When it comes to child rearing and upbringing I am a self admitted elitist. I had excellent parents. Not that I appreciated them to the extent that I should have when they were raising me, but looking back I find more and more reason as to why parents like mine exist few and far between.
They raised four wonderful children, of which I am the least amazing and honestly often the unanswered where did we go wrong question. It is this reality through which I view the entire world. So it’s not that I see things through rosy lenses or even the jade of skepticism, it is the simple truth that yes a tree produces after its own kind.
Why does all of this suddenly matter? Why is the indictment on our parenting skills one that we can no longer afford to ignore? Because as I survey the world we live in, and I become more and more acquainted with the crisis of character, integrity and conscious that we face, I can’t help but wonder, what are we really teaching our children? Have we become a people so engrossed in ourselves that we fail to recognize that not only are robbing our children of hope for a successful future, but we are robbing society in general of a socially conscious future adults that will undoubtedly assume that they are owed something since they have not had to work for anything.
My parents taught me that not only does a village raise a child, but that same village pays for or is rewarded for the decisions that child makes when they become an adult. How many adults are we dealing with everyday that have grown no further than the microwave reality that my generation has grown up with. We live in a time when everyone gets a trophy for showing up, we have no more healthy competition, we have no more winners, we have a sea of victims waiting to be healed with whatever magic pill the pharmaceutical companies release next. Can’t sleep, there’s a pill for that, need a better sex life, want a new body? Have a body ache, bet you there’s a syndrome, melancholy, mania and everything in between has a drug and a dealer with a MD in their title. But that’s not what got our attention.
We need only look to the economy to prove that parenting is no longer a priority. It wasn’t the epidemic of teenage pregnancy, global youth AIDS, or poverty that has made it crystal clear for us all. It’s the Wall St. mentality of greed and the welfare without work mentality of a handout; the irony is that they were both found in the same place. In the board rooms of Fortune 500 corporations that somehow believed that after looting America as if they were Saxon’s in lower Britannia had the nerve to be worried about whether or not they would be able to continue their $400k trips to the spa. There is a grave difference between caring for the poor among us and creating an impoverishment of drive, ambition and flat out work ethic. What we face is a global endeavor to get ahead and never look back at what we left in our trail.
These are dangerous and radical ideals. Talk like this sparks Marxist inquiries and McCarthy commissions on Americanism. But do we have the right to enjoy the benefits of a free market capitalistic society, when we can barely manage our fiduciary responsibility to raise the next generation to handle and survive the stuff we have amassed. What is funny is that we need a license to drive, a degree to get a job, be 18 to vote, 21 to drink and 25 to get into some nightclubs, but the only requirement to be a parent is simply to have excreted or accepted the necessary fluids to procreate.
Am I wrong for wanting more for my daughter than the world she will inherit as of now? What does it say about me that I have made a million mistakes and that if she were to make them I would be outraged? Am I a hypocrite or just another parent striving to want more for my children than what I had? Unfortunately that is both my gift and my curse. I don’t know if they make parents better than mine, I’m sure that I will be no where near as effective as they were, far less make as few mistakes as they did. I’m sure if I asked them they would say what all parents say, they just did the best they could and tried to make sure they passed along real values. They succeeded, I’m left to wonder though, will real parenting die with my parents and their generation? Can us children who grew up with microwaves, computers and VCR’s have anything to really give to the DVR, iPod, iPhone, generation that will give them purpose?
And I thought solving world peace was hard…
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