I’ve been teaching in public schools for about 20 years now. I have no kids of my own but I’ve worked with hundreds of them.
Overall, I have to say that parents sure don’t raise their children the way mine raised me and the status quo seems to slide backward a little more every year.
My parents were married 60+ years, right up until my father’s death. The divorce rate these days is no secret. Sure, kids are going to be disillusioned and have a host of issues about the breakup of a marriage. Above and beyond that, divorce means a single parent (usually the mother) is trying to raise the child alone. She may be working overtime or two jobs to make ends meet—how many “latch key kids” do we have now? If a parent isn’t there, how can they transmit norms and values? Kids have to be told over and over and over before the message gets through, and a lot of parents simply aren’t there to do it.
That assumes that the parent knows what to tell the kid in the first place, i.e. that the parent completed childhood with sufficient guidance and support and can now transmit what they learned to their own kids. Quoting from a NY Times religion column:
It is a well-known, little-mentioned fact that children who have children tend to be those who were themselves products of teen-age parents.
Children raising children…raising children. Isn’t the effect on parenting skills becoming like a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy? Sure, back in the day people like my folks got married in their teens. However, that was the norm and it was more like the Waltons on TV, where they had help from the extended family and moms stayed home…hard for the kids to get much past her. They had to behave and contribute to the family for survival. Then as a society post-WWII we hit on some prosperity, and we started giving kids more and more while expecting less and less from them. Enter the sexual revolution, women going out to work, the “me” generation and the slide has been continuous ever since.
Go to your local high school and compare the cars in the student parking lot to those in the teacher parking lot. Shit, I graduated HS and college…I have a B.A. with honors, and all I got for graduation was a VCR! How is it that these kids have cars nicer than mine when they haven’t finished anything yet?
I have seen this phenomenon—parents buying their child’s love—in various forms. The parents work work work and aren’t there, so they throw money at the issue. I hate to quote Jesse Jackson but: “Children need your presence more than your presents.”
I saw something similar even in some poor families. In one school, if I needed to contact a parent, I found that a surprising number of them had no telephone. You might guess that these students had shabby, threadbare clothes, but it was just the opposite: they wore Tommy Hilfiger and the like. A fellow teacher told me, “Their parents don’t want anybody to know they’re poor so they buy them nice clothes to create the illusion. But then there’s no money left for a phone.” I wonder what the plan is when they need to call a fire truck or ambulance.
Throw into the mix the cultural differences—inner city, welfare system, ethnic group norms. Add that some children have been sexually abused and acting out. And some girls think they can “trap” a boyfriend who’s threatening to leave or simply hoping a baby is her ticket out of her parents’ home. Some think a child will provide unconditional love (which they didn’t get from their parents) and be a sort of human pet. They bring the babies to school like trophies. They’re not thinking long-term: the father is primarily a sperm donor and they plan to find someone they actually want to marry later.
And it’s a huge understatement to say that pop culture contributes. Movies lead a naive person to believe that you see each other across a crowded room, fall in love, and it all works out without any arguments, compromises, etc. Censorship on TV…not like I remember it. Kids listen to gangsta rap and such, posture like hoods and girls dress like whores.
If all parents were on the ball, there would be no gangs: these are unparented/underparented kids with nothing to do looking for other kids to lead them and teach them, for a place to belong, etc. The single most important thing to adolescents is peer approval—that’s just baked into the deal and always has been—but parents aren’t stopping them from emulating some very questionable role models.
We’ve become so mobile that we don’t live anywhere near an extended family, we don’t even have two parents on the job in the first place, church attendance ain’t what it used to be, networks will air anything for the almighty buck, the internet is a free-for-all (MySpace, anyone?), and families aren’t coping well with all this.
I’d like to know about raves. How do kids get away with staying out all night at parties? Do the parents not know or not care? Throw in booze, drugs like Ecstasy (or rohypnol) and the rave is just a recipe for disaster. In another thread people were asking when Hooter’s because a family restaurant: exactly. The line between adult and child has blurred terribly. I get a lot of students who think I’m their peer because they’ve never been taught basic respect for authority. Parents want to be the “friend” of the child.
Sex ed isn’t the solution, nor is handing out condoms…we can do those things, and they will help. But if you really want to fix the problem, fix the nuclear family.
