The problem of professionalization and depersonalization is, for me at least, most vividly on display in social behavior.
Ken mentioned in Pt 1 that kids these days have at their disposal so many more resources that most people reading this might have. I wonder whether or not this is a good thing.
don’t get all worked up, I’m not saying we should deprive our children of every advantage our society has developed and built.
But what about the things that are not truly advantages? Clearest to me is the video console. Never before in the history of Mankind has there been a device that encouraged solitude and self-modifying behavior. Whittling is as close as I can come up with insofar as other hobbies or pastimes that have not been group activities in the past, but whittling was never really that rewarding and so people either got bored with it or became sculptors, neither of which is a bad solution.
But in the modern context, we have so many things that kids can do, so many activities, so many inputs that there is almost no time in which they are bored. They may say that they’re bored, but as often as not they are seeking a new disc for the game cube or something because the game has become boring, or their movie collection has become boring, or their computer is too slow or whatever. That’s not boredom, that’s just deprivation of instant input.
No, I’m talking about real boredom. Take away the video console, no soccer, no tv no internet for a week and inspire some real boredom and see what happens. Probably nothing other than your life becoming a living hell. And that’s the problem. With so many different avenues of individual entertainment, pick-up games of soccer or basketball, common on the playgrounds and fields of my youth, have all but disappeared. They have been replaced by leagues, this is true, but then it begins to edge out of the realm of play and into sport and it isn’t so much a cure for boredom as it is a way to fill the time between school and dinner, between dinner and sleep, between Friday and Monday. It has preempted boredom.
But what’s wrong with boredom?
The constant barrage of input, the amazing spectrum of scheduled events, the wealth of possibilities is truly the blessing of an advanced society with wealth that would make Solomon blush and yet, so much of it leads us into pursuits that fill our time without bringing us much closer to the people around us, even teammates because the activity is the point not the creative, corporate dispelling of boredom or the spontaneous creation of community.
I think that the most glaring example of too much input and not enough society is the frequency with which I see young people riding around with their parents, staring out the windows of the car with the ubiquitous white wires from their ipods hanging from their ears. Two people sharing a small space, bound by love and family, not interacting at all.
We’re losing touch with each other as much as we’re losing touch with the unseemly bits of the life that we lead. We were made in the image of God for community, mutual support and loving communion with one another and we are fracturing, idividualizing and becoming distanced from one another in an effort to become all that we can be as individuals, without seeing that we were meant to be all that we can be, together.
This may not be right on point, but there seems to be something missing. Please know the following ranting is not directed at the author of this blog, just a response to the same argument I’ve been hearing for a long, long time.
Bottom line is our current parenting and community building (what there is) is absolutely fear driven–fear of disease, strangers, drugs, terrorist. . . . Fear of our own inadequacies, fear of alienating or being alienated, fear of being our parents. If we don’t do such and such, our kids are going to harmed in some way and usually by some stranger. Hard to build a community if we can’t trust each other. We are in so much fear, in fact, it’s going to probably take a few generations of our kids deciding they no longer wish to live like that before much substantial really changes.
When the topic of kids today vs. “when I was a kid” gets brought up there’s a picture painted that in “the good old days” things were this way or that. Some of the things we conveniently forget is that there was child labor, illegal abortions, child abuse that was ignored (a “family” problem–don’t interfer), families who were trying so hard to be perfect that they nearly imploded and sometimes did. That same father who took us fishing or mother that taught us quilting is more often than we want to remember the same parent that took us out behind the wood shed and beat the living daylights out of us with a razor strap. If family values were so much better in days past , why do we have so many dysfunctional adults? Who were they raised by and in what kind of society? And who were those parents raised by?
Ok, now to the current topic at hand. It would be better, I think, to let go of the idealistic images of getting back to something that wasn’t really there and concentrate on meeting the children and families where they are today with what we have. Let’s praise the families and communities who are making it work (any many are) and being models to those who struggle. For families who are interested in working hard to communicate and spend quality time with their kids, they’re doing that. Some parents aren’t as adept and no matter what social pressures we place on them to become so, they aren’t going to meet the standards we try to set or, like me, become confused because just when you think you’ve got it “right” someone comes along and tells you no, there’s a much better way. Well too late, my kids are messed up because the “experts” were too late getting me the latest pop therapy info I was lacking.
