Robbing the Cradle/Open Trackbcks

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Here’s a rough sketch from my huge pile of draft posts…

Rebellious teenagers. It’s a meme we all live with, grew up with, know well. We simply expect teenagers to be rebellious. We’re told it’s always this way and always has been this way.

It’s a lie.

I know more than a few teenagers who have grown up and passed through their adolescence who have defied the meme. Our own, now grown, children are examples of children who seemed virtually immune to the meme.

Others… never grow out of adolescence, never seem to embrace the values their parents say they hold dear, are rebellious, angry, deceptive and even dangerous to themselves and others.

Why?

Well, for one thing, many parents today are ceding the parenting of their children to others from an early age.

From birth to age five, nearly 60% of American children are cared for by persons other than their parents or family members for time periods ranging from four to nine hours a day. Only 22% of American children from birth through age 5 are cared for full time by their parents. ¹

Let that sink in.

Now think further: how many of those parents who are fulltime caregivers for young children largely use the television as an in-home “babysitter” as opposed to those who “teach and care” as they go about their day being an adult?

Rabbit trail: my own mom had five children born within a space of five years. No daycare, no regular in-home babysitters. She managed the household and raised the five of us. “Play” with Mother when I was a young child consisted of “helping” her do housework. (Yeh, I was a fine help banging on pots n pans with my brother and sisters while she cooked or did dishes. *heh*) TV? She read us stories. We played in the yard or with board games (as we grew) or built things with what toys we had–no closet or roomful, just a few things we could make more of with our imaginations.

Is it any wonder more and more “adults” are simply living a life of delayed adolescence? “Grups”–people who have no idea how to be adults, because they were NOT raised but simply farmed out by parents who were just children in adult bodies.

Or the flip side: children whose every whim has been catered to from birth… remaining children for life, thinking the world owes them whatever they want. Children whose parents shuffle them from one “enriching experience”after another, scheduling their days to the nth degree, stifling any genuine creativity and creating children-for-life who are bored to tears without constant stimulation.

Robbing the cradle? Robbing society of generations of adults needed to make a representative republican democracy work. It’s no wonder Congress is filled with idiots, scoundrels and worse, considering gthe electorate that sent them there. And it’s no wonder that Mass Media Podpeople and Academia Nut Fruitcakes can lie out of both ends of their alimentary canals and have both ends’products gobbled up by a gullible public of eternal children.

Maybe there’s hope. Well, I have to hope so,because despair is perhaps the deadliest of sins…

There. Now wasn’t that a cheery thought?