I have no doubt in my mind that it is harder for us as parents today to raise our children than it was for our parents.
I was a child in the 70’s and 80’s. The dangers of our childhood included things such falling off our bike, getting caught at school gluing the dictionary together and as eating an apple with a razor blade – and that never happened, at least to anyone we knew.
My kids face the same dangers. Plus the knowledge that there are people who want to “steal them away” and that their Cousin Dan spent time fighting a war in Iraq against people who want to kill them because they don’t believe in the same god. While driving the other day, Josie, my 9 year old, asked me “Dad, whats meth?” We never had to face such questions. I knew my neighbor’s oldest son smoked dope, but I didn’t know what dope was and I knew that I shouldn’t be hanging out with him as he was he was out of high school.
Kids have many more distractions today than when we were kids. We had 4 channels on television, the big 3 and PBS. Today, there are hundreds of channels, and there is still nothing worth watching. As such, we got rid of our television, and only recently did we get one after not having one for over 5 years. We still don’t have cable or satellite. It’s just for watching movies. Nobody carried an Ipod – the Sony Walkman had just come out and while huge compared to today’s standards, it was out of the price reach of all but the most elite 6th graders. How many parents today don’t think twice about spending $200 for an Ipod for their kid?
Today we face more challenges than our parents. We have to guide our kids through a more challenging obstacle course than we faced. The hurdles are higher and the pitfalls are deeper. We must try do exactly what our parents did: keep our kids moving forward, letting them learn from their mistakes while trying to prevent them from making mistakes from which they cannot recover.