If the alternative to a kid being plugged into their iPod is families riding around in the car arguing over the radio or siblings fighting in the backseat distracting the driver or singing car songs that drive most sullen teens up a wall, I pick iPod. In fact, really wish I had that option as a kid.
Finally, we spent years and years after 2 working parents became the norm hearing how we need to occupy our kids because teen sex and pregnancy, drinking, drugs, loitering, etc were running rampant–who was watching the kids? Now, so many of us work really, really hard to keep food on the table and keep our kids in positive activities to keep them out of the mall. Now we’re being told it’s too much. What’s a parent to do? Who can we blame? Any volunteers?
Are the iPod and the argument the only options?
I never meant to idealize my upbringing, just some facets of it that I found valuable that have changed (been lost, in my opinion).
Apart from that, we’ll start at the beginning of the response:
I agree totally with the idea that in large part, our parenting is fear driven but I think that you stop too soon. A lot of our society is fear-driven. We might have once had a common, unifying enemy, whether it was Nazism or Communism or whatever (heck, you could go back as far as the British, then the Indians). For lots of people the world was just that small, we’re right, they’re wrong (or scary or sinful or whatever) and we have to be the best we can be and we’ll outlast them if nothing else.
Generational studies have found the same cycles repeating over and over throughout American history (it is easier to limit these things to one national border) from revolutionary times on and the place we are in now is interesting in terms of child rearing. Our grandparents (and I am speaking as one of the oldest members of Generation X, and while people on the cusp are not as clearly viewed as those in the heart of a generation, I can see the truth in a lot of this) valued a measure of conformity and the building of structures in society that they hoped would outlive themselves. Their children, the Baby boomers, reacted against an emphasis on conformity and adopted more of a roll-your-own kind of philosophy, giving rise to such movements as the self-discovery movement, EST, and the great decline in mainstream religious faiths.
This left them largely without a structure in which to raise their children, after all they had discarded the structure that they had inherited. GenX is the product of that upbringing. The typical label for this generation is “lost” because they are largely latch-key and without the kind of boundaries that other generations have prized.
I’d like to make two statements about these studies:
1) They are descriptive rather than prescriptive in that they describe what the evidence presents rather than telling people how to react.
2) They are general and not specific. While I have many traits in common with the GenX crowd I am often lumped in with, I also carry some Boomer characteristics.
There is no blame in these studies as they do not attempt to predict the future or determine cause for societies ills or successes.
Our grandparents valued building and leaving a legacy
The boomers valued exploring outside of the boundaries (remember all of that “think outside the box” stuff?) which values individualism
GenX seems to be trending toward following the trend of seeking to rebuild the relationship and meaning skills that they find that they are lacking.
From my reading, it seems that the next generation will again seek to build upon tradition, to create cozy homes for their faith and their relationships and leave something to their kids (who, unfortunately, will likely reject it and so on).
The gist of this is not fatalistically accepting that we’re doomed to repeat the missteps of the past, but rather a hopeful look to how we can try and feed the needs of our children and our parents by understanding what those needs are likely to be.
to make my tendency toward long responses more palatable, I’ll allow a break and submit more in a minute
I agree that “when I was a kid” isn’t a prescription for change that will EVER work. But ignoring the things that people treasured from their upbringing simply adds to the distance between you and them. Nobody’s upbringing was idyllic but we all tend to remember it as better than it likely was unless we were terribly scarred by it. That’s because it was the time when you were taken care of, bills and taxes and communism didn’t enter into your consciousness and so you could just be happy.
I think that the generational studies bear out the cyclical nature of the family dynamic. A father who spanks often breeds a father who will not strike (unless the damage is severe) which often breeds a child with no boundaries which breeds a child that needs the boundaries to not only be there, but to be rigid so that there can be some kind of predictability in their life, which breeds . . .
