Too Easy?

Posted in Philosophy of EducationParenting on Feb 26, 2010 - 10:26 AM

“I hate to say it, but I think our kids have it too easy.”

How many times have you heard, thought, or said that phrase in your life? A friend of mine recently mused out a version of that old dismissive turn of phrase recently after one of her daughters refused a simple request to help clear the table after lunch.

I think it's common and rational that many parents of my generation make the assumption that previous generations, perhaps forever, have judged their own children as having an easier life then they had themselves. The conventional perspective is that each successive generation has more play time and toys, yet fewer rules and less responsibility.

Were 5-year-old boys really stoically driving teams of oxen through the 4 am fog as their whistling older sisters canned orchards of apples before their 7-mile walk to school? Did they eat potatoes and cabbage every day and never complain? I picture ancestral images of smile-less children, more like tiny adults, already life-worn with their stony eyes and callused hands, which is a stark contrast to the modern-day, middle-class American child archetypes of my imagination; like the little, doughy Wii champion whining to his weary parents to bring him another energy drink before pro wrestling comes on. Or the 9 year-old fashion-obsessed woman-ette steadfastly trying to pass off the generic, hyper-sexualized persona of the pop-puff du jour as her own.

And so many of us, living a relatively affluent life in America, can't even reference our own childhoods as an example of a time where children didn't have it "too easy." Most Gen-Xers of my ilk KNOW we had it easy. So, as we attempt to help our children gain perspective on their place on the spectrum of privilege, we have to pull from beyond our own experience.

Luckily, we have so much more to go on than old episodes of "Little House on the Prairie," that popular 70s show based on the diaries of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or the ubiquitous series of black and white photographs of soot-smudged street urchins of the Great Depression. Many of us draw on to the youth we've worked with on city streets, children we know about who are exploited in the endless dungeons of the global, economic gulag, or our personal and familial experiences and connections to the realities of the struggling classes in our country. We can share stories, help our children reflect on what this all means. We can (though I don't) set up brisk chore regimens, strict systems for earning privileges, or even resort to simply telling horror stories about what life could be like in another time, class, or country.

But still. Isn't there still a holographic quality to these “hardships”?

Having it hard is a difficult thing to grasp when you have it . . . well, easy. It's an even harder thing to grasp in a way the aids and abets your becoming whole. What sort of ease makes a healthy, rather than slothful and maladaptive, childhood? What sort of challenges build, rather than injure, a young person's developing self?

While I'm sorting this out, I wish someone would run to the fridge and grab me another energy drink. Lady Gaga is on iTunes radio.

Khalif

Tags for this entry:
responsibility, privileges, challenges

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