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Health & Fitness

Kids These Days

Every generation thinks that the one it raised is going to be the one that kills off humankind. Is this one really it?

It wasn’t like I was ancient when I had my first child – I was 31 – but I wasn’t terribly young, either, and in the neck of the woods where I live the average maternal age is younger than the average maternal age in most of the rest of the country.  As a result, I am, if not the oldest, one of the oldest of my kids’ friends’ Moms.  More than once I have found myself at a birthday party relating more to the child’s grandmother than their mother.  My husband, who is 16 years older than I am, is generally older than the grandparents at the birthday parties.

 I say this to tell you that in some ways it makes perfect sense that we would spend a great deal of our time sitting on the front porch in our rocking chairs, making clicking noises with our dentures and shaking our fists at the sky to bemoan the tragedy that is Kids These Days.  Our children believe, with good cause, that we are hopelessly uncool, and if we were to even try to be cool it would be worse, because we are way too old for cool, and should just go back to knitting afghans or churning butter or darning socks or whittling pipes out of corn cobs or recounting our latest medical procedures, or whatever it is that old people do to entertain themselves. 

 As a general rule, I can’t stand the television shows my children watch.  They are dumb, crude, unfunny, and rude.  It is difficult to believe how a person could have ever persuaded a major network to produce and air this drek, and it truly makes me wonder what horrors were rejected to make air space for such winners as “Stephen Universe” “The Amazing Adventures of Gumball” and “Adventure Time.”  When I watch these shows, or even catch a glimpse of them, I can hear my brain cells screaming as they jump suicidally from my ears to make the torture stop quickly.

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 Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a prude.  I don’t really mind some forms of rude and crude so long as it is also clever.  But I struggle as a parent what to forbid, what to merely disapprove of, and what I should just chalk up to personal preferences. 

 And then one day I was flipping through channels on the satellite radio in my car, and happened upon the Broadway channel.  After the song I was listening to ended ( “One Night in Bangkok” from Chess) the next one to begin was from Bye Bye Birdie.  You know the one, the one that starts out, “Kids!  What’s the matter with kids these days?”  It struck me that even back in the allegedly squeaky clean 50s when Bye Bye Birdie made its debut that people thought that kids these days had just invented being wrong and bad.  And then I remembered an essay written a hundred and thirty some odd literal years ago by Mark Twain called “Advice to Youth” that I read a metaphorical hundred years ago.  He talks about how kids lie and won’t listen to their parents and like to sleep late and are prone to accidental gun violence.  But for his frequent use of the word “musket” it could have been written last week.

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 Then I got to thinking that Chess came out when I was roughly my son’s age, and some of the lines from Bangkok are things like, “You’re looking at a tourist whose every move’s among the purest – I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine” and “The Queens we use would not excite you.”  And how I found a bunch of 25 cent VCR tapes at the local Goodwill of my favorite movies from when I was in Junior High, and bought them for my kids.  And was then horrified to be reminded what foul mouthed little kids those Goonies were.  I guess I can’t go from, “You have to watch this!  I know you’ll love it!  I loved it when I was your age!” to “Oh no, you’re not going to listen to this kind of foul language in my house!” in less than ten minutes without appearing like the world’s biggest hypocrite and destroying what meager credibility I might have in the future.  (They did love it, by the way.)

 I also thought about how funny I thought it was that people were ever scandalized by the early Beatles, who wore suits and ties and were well groomed and who sang about holding hands.  But then, right about the same time the Rolling Stones were singing about how brown sugar tastes so good.  Plus, don’t forget the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald song about how she can’t dance with him because she knows good and well she isn’t going to stop with just dancing.  Or, for that matter, Billy Joel trying to talk poor Virginia out of her virtue. 

 So, while I will never approve of my kids listening to Ke$ha sing about brushing her teeth “with a bottle of Jack, cuz when we leave for the night we ain’t coming back,” I guess I can rest assured that odds are good they’ll turn out decently anyway.  Theoretically, I have a greater influence on their lives than some pop star they’ve never met, even if I am their hopelessly dorky Mom. 

 Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays.  You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor

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