My therapist once told me not to worry about screwing up my daughter, just to accept that I was going to and try and make sure that no matter what, that Caitlyn ended up strong enough to heal the scars and have a life of her own not haunted by me and my mistakes. I think it’s wise advice because as soon as someone comes out with a program on how to raise your child (or find a spouse or live a happy life) it becomes yesterday’s news because of “new studies” that speak to a different personal dynamic.
Lauren, your kids are strong. Not significantly (to my eye) more screwed up than most other kids and a damn sight better than some. If being a Christian tells me nothing else it tells me that none of us will ever do a perfect job of anything, let alone the single most complex job in the whole species.
Back to the either/or discussion. Isn’t there a middle path between not communicating and arguing? Maybe put the iPod down for one designated ride a week. If we’re ruled by the fear of the argument, we’ll never venture out of the silence. Unfortunately, by the time they’re teenagers (at least in my case) it’s a little late to change ingrained behaviors. I don’t know the answers, I’m just hoping to name what I see as the problems and get the discussions going.
Lauren said – “Finally, we spent years and years after 2 working parents became the norm hearing how we need to occupy our kids because teen sex and pregnancy, drinking, drugs, loitering, etc were running rampant–who was watching the kids? Now, so many of us work really, really hard to keep food on the table and keep our kids in positive activities to keep them out of the mall. Now we’re being told it’s too much. What’s a parent to do?”
hopefully not give up. When is it too late to start the conversation? Do you think I don’t understand how this works? I learned to cook because my parents were divorced and I wanted to eat and mom needed to work late. Dad lived 2,500 miles away and we did all of the work on the apartment building ourselves. Did my mom rely on me to an unhealthy level? Yes. Did she also make sure that we all got together whenever possible in order to remind us that we were family? yes.
My childhood sucked in a lot of ways. Always looking into the windows of homes where wealth was taken for granted and looking at my paltry life and crying for the shame of it. I’m not being melodramatic, I cried at the frustration of seeing so many of my friends have so much while we struggled so just to have decent clothes and a life free of public shame.
My childhood rocked in a lot of ways. Learning the value of a good days work, side by side with my mom or dad. Seeing movies at the University’s movie night (because we couldn’t afford to go to the regular movie) but doing it as a family. Living in a world just slightly less fear-bound so we could run freely all afternoon before tumbling through the door for dinner.
“Who can we blame? Any volunteers?”
If you need to blame someone, blame me. I seem to have scratched at a wound that I didn’t intend to. I apologize to those who might have been offended. But I truly believe that until we can get past blame we cannot get past living in the past and turn our eyes to what we can do NOW. Blame me, blame Reagan, blame Carter, blame Dr. Spock, whatever, but then let’s see what we can do for today’s kids and tomorrow’s kids in the here and now.
Good response! Shows more of the Tim I’ve read this past year than the original post. In my opinion, if you decide to host a blog, unless attacking anyone directly, and we decide to read/respond, no apologies should ever be needed. You say, we say–it’s all good
(Is there some written etiquette on this somewhere?)
Part one reply: And so the pendulem continues to swing but never without carrying fun new info with it.
Part two reply: The “what’s a parent to do?” and “who can we blame? were rhetorical (but you probably knew that). The point being that, as you correctly mention, we aren’t perfect and we can only do what we can do with the God given gifts bestowed on us and blame has little to no value here. (Fault finding is only helpful if it is transformed into fact finding for the source of a problem to make positive change or correction, or some such nonsense as that.) I wholly agree with you that we all of us–family and community alike–need to be responsible not only for ourselves, but for each other. And yes, the next generation will, without a doubt, react to their own upbringing as we did ours, etc. . . .
Part three reply: I also agree with you that we need to pass down to our children the best parts of what we were given. And (not but) creating new traditions are equally as valuable in working with life today. I find this much easier on my sanity than trying to hold on to an old tradition that I may cherish but that no longer works. But, I’m an adapter. Since we’re evolutionary (my advance apology for offending), the dear things our grandparents taught us may no longer be useful to the next generation, even in terms of family values and community building, but something parallel and relevant may be. Remember the art of storytelling? Now we can tell stories with photographs, videotapes, memory books. Is that less valuable? Maybe in some respects.
