"You can fast forward childhood, but you can't rewind it."(Jonathan Christopher, www.StuffChristiansLike.blogspot.com)
That sentence set my wheels a-turnin': Why is our culture jumping up and down on the Fast Forward through Childhood button, and then when our seven-year-olds arrive breathlessly at a media-induced-early adolescence, the culture slams on the brakes? Why is it that we want our Teenage Years to last from about age 6 1/2 until, oh, age 30?
I have some ideas, and I'd love to hear yours as well...
Youth today means "I can make my own decisions and I don't have to shoulder any responsibility for said decisions." Loosely translated, that means we crave rejecting the authority God has placed in our lives, and instead we replace it with our own set of personal standards. Let's all sing the Malcolm in the Middle Song together to demonstrate: "You're not the boss o'me n-o-o-o-o-w!!"
There should be a reasonable period of time in life for children to practice making their own decisions in an environment that is safe for them to mess up in. A kid should be able (once!) to say stuff like, "I'm eating chocolate chip cookie dough for every meal today," and suffer the consequences at home. But to ellongate this period of life so that such thoughts turn into, "I'm gonna live in dad's basement and play video games for seventeen hours a day even though I am twenty-three years old," and suffer no consequence greater than the exasperated shoulder -shrugging of mom and dad is horrible.
For some reason, our culture has fed us the lie that we deserve to be entertained, and that being entertained is the highest purpose in life. We are raising a generation of spoiled kids who have no purpose, no drive, no ambition, and no standards-except that whatever they do needs to be entertaining, and worthy of posting on You-Tube. In our quest to be sure our kids are happy, we have stolen from them the things that produce true happiness: responsibility, and hard work.
The Lord spoke about this mentality in the gospels: John 12:25 He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. That concept is completely weird by today's standards, and, truth be told, pretty freaky to those who actually heard the Lord say it so many years ago. We are seeing this verse lived out in today's culture, though. People are competely self-absorbed, entertained every minute of every day, coddled, cuddled, coifed, fawned over, manicured, styled, twittered...and miserable.
I believe we need to go the other way: lengthen childhood. Stretch that period of innocence and trust in adults out as long as possible. In order to do this, we as the parents of children must be people who are trustworthy and worthy of respect. We can not rail against children without turning the microscope on our own responsibility toward them. We must train our children, not entertain them. We must get back to spending time with them, talking to them, encouraging them, instructing them, and disciplining them. We must return to interacting with our children. So often in the early fall I hear parents say with actual glee in their voices, "School's starting soon! I can't wait to get these kids out of the house!" We need to reel that attitude in. If we can't stand being around the kids for very long either we have little patience, or we have raised little people no one wants to be around.
Secondly, we need to shorten adolescence. It needs to start later, and end sooner. In the colonial period, a young man of fifteen could earn a living for himself and his family. A young girl of the same age could run a household effectively and well. While I am not advocating a return to Little House on the Prairie, I would hypothesise that the teens of that era were happier and more fulfilled than today's thirty-year olds.
Why? Because they knew they were needed.
The youth of today don't know this. We as a society often pay lip service to our youth by saying pithy things like "the youth are the future", but we have entrusted them with nothing, with one glaring exception: the military. Oddly enough, the military has absolutely no intention of entertaining anyone who joins up, it requires hard work, it demands absolute respect for authority, and the military gives both purpose and responsibility to young people.
People need to face difficult challenges in order to see how strong they are. It is our job as parents to let our children see their strength. So, let's make them do some heavy lifting.
