Oh, hey! We had The Awesomest Visit from "Uncle Pumpkin" for a couple weeks and I forgot to write about it. I dunno: there are pictures. I sort of forgot to be all reflective and stuff and even sort of wondered if I had anything interesting to write when I was in the process of talking so much. Then Uncle Pumpkin left and I remembered that I Have Words To Spend. So I'm back. Also, my friend called to tell me how her son is watching.... well. Okay. We can skip the "my exiting visitor" recap and go right off.
So the boys in Squire's class are all sophisticated and stuff. When I went to pick him up from the "week in wilderness" thingie, I asked one boy how it had been and he said it was "boring". I don't remember finding things were "boring" until I was in high school at least. You know that little window between when you find out how awesomely worldy you are and how trivial the rest of that world is (high school, for me) and when you find out that if life is boring, it's because you yourself are boring (adulthood, for me)? I guess the window is wider now, if it starts at age 11 and clearly being bored is a lifetime occupation for some people.
And then this friend of mine was telling me how she caught her boy, Squire's friend, surfing internet porn. And how she told him that porn wasn't very artistic. To me this is like telling your child that learning to drive a Trabant isn't a good idea because Trabants aren't cool. Which first of all Trabants are awesome, but second of all: Are you really going to judge joyriding on the basis of the car brand? No: stay with me! This is true. We had a family friend who, upon discovering that their child had been stealing Playboys, told the child that if he wanted naughty magazines they would buy them for him, because stealing is wrong. Stealing is wrong?! Here's what's wrong: kids reading porn. Leave aside for the moment my own arguments against porn (and/or cars): The problem with this particular argument is that kids can't handle this thing, this thing that sometimes is useful but causes damage that can't be underestimated; this thing that is absolutely inappropriate for children even though it's legally and perhaps morally approved for adults. I do tell Squire a lot of stuff about sex (and about cars) because I don't want him going off of the bad information he'll get from his peers, but it is made clear that this is Future Stuff. I can't imagine finding him doing something illegal and trying to reason with him about the quality of it.
It breaks my heart, these parents who give their kids so much beyond them. Were their childhoods so miserable, and their adolescence so marvelous, that they need to rush their kids through the one in an effort to reach the other at top speed? It just seems so terribly sad. It's not like I want to bubble my child out of his teen years altogether. But in my mind, adolescence is the time that you start taking personal responsibility for your actions, when you start to realize you can choose something different from what your parents might have wanted, and when you step up to the consequences of those choices. It's when you start to understand the relationship between privilege and responsibility, where the former is conferred in correlation to the latter. And it's when you learn what happens when you totally screw up, in the period in which you still have a safety net under the risk of your fall. But what I'm seeing increasingly is a lot of the privilege and a little of the responsibility: I'm seeing a big safety net and a very low high wire. Kids have mobile phones for what? For the awesomeness of sending each other snuff videos (I wish, I wish I were making this up.). We knew to hide what we were doing if it was wrong; these kids seem to know that if they're open about it they'll be forgiven for the virtue of their honesty, as if that were all that mattered.
Without wishing to be all "I walked uphill through 10 feet of snow to get to school" -- because actually, I walked uphill to get home, and also because there was never so much snow -- or all "Damn kids on my lawn" --because I don't even have a lawn-- nevertheless. Nevertheless and still. Kids are human beings, and I tend to find them absolutely as annoying as I find all other human beings, but in this case I can see how they got to be that way, and there are some parents I really want to punch in the face.
Amen. Fun how those parents get all confused as to how those kids got all fubar, no? And then complain when same kids mooch off of them forever....sigh. I hope I'm a better parent.
Posted by: Alyson | June 26, 2008 at 04:32 PM