Cat's in the Crade, and Silver Spoons

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?""
He shook his head and then said with a smile
"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys"
"See you later, can I have them please?"

Quite a long time ago now, the DHM at the Common Room and Cindy at Dominion Family brought up this article which coincidentally, my husband had mentioned the same week during one of our morning conversations. My kids get a lot of their political and civic context information from my husband's habit of coming out of his office in the morning and discussing whatever's going on in the news that has struck his interest. This kind of study goes to the heart of our interests as parents, of course, because we are raising our own members of the next generation, plus the ones out in society are the ones our children will be working with and living with to at least some extent.

Here are my thoughts on this for what it's worth:

1. Statistics are Simply Data.

Statistics are a bit like computer programs.... or like oracles. They tell you what you ask them, and what they are set up to tell you. How you interpret them is a whole different field, and more like an art than a science. It is a judgment, which involves a different kind of thinking than simple empirical information-gathering and -crunching.

I'm sure it's been said before, but I think statistics, or rather the use of statistics, are the myths of our time. I am not using the word "myth" as a euphemism for fiction or delusion. Rather, myths are stories created and/or distributed to evoke an idea or explain some curious event. Myths may be true or false; they may be interpreted in varying ways, and that is part of their resonance. Statistical studies are designed, implemented and reported to deal with the concerns of our time. The particularly resonant ones are often resonant just because they put a finger on something that troubles us or baffles us.

Obviously, we are troubled and baffled about our young people. In the first place, we are troubled because often we don't really know them. Sometimes, we haven't seen them except in spare minutes here and there almost since they were infants. In the second place, we are baffled because we don't know what we have done or failed to do that has made them this way. The Greeks have many stories about children being exposed on hillsides and then coming back in some way to be the ruin of those who exposed them; we have our studies about how children are failing in education and in life. There is more than science here.... there is almost a kind of poetry and prophesy.

2. I am Not Really Special, Therefore Nobody Is

The article puts the blame on preschool songs like "I am Special" and parental habits like permissiveness. But these seem more like symptoms than an actual disease to me.

Think about where the children -- presumably 3-5 year olds -- are actually SINGING these songs like "I am special." The answer would probably be: (1) At preschools. (2)Along with Barney or whoever they are watching as they park in front of the educational preschool TV shows in the morning while their older siblings, if they have any, are bunkered in the schools.

Isn't there a deeper problem than twaddly, self-centered songs here? These children need individualized, responsive love and attention. They need bread, and are getting pebbles.

The obvious fact is that every child is special. Definition: particular; unique or specific. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" Jeremiah 1:5. Every child knows this instinctively about himself from his first dawning of awareness. If he is fortunate, he moderates and refines the impression as he gets older. He learns that everyone is created with this loving solicitude, not just himself. He learns that he is formed for a purpose, and that an essential key to his identity is to be of help to others. .... that "no man is an island, entire of himself." He learns that he reaches his fullest potential as part of a family, a community working for a higher purpose. (Which is, of course, the overriding message of The Incredibles whence the famous line comes: If everyone is special, then no one is. Our "specialness" is an asset to the wider society, not a debit or a polite fiction)

But just as Al Gore doesn't actually make his lifestyle ecologically friendly by marketing environmental movies or purchasing carbon off-sets, we don't make children recognize their unique potential by ignoring them, shuttling them off, putting them in situations where their uniqueness is a weak point, and then telling them they are special. Children are not stupid; they can recognize the ambivalence just as well as anyone else.

You acquire a sense of uniqueness and particularity by being loved passionately and individually and being brought up in a particular family culture with all its richness of enculturation into our society's heritage. I am not saying that preschool and kiddie TV is always and everywhere bad. I am saying that the silly songs are just one element of a bigger problem; changing the silly song to "You are NOT special" is only going to worsen the basic problem.

3. Don't Hate Them Because They are Learning From Us Too Well.

I think permissiveness, where it exists, usually exists with arbitrariness, and the arbitrariness is a bigger problem than the permissiveness itself. We are allowed to give good things to our children. -- in fact, if we don't, we are not doing what God wrote in our heart in His image even though we are weak and concupiscent. But what we do if we are careless and neglectful (and who isn't at times -- it's our job to get up each day and try to do better) is give our children poor substitutes for good things. Our children ask for bread and we give them Twinkies. Our children ask for time and attention and we give them TVs in their room and Ipods with earbuds so we don't have to listen to their music. They ask for a childhood and preparation for adulthood and we give them scheduled and over-structured substitutes for playtime, and trashy pre-teen clothes and toys.

They want love, which includes personalized discipline and instruction, and we are detached and/or anxious and thereby and exasperate, despise, offend and hinder them. We run to the experts too easily. We hand off our responsibilities too readily. We ourselves were usually taught that we can't trust our own heritage and our own principles and that we should wait for the experts to tell us if we got the answer right or wrong. So it isn't entirely our fault, but we can't absolve ourselves completely, either.

Read The Hurried Child and Hold On To Your Kids, and look at life from the point of view of those "entitled" kids. Where are they getting the attitude that bling-things, status, self-aggrandizement and novelty are more important than genuine commitment and achievement? Why do they think that scorpions, snakes and stones substitute for bread, eggs and fish? We're teaching it to them daily, when we make Paris Hilton or Brittney Spears into a news spectacle, and Simon Cowell and Donald Trump into the arbitrars of our standards, when we isolate them in their peer group as if it were some kind of ghetto or warehouse. Meanwhile, the vast majority of these children know that they are the disposable generation; that many of their peers didn't make it through the filter of their parents' decision process. How bitter that must be for them.

4. The Silver Spoon that Doesn't Feed Them

We give them entitlements that are merely inadequate substitutes, and then we wonder why they are attached to the substitutes and no longer have a taste for the real things. The cat is in the cradle -- the child who is shuffled aside becomes the shuffler himself.

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
....my boy was just like me