As an aside, have you read/seen “The Education of Little Tree.” If I’m not mistaken, I think it’s right on point for what you’re getting at.
What do the studies show on those who have attempted to bring back the cherished values of yesterday? How do the kids who have been pulled out of the sin riddled cities and schools and placed on Amish-like farms or home schooled compare to their peers in the long run? Are they any better equipped for “the real world.” I did some very limited comparative study on home schooling vs. public school and, while the home schooling certainly gives the parents more control over their children, their social activities, their communities and environments, I can’t say this progressive movement is necessarily in society’s best interest. The kids sure look good though, don’t they? Time will tell.
Hummmmm I feel the desire to go home and bake pies with Hannah. Too bad she’s at her Dad’s this weekend.
I don’t know about any studies on therapeutic usage of a change of setting. I’m sure that they are out there, Google them later and we’ll see.
Insofar as the generational theory goes, predomiantly, we identify with our grandparents, because they are alive and unlike our parents, but we tend to have the same views and characteristics as our great-grandparents, hence there is a four-fold pattern or series of generations that tends to repeat itself throughout history.
One of the illustrations I liked from the book “Generations of Faith” was likening Col. Potter from M.A.S.H. to the current GenX’ers. The generation that went to war in WWI was also raised by parents reacting against too strict a parentage and who therefore let their kids roam more than had previously been common. Potter’s generation was largely dismissed as “slackers” or whatever the term was in those days, especially in the eyes of their grandparents, who had built the industrial nation.
Potter, like the GenX members, focuses on shepherding his “flock,” he cares for them, holds their hands, heals their divisions. He is regular army but he doesn’t have much patience for rules that harm or hurt people and seeks to remove those from service who hurt or harm.
We’re now in a part of the cycle where children are again treasured and cosseted. Where do we go from here? don’t know, but I hope we go there together.
I have four children, 3 daughters and a son. I have been parenting for 31 years Each child has required totally different parenting approaches, techniques, discipline and compassion.
Mark came from an upper middle class two parent family with mom at home. Although they did eventually divorce, they waited until the youngest were enrolled in college.
I came from a chaotic, cruel, poverty stricken family. My parents eventually divorced (thank God). College was not a word in our environment. Girls rarely graduated from high school.
I made a choice very early in life to raise above my upbringing and create the environment that I felt the most comfortable in for my children and for myself. I got off to a rocky start, myself divorcing when my second born was still a toddler. But with time and determination, I met and married my match. A stable, determined man of integrity that shares my values of the importance of a healthy, balanced family and self.
The point is, no matter what our generation. No matter what our environment. No matter what the outside influences. No matter what we possess or lack in possessions. God gives us choice. God gives our children choice. We choose what paths we take. We choose what attitudes we have toward our life experiences. That is how it has been, and how it is, and how it will be. It is not the experience, nor lack of experience – it’s how we choose to perceive.
So there is not wrong or right way to parent. No wrong or right culture. No wrong or right way to relate to our environment. Just God granted choices. Our choices, our children’s choices and our community’s choices. I really liked when Lauren stated, “Fault finding is only helpful if it is transformed into fact finding for the source of a problem to make positive change or correction…” In other words, better choices.
Mary sent this to me, it’s apropos, but flawed in some ways . . . I’ll comment at the end.
THOSE BORN 1930-1979
TO ALL THE KIDS
WHO SURVIVED the
1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while
they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and
didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby
cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took
hitchhiking.
As infants &children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster
seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and
NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made
with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because .
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we
were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down
the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into
the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at
all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no
surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers, no
Internet or chat rooms…….
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live
in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told
it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who
didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem
solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
If YOU are one of them . . . CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as
kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives
for our own good
And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how
brave (and lucky) their parents were.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!
– - – - – - – - – - – - -
But this generation also bred the fear that put the kibosh on all of this freedom. Is it just a reaction to freedom to run amok? I don’t know. I’m still confused and working on this, any comments?
We weren’t supposed to eat blue cheese dressing?
Uh oh!