Adventures in Parenting

Did you ever notice that people never say the present generation of kids are morally better than the previous generation? You never hear anyone say, “Kids today are much better behaved than when we were kids.  Kids now are more respectful and polite than when I was growing up.”

No! We always hear comparison of the opposite. You would hear something like, “Kids today are lazy and disrespectful.”

It seems to me that morality deteriorates with each generation.

I didn’t search for statistics to back this up, but from what you’ve observed, would you agree? Crime committed by young people is up, drug and alcohol use among kids is up, and reports of school violence that are happening now were unheard of in the old days.

What is also interesting is that the standard of living is higher now than before. We often hear people say, “We never got to have the things that our kids have today.” (My daughter has an annual pass to Disneyland – something that was way beyond what I would even hope for as a kid. I’m jealous!) Our houses are bigger, our cars are fancier, and we take more vacations then when we were growing up.

What does this mean? Does it tell us something about where we should put our focus? Is telling our kids to study hard, get good grades and get a high paying job the most important values we could teach them? Should we perhaps pay more attention to our children’s character development to get them ready for college rather than their SAT scores?

Providing food and shelter is relatively easy. Let’s get back to doing the hard job of PARENTING.