Kids These Days

If you’re of a mind to lament the comparative worthlessness of kids these days, there’s one detail about your observation that I’m certain you’re overlooking: Kids don’t make themselves.

Children have almost no autonomy. They are what we make them, almost exclusively. We have the greatest effect on our own kids, but we have some effect, at least collectively, on all of them. That may sound weird to people who know me. I don’t believe in “collective guilt.” But people who do believe in collective guilt are guilty as hell when they say, kids these days. The index finger points out two malefactors, generally.

Kids these days are probably tired of hearing that they grew up in the world others made for them, but they’re somehow doing it wrong. I’m not young anymore, but more than once I’ve suffered an affront that goes something like this: You screwed up; you cooperated. That’ll teach you!

Well, I don’t cooperate all that much anymore. I’ll tell old people to get off my lawn, mostly, but not the young people. I like energy and the promise of better things to come. I will continue to do so until I get a bed with a lid.

I like my own kids, and every once in a while I indulge my wife and allow myself a bit of pride about their energy, or their bearing, or their good natures. I would expect to be judged harshly if they had turned out like… kids these days.

My reason for refusing to sanction the bylaw made by the borough
council of Stoke Newington was that I have received no evidence that
the dangers arising from roller-skating by boys and girls are so much
greater than the ordinary dangers of traffic in the streets,
particularly motor traffic, that the practice ought to be prohibited by
by-law.  Such a by-law would create a new offence punishable by the
criminal law…would lead to the imposition of fines, and possibly to
the detention and imprisonment of children and young persons for
indulging in a form of amusement which would be legal on one side of
the road and illegal on the other. I am very reluctant to increase the
number of occasions when the children of the poorer classes may be
brought into the police-court and rendered liable to imprisonment”.   -Winston Churchill