Kids Today

 

 

“Kids aren’t like they used to be.”

“You can’t raise kids the way you were raised because the world isn’t what it was when you grew up.”

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

These sentiments have been chanted for years now, and I don’t think they’re entirely true.

Kids haven’t changed over the decades. What has changed is adults’ attitudes toward them and the adult expectations. They are no longer seen as moldable pieces of clay without individual personalities. Adults don’t treat them with the “Do not speak until spoken to” rules we were given, and they accept that children have opinions. They’re no longer told, “You’ll do it and you’ll like it,” as we frequently heard on “Leave It to Beaver.”

Instead, they’re allowed to have opinions, and they’re listened to, sometimes far beyond what their experience and knowledge indicate they should be.

In the dark ages, when I was a child, I was more likely to get a backhanded smack on the mouth if I tried to argue once I was told to do something. No, I didn’t come from some repressed family. Most kids in my era had a similar upbringing. And the backhanded slap was more of a flick that startled rather than hurt.

My opinion was only considered when I was choosing what to eat in a restaurant, or what I wanted for Christmas. Even then it was taken into consideration as part of what my parents could afford. When my mother took me clothes shopping (before about age 10), she shopped for the clothes, and once she had decided what clothes were in her price range and what style she liked, I was consulted on which of three or four items I wanted and what color – as long as it wasn’t purple, since my mother hated purple. As I got older, I had more choices, but she had the final say on price range and level of modesty until I bought my own clothes, when I was finally allowed to choose purple. I was never without opinions and desires. They simply weren’t always taken into consideration.

So, it wasn’t kids that were different, it was what was acceptable behavior that changed.

As far as the world being different, yes it is. Of course there have always been differences according to where one was raised.

My parents grew up in the city. There was a certain sensibility one had living in the city that wasn't the experience in the suburbs or in a rural area. Most of my cousins grew up in suburban areas that were more citified than my more rural suburban area, so they had more street smarts than I ever needed. I was seen as the unsophisticated country mouse who didn’t think ducks and chickens in the next yard was any big deal, but was impressed by sidewalks and street cleaners.

Our city parents moved to the suburbs ostensibly to have more room to raise a family, and demonstrate more prosperity than their first-generation parents. What was less apparent to us kids was our parents’ desire to stay in a white neighborhood as the cities became less segregated.

I’m not ashamed of where I grew up. I had no say in that decision. I think I missed opportunities for growth and understanding in my childhood because my parents saw racial segregation as somehow protecting their children. From what? I’ve never been clear on that.

And yes, we’ve thankfully moved beyond people being allowed to refuse to sell their house to someone of another race, so children are exposed to and more comfortable with people of other races and ethnicities. Even still, I heard a couple of high school students complain not long ago that there isn’t as much racial and ethnic diversity in our area as they would wish.

Many of my friends’ adult children are moving back to the city our parents couldn’t wait to flee.

As far as education, children don’t learn in the same way we did. They print and some don’t know cursive. They use chrome books and tablets and not copybooks and looseleaf. Their textbooks are often written in “soundbites” rather than full-length pages or double columns with few pictures. They sometimes sit in “pods” or around tables, sitting on therapy balls instead of chairs. They don’t sit in desks with the chair attached, in long rows facing a blackboard. Many kids today would ask what a blackboard is. (Psst: it's a white board that you use chalk on.)

But my generation was subjected to changes in the curriculum, too. Starting at about age 9 (4^th grade), we had this anomaly known as “modern math” in which we had to organize objects into sets and subsets. What this had to do with math, I still can’t fathom. I never used it in subsequent math classes, but for four years we wasted the first two months of school with a repetition of this nonsense before we got down to the business of learning arithmetic. And it’s only gotten worse, at least in the schools I’ve worked in in New Jersey.

A “new” method of setting up algebra problems made the subject more difficult for me until I finally got a teacher who taught algebra equations “the old fashioned way,” which was what clicked with me.

Education has always evolved, based on what subjects were necessary and what was no longer relevant.

But school education is not about raising children.  Teachers  aren’t in charge – even in religious schools – of forming a child’s behavior, values and empathy. That’s the parents’ job, although there are some who would prefer to dump all learning on the schools.

A teacher’s job is more difficult if parents don’t teach basic good manners and consideration of others’ rights and feelings. While a child needs to learn subtle differences in acceptable behavior in different environments, such as the classroom and the school yard, if the basics aren’t there, the subtleties will be meaningless.

It’s still the parents’ job to instill basic good behavior in their children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents.

So, yes, you can and should raise your child with morals and values and a sense of acceptable behavior. Maybe the morals and values are slightly different, but there are still some,  regardless of how “modern” society becomes.

I believe the greatest disservice we do to children is to raise them with an inflated, entitled sense of self and no manners.

And then we come to the village.

While it’s true that no man is an island, I wouldn’t want the village determining what sort of people my children would become – if I had children. As my mother told me when I went away to college, “I had 18 years to instill my values in you, and if I didn’t succeed, it’s a little late now.”

And the village’s values didn’t always align with what she wanted for me, which is why she taught me to fight against peer pressure. If I complained about not being allowed to do what “everyone else” was doing, she’d reply, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off after them?” At the time, I didn’t know where Brooklyn was.

When I was a child, neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone’s child who wasn’t behaving. But if you needed correction by the neighbors, you heard about it from your parents when they found out. As the parents saw it, they were being judged by your bad behavior.

I think neighbors trying that now might be in for a good telling off by some parents who think their children are too precious for correction. But they can still tell you to get off their lawn.

While the village was reinforcing what behavior was acceptable, it was your parents who had the final say. Now, sadly, many people don’t even know their neighbors, so the village suffers by not being allowed to help as the guardrails of society.

So, while each of these assertions has some level of truth to it, none is entirely true. We need the village to guide acceptable behavior, not to teach it. And while the world continues to change, kids are kids, and they can and should still be taught basic civility and manners because kindness and empathy never hurt anyone.