The Kids are All Right

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land.
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly agin.’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.
For the times, they are a-changin’.”
— Bob Dylan, 1963

I think our kids today and society in general get a bad rap. We talk a lot about screen time and technology, about children growing up too fast, about disrespect and a total lack of boundaries, about how everything just feels so scary and out of control in the world around us…but didn’t every generation? I recently got sucked into a keyboard warrior session on social media (because of course I did) and tried to remind my opponent that most every decade or so, the adults of the time thought the kids in that era were the worst yet, that they just weren’t so tuned into every single offense like we are now.

Information is great and so are choices, but sometimes I feel like it isn’t really the kids we’re raising causing such alarm, rather our constant desire to be informed all the time.

Choices and modern conveniences are great. What a time to be alive that I can sit in my 70-year-old house and type this blog to the masses; I can pick and choose which historical elements to bring into my life (hello electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery delivery — I’m cherry picking y’all for now) and which ones just don’t work for me. At the push of a button, I can literally access anything on the internet and in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, I can become a near expert in anything for which I take the time to search. But this has all come with some very real consequences. Collectively we are all scared, second guessing every move we make all the time.

Maybe as parents we are too plugged in.

Maybe we have too much data at our fingertips. My best friend’s husband was in the Navy with some really, really smart men who ran really, really high tech stuff, but on the other side of that coin, were sometimes too cerebral. They had so many thoughts running though their heads at times that they would shut down. My friend’s husband and his buddies would call this “analysis paralysis;” essentially that all the things they knew were doing them a great disservice in that it was too much to process if they tried to apply everything swirling around in their heads to every situation. They literally couldn’t and would get incredibly frustrated with themselves, so they’d just shut down entirely. I think as parents, a lot of the time, our outlook is very much like that.

Can you imagine living through any of the major wars, the industrial revolution, Al Capone, or your daughters bobbing their hair and sneaking into speakeasies during prohibition? What about the subjects of draft dodging, the Manson family, or that time John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus (just to name a few), in such an over- informed modern age? Those of us on the sidelines would have likely died from the stress and shock of it all, or spent all of our free time arguing on the internet about how flat-out horrific and awful the world around us had turned out to be. And yet, those are the same times we look back on longingly while feeling like the world was so different and so much safer.

It wasn’t. We just didn’t see it in our feeds 24 hours a day.

There is a lot of bad. There is a lot of good. There is more information thrown at us than ever before and filters can be more or less discerning depending on the day or the topic of conversation. Listen; I scroll and comment and share at times with reckless abandon, but I also pay for it in spades while I sit up at night wondering what really is in our sunscreen or if my organic carrots really are organic.

None of us have the answers, but mostly, I’d like to think that the kids are all right.