What is it about this younger generation? They question everything! Even when they don’t have an answer, or an alternative opinion, they still question everything. But most of all, they don’t know how to do anything scholastic or academic, and the teaching profession is wanting to know why?
Why, when kids come to school at the age of five or six, unable to write even their own name and address, it’s somehow the teacher’s fault if the child can’t write ‘War and Peace,’ by the end of their first year in school? Why the kids can’t read even the most basic of primers, yet again, they will be expected to be top of the class in English, during the same academic year? And why they can tell you how much, or how many, of anything is anything. They can’t read an analogue clock, a timetable, or a calendar, don’t know the alphabet, can’t have a meal without crisps, and drink too much fizzy, because their general behaviour is far from admirable!
Are parents really doing enough with their kids?
It’s clear that societies have changed beyond recognition during the last fifty years, and that for most families, the demand is for both parents have to work to maintain their families, to survive. This, of course has consequences, in that the parents are not around when their infants and children at home immediately after school, and probably too exhausted after their work day, to give them the interactions they need. I’m absolutely certain that the parents don’t love their kids any less, but there is just so much pressure on them.
What we must understand however, is that throughout infancy, the average infant asks about 40,000 questions ranging from the name of, or simple facts about an object, progressing to explanations in late infancy. During that period, their synapses, or neuron connections, equate to three times more than the number found in an active adult’s brain. That’s a crazy number, but reflects the number of times an infant asks “Why?” or “But why?” Those not being confused understanding, but the fact that we adults are usually answering the wrong questions. It is a fine line isn’t it?
On balance, as a parent, you can’t keep your mouth shut when things need to be said. You do need to read those bedtime stories, play snakes and ladders, be a good listener and question answerer. You need to be what they need for tomorrow, next month, next year, and beyond. Most parents will disappoint their children, but that goes with the territory. We all have quite inflexible expectations of our kids, our relationships with them, and will find it difficult to bend to meet their needs. But really, neither did our parents... yet I feel we were better prepared for what lay ahead.
Now that maybe because there were less options then, and maybe more societal structure, with more restrictions, a kind of progressive ‘1984?’ Despite ‘hacks’ being thrown in our faces for almost all we do, whether it’s Facebook, X, or Instagram... there are no hacks for parenting. There’s no easy way, easy answer, or short cut, but, if you feel like you are being a ‘bad’ parent, you can take comfort in the fact that young Kevin’s Mum, in ‘Home Alone,’ never realised her son was missing until she was halfway to Paris!
By comparison to infants and children, the ‘WHY?’ that echoes incessantly throughout young people’s environments, demonstrate a fragile desire to know everything, whilst being reluctant to be taught, and even more reluctant to learn. There appears, not just alive and well, but absolutely thriving across the pre-teen and teen education sector, an entitlement to knowledge, but with minimal teaching and learning involved. Is it just laziness, or maybe a sense of entitlement?
Maybe wanting the ‘right answer,’ without having to know or understand why, is probably a consequence of the technological age we live in, as pace, speed, rush, and hurry are all priorities in our new world. This phenomenon of endless questions rarely seeks genuine responses, but rather is a quest for legitimacy for unchallenged, facile beliefs, volatile opinions, and tunnel-vision perspectives. Its intolerance, entitlement, and arrogance all neatly parcelled up as self-indulgence.
Don’t let it happen to you and yours.
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