Missing adults
Can we be friends? When dealing with youngsters, is it possible for us to provide guidance and instruction while at the same time wishing to be recognized as pals?
Rob Henderson doesn’t think we should try, and that there’s a dearth of the type of adults that young people truly need. The actual elders that youngsters face these days are older people who want to look and act like they’ve never grown up. Today’s adults want to be acknowledged as eternally youthful, especially by today’s young. This, Henderson argues, deprives young adults of guidance.
Henderson was himself a foster child who went through various homes without proper adult guidance and a lot of emotional turmoil. At one point, an adult father figure in high school encouraged him to enlist in the military. He did, and he says marine boot camp gave him the needed swift kick in the pants. Fresh out of high school he was still an adult with childish ways, and the marines finally gave him some tough adult guidance. They taught him rules, gave him boundaries.
Henderson senses that today’s elders, when interacting with young people, are motivated mainly by a vain desire for admiration—not for being older, but for being “cool” by the amorphous standards of the children:
Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent,” every professor wants to be the “cool” professor.
Read the whole thing.
For my part, I wonder to what extent the lack of guidance comes from adults’ own vanities and how much from elders’ own uncertainty as to whether or not they themselves have the right answers. Part of the phenomenon might have to do with the evolution of families themselves in modern times. That is, throughout all of our human history, families were a unit of basic survival. Every additional child was an investment in the adults’ future—in more ways than just the propagation of the parents’ genes.
Before the 20th century—especially in America—earlier generations had to spend most of their time securing sources of food for the whole year. There weren’t grocery stores stocked year round with foods from distant lands available out of season. People were obliged to live as “locavores” with no other options. Children were part of any family’s labor force involved in preparing meals for the day, and for raising food to put in storage for the family for the lean seasons.
As soon as they were big enough to contribute, children were expected to do the work rather than just offering another mouth to feed. Adults in the family had to train the children how to do the work, how to behave as members of society focused on the very adult work of keeping everyone alive.
Children in the modern context are no longer a survival necessity, but instead a lifestyle option. Adults don’t see them as a necessary source of labor for doing the hard work of bringing in the harvest and filling the larders. For modern adults, children are potential best friends, vessels for love and adulation—they are other, admirably younger humans who can help the adults find meaning in their own lives, in which basic survival is taken as a given. The kids are no longer necessary for actual group or individual survival, but rather for psycho-social validation, for the adults’ own sense of purpose.
Before this sprawls too much further, I should point out that what I say here is grossly over-generalized, and thus inaccurate, lacking in nuance, and so on. Also, this isn’t an assertive case for what should or shouldn’t be, or for how I think the world should work—and I’m not even disagreeing with Rob Henderson. Not too much. I’m mainly speculating on how it is we got to where we are today: more by the happy accident of our incredible good luck and prosperity.
And I’m not sure how to fix the problem, inasmuch as it is a problem. The young might be in need of guidance and adult supervision. But the adults seem to be lacking in the same thing. As they say, there’s no instruction manual for raising children—whether yours or others’. So where do we go to get a cadre of drill sergeants to put us through collective boot camp?
I slept a long time last night till this morning...but, feel so much better...
Tonight I shall play with some of the cool things I got...lol
I think it is possible to both be fun, and have a child at heart attitude and offer guidance, I am not the way I am because I seek approval, I am the way I am, because it is actually who I am.
One of my nieces this year send me an awesome Christmas card where she said ; I owe some of my sweetest memories of this time of year to you, along with my gift wrapping skills. Now, I wasn't anyone's parent, and I don't like being called "aunt" ( or other labels) , but, all my nieces and nephews liked me and came to me for advice ( and sometimes to get away from a toxic parent or two, they are way different than me), or just to hang out...so, I think if I had had children I would have known how to be both.