Raising a generation of deluded narcissists
Posted by Non_mooching_artist 11 years, 4 months ago to Culture
This sums up the kids from grade school upwards through the 20-somethings. And this is what we get as a society for zoning out when our children need us most. Just plonk them in front if the tv, so we don't have to be the engaged parents we signed up to be. It's tough to punish kids for misbehaving, but being their best buds is not in the job description. It's to guide them to adulthood, not do everything for them. Teach them that they need to figure out things. And failure will happen. But get up and try again.
My wife and I had one child. My wife worked the steady job. I worked part time and was Mr. Mom ten years before the Michael Keaton movie.
One of the reasons that I chose Eastern Michigan University over the U of M to complete my degree was a statement made by a classmate, a single mother who was happy not to see the unmarried father of her child. Her aunt and mother were helping her get through school while she worked part-time at Walmart. I was impressed with her maturity and tenacity. I did not see that in the pampered lap puppies from the Big U.
Family is what you make it.
In fact, if you stop and think about it, the Roman concept of PATER FAMILIAS was about more than who child was whose. If the father died, the place was taken by the "little father" AVUUNCULUS, whence the world "uncle." In Aristotle's time, the "despot" was the master of the single family home or farm. Aristotle pointed out that as a union of families, it is inappropriate for a state to have a despot, but perhaps perfectly appropriate for a husband and father to beat people who do not obey him.
Different societies have different modes of family.
We used the labels "uncle" and "aunt" for many people we knew. My wife grew up differently. She thinks that I am not related to her brother's wife. I think that she is my sister-in-law. My anthropology professor would agree.
The so-called "nuclear family" was a construct that hardly described people in its own time and does not describe them now. To say that children today from "two parent households" are "successful" does not define what those children are successful at.
Kids on farms did not grow up in nuclear families. Neither did the apprentices in the factor houses of medieval merchants.
If you read about the actual lives of people who really made a difference in the world, you have to accept a multiplicity of outcomes for a wide variety of circumstances. The nuclear family narrative is just another kind of central planner's dream for social control:"If everyone lived like I want them to, they would be better off."
In fact, what I see is the young hoodlums giving way to older people on the bus, being polite. How they deal with each other is different, but clearly, they know their manners.
So, without an actual statistically valid sampling, we really have no facts, just stories. You have yours. I have mine.
Kids who play video games seem to be better at solving abstract problems. Just sayin'...
"These men of Florence, not content to following their vocation call themselves "l'uomo universale" the man who is an artist, a poet, a natural philosopher, and a statesman all at once. They glorify the individual. The adorn their churches with sensual images of naked bodies. They revive the pagan past and mimic the works of Cicero and Caesar. They paint themselves and their friends as the faces of the Holy and they presume to put the Pope in Purgatory or even Hell. Their lavish indulgence in the flesh then leads some of them to the actual butchering of corpses from which they produce the grossest of images of mucles, bones, and the very vessels that carry the blood of life itself. Their new printing press allows each of them to be a self-defined authority, even proposing to overturn the Maps of the Heavens and replace the Sun at the Center."
Yes, kids are shallow. They can't help it. They are children, by definition.
About 1000 years ago, when I was a child, a Wheaties commercial started out by calling young people today are rude, vulgar, and disrespectful. Then the athlete spokesman turned the tables: "That was said by Plato 2500 years ago. We disagree..."