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I just finished reading JP's post about the Sheep Detectives, which looks like a cute movie. Anyway, he mentioned that it is rated PG because it references death, and that got me to thinking. Something that I often see on here is how today's youth is glued to their phones, how they don't want to work, how they don't know how to interact, how they can't function, etc. Have any of us ever really considered that our culture and how we handle children has so drastically changed in the past 40 or so years as to create the most immature generations ever in the history of the world, and it's our fault not theirs, because we raised them. We coddle children far beyond their infancy treating them as if they are incapable of dealing with any responsibility or the realities of life. This is something I've been thinking about for a couple of months now. Two things have happened in the past two or three months involving my daughter that made me think about it. My daughter is 16 and wanted a library card in Lawton, which is about 20 miles away. I told her to drive over and get one, and she said she couldn't get one without me because she is a minor. I distinctly remember riding my bike over when I was about 10 and getting one when we first moved to Lawton. The other thing was when she wanted to adopt a dog from the Elgin pound, which is the next town over. Again, I told her to go do it, as long as she took care of it. Well, guess what else minors can't do anymore. Then, this goes back a bit farther in time, there is the issue of getting a job. It is a lot harder these days for kids to get jobs, Oklahoma now requires anyone younger than 16 to get a permit from their school to allow them to work, and no one under 14 is allowed to have a job. Even if you do have a permit the regulations over how much you can work and when you can work are pretty ridiculous. I don't know about y'all but I have been gainfully employed since I was 12, and no one legislated how much I could work, that was between me and my boss. The Federal gov't pushed the minimum age for tobacco back to 21 a few years ago, 18 year olds aren't mature enough to decide if they want to smoke but they are mature enough to elect the leader of the free world, that's a scary precedent.
We have effectively created a society in which we extend infancy into our kids' 20s and then we sit around and gripe about the youth of today. One of the things that always bugs me about teaching is that I see teachers treat their students like infants and expect them to act maturely. One thing I am often asked by other educators and parents is how I manage to have students that are so responsible and mature. My answer is simple: you can't have it both ways, if you want kids to behave like adults you have to treat them like adults. Give them responsibilities, allow them to fail, teach them what growth looks like and how to get there. I often have kids come back to me after they have gone to college to tell me that while I was the hardest teacher they had I was the one who best prepared them for life after high school. We need to quit looking at our youth and complaining about their immaturity while treating them like infants. As a society we need to get better, we need to start giving kids responsibility again so that they can learn what responsibility is. If we never allow kids to fail, if we don't allow kids to make informed decisions until after they are 21, if we coddle them in childhood, that childhood will extend into their 20s and 30s, and they will never learn independence. It really strikes a nerve with me when I see someone complain about kids but not about how we, as a society, have raised them. We are all culpable for the way this young generation has been raised and we need to take ownership of our failure in raising them.
We have effectively created a society in which we extend infancy into our kids' 20s and then we sit around and gripe about the youth of today. One of the things that always bugs me about teaching is that I see teachers treat their students like infants and expect them to act maturely. One thing I am often asked by other educators and parents is how I manage to have students that are so responsible and mature. My answer is simple: you can't have it both ways, if you want kids to behave like adults you have to treat them like adults. Give them responsibilities, allow them to fail, teach them what growth looks like and how to get there. I often have kids come back to me after they have gone to college to tell me that while I was the hardest teacher they had I was the one who best prepared them for life after high school. We need to quit looking at our youth and complaining about their immaturity while treating them like infants. As a society we need to get better, we need to start giving kids responsibility again so that they can learn what responsibility is. If we never allow kids to fail, if we don't allow kids to make informed decisions until after they are 21, if we coddle them in childhood, that childhood will extend into their 20s and 30s, and they will never learn independence. It really strikes a nerve with me when I see someone complain about kids but not about how we, as a society, have raised them. We are all culpable for the way this young generation has been raised and we need to take ownership of our failure in raising them.
