@Foxfyre,
Quote:My experience growing up in the 40s and 50s was that the child, Anglo, Hispanic, Native American, or black, who did not have a mom AND dad at home was really unusual. The child who did not have parents who showed up for PTA meetings and teacher/parent conferences was pretty unusual. And the teacher who could not count on the support of most parents to deal with problems the child was having was almost unheard of. And that was accomplished without drugging the kids with behavior modifying substances. I see all of that as definite positives.
Yes. I remember my first teaching job when I was twenty-three and I was working with a sixteen year old. He was making sexually innappropriate comments to me ( remember I was only twenty-three) and some of the other females in the class. I asked him to stop. Then I TOLD him to stop. Then I talked with him after class and tried to help him understand how innappropriate it was and how uncomfortable it was making the females in the room feel. I told him if he persisted, I'd have to make an appointment to talk with his mother. He said, 'Go ahead, call her,' and laughed.
His mother was about twenty years older than I was at that time- probably around your age. She came to the meeting drugged up out of her head on something or other. The principal and I could only look on in shock as she told me I should be flattered at his attention- but that she knew he was a bad boy and then she turned to him and said, 'Cut it out or I'll take you out to 295 and drop you off at one of the exits and you can go wherever you want from there....'
So not every parent from back then was clean and sober and cooperative with the teacher. In fact, I learned something about how definitely NOT to parent from the parents I dealt with as a teacher before I had kids.
I think the difference is the world we've created since the forties and fifties. There is so much more stimulation. And drugs are part of that change.
I have friends in the medical profession who tell me that adults my age are more likely to be on some sort of antidepressant or mood elevator than not.
Their kids see them taking drugs to make it through the day. They don't find it at all out of the ordinary if the parents then tell the children to take drugs to make it through the day. It's a way of life for millions of people of ALL ages.
But it's like I always ask my dad - who must be about your age- when he starts in on 'This younger generation' negatively - talking about my peers. I say, 'Dad - who raised 'this younger generation'? Do you guys take ANY responsibility for the way the world is now?'
Quote:Now the child with multiple step parents or living with grandparents because the parents can't or won't get their act together or living with a single parent is the norm rather than unusual. I have a difficult time seeing that as a positive.
I don't see it as a positive either.
Quote:What he is saying that marriage should be encouraged before children are brought into the world and we don't do that when we celebrate or treat no differently those who sort of skip that step. So back then the unfortunate girl who messed up went away privately to have the baby. Such girls were treated with kindness and understanding, but the stigma definitely did discourage the activity thus children outside of marriage were a very rare thing even before abortion was made legal. And no, the girls weren't going to back alley butchers either. In small towns you know.
I don't call it kind or understanding to force a girl to leave her home, hide who she is and what she's done and in many cases, take her child and place that child for adoption against her will - so that the facade of gentility and properness can be maintained for the family.
People were getting married much younger back then. My mother was engaged at nineteen and married at twenty-one. My grandmother was married at sixteen and a mother at eighteen. I think that's one of the differences, and reasons that you saw so many fewer children born out of wedlock.
But I'm in agreement with you - fewer children born before the woman is truly ready to parent would be wonderful. More healthy for both the young women and the babies.
I think that could be achieved with education rather than community disapproval and branding of people with negative labels.
I think, from my observations of my own children and many others, that things are made too easy for people now. A lot of things that people used to have to learn how to go without or work very hard and save for are very conveniently obtained - even for relatively poor people.
There's not a lot of perseverence and struggle involved in obtaining a fairly comfortable level of subsistence.
Strength of character and determination are not really called upon anymore (unless you have a disability of some sort) to achieve a fairly comfortable existence.
This has encouraged or produced through sheer habit, a certain laziness or malaise- physically, emotionally and spiritually (and I'm not talking about religion).
In fact I'd even go so far as to say that the fact that physical labor or movement is so unnecessary in most day to day lives, this has encouraged an overall lack of energy toward life.
If it aint easy - we don't want it.
(That's why David needs his yellow cabs)
(Just kidding David)
But again, we who have lived in the world have created what it is for those who are just beginning to experience now. How can we look at them and blame it on them?
