Earlier this month our niece had her 16th birthday. I gave her a card listing a few things she has available now that I didn’t have at age 16. Given our 50 year age difference, there’s a lot: cell phones, iPods, Wii, color TV, cable TV, SUVs, Google, Facebook, Twitter, IKEA, Starbucks, Kindle, MacBooks and that’s just a start.This bit of reminiscing led her to question what things I did have at age 16 that I sometimes wish were still available. This is usually the place to talk about values, integrity, ethics and other “eye rolling” stuff for teenagers. But I wanted something more tangible, something really “cool” that might show that we didn’t live in the dark ages.
All I could come up with on the spur of the moment was an old style phone that you can actually slam down in disgust – we’ve been getting a lot of telemarketing calls lately. The newly minted 16-year-old was not impressed and the look was somewhere between “that’s pathetic” and relief that we’re only related by marriage and not in the same gene pool.
I asked for more time to think about it.
“Whatever. I just got my license and have to go drive around so people can see me.”
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Okay, I'll give you an eye-roller: children and adolescents today have no idea how restricted and supervised they are compared to previous generations. They have very little freedom of movement or association compared what my and my parents' generation enjoyed in our youth, and they seem to take being controlled and monitored around the clock for granted and not realize what they've lost. This is the result of the pathological risk-averseness that has infected our culture, and the general delusion that the world, and other people, are much more dangerous than they used to be. I feel sorry for today's hothouse kids. Click on my name to read an informative article about this.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
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