What Do Today's Kids Need? Smarter Adults.

I've been hearing this sentiment a lot lately--being that my mother and mother-in-law are both teachers--that kids today are out of control. They're cussing at young ages and talking about sex and guns and shooting each other in school, etc. and it never used to be this way. Well, first off, yes, it did used to be this way, it just wasn't this way for suburbanite middle-class white kids. And now it is. Actually I can still remember cussing and talking about sex and violence at a pretty early age--never shot at anyone, but I probably wished I had the sack to a few times.

My mothers both share the opinion that because there is no longer prayer in schools, this is why kids are going crazy. I respectfully disagree (mostly because I went to Catholic school my whole life and never did or didn't do anything good or bad based on the fact that I was being forced to pray to a God I didn't understand or necessarily agree with). I believe the real problem is that kids today have access to information beyond our parent's wildest dreams and the adults aren't keeping up. If you are my age, 27, or there abouts, imagine going through college without the internet for research. WHAT? Actually having to go through microfilms and books to find little tidbits that we can now punch into a computer screen and in one second have everything ever written in the entire world. This is what today's kids get from day one. Not only this but they are smart enough to get into things that kids probably shouldn't see--such as sexual content, violent video clips, etc--but are. So what do we do about this? It makes sense to me to deal with it in a way that addresses the problem. We didn't ask for kids to be exposed to this stuff and we certainly can't stop it completely. If they want to see things they shouldn't see, they're going to find a computer somewhere where they can access these things. Can we talk to them? Is this that big of a deal? I don't have kids so I don't want to assert too much here, but I can't imagine myself not just sitting down with my child and explaining why these things can be harmful to their worldview. And if I can't explain it, maybe I should consider that I'm being close-minded and that this is just a change the world is going through--not the coming of days.

I don't know the answer, but I certainly remember what I thought as a teen. I wanted the WHY behind everything. If an adult couldn't give me the WHY I usually considered that adult pretty ignorant. I respected adults with answers, with information. Not just because they earned their place as the Alpha, but because they made me a smarter person and usually didn't ask me to do things based on their own laziness and apathy. So, I'm sorry my fellow adults, there is a traitor in your midst. I'm with the kids on this one. Give them information, talk to them like intelligent human beings, they'll respect you. Order them around like some kind of dictator who deserves respect simply for being alive longer, and I gurantee they're going to rebel.