies toward protectiveness.
As I siad, just a speculation.
Comment by HC68 — October 27, 2026 @ 21:24