Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 May 2007 10:32:32
When I was young there was: drinking, smoking, cars, lads and stuff - as well as church. For us it was something to do, a natural part of growing up & it was there when we got to being 15ish. It was something that we just did, in part because there wasn't much else to do. It was stuff that people kind of kept an eye on and made sure didn't get too out of hand. It was stuff that our parents kind of handled.
For most of us there were two parents about, and we may not have liked them but we knew they were there for us. That was the old days though.
This weekend I saw a picture of modern life that scared and depressed me. Our kids are doing the same kinds of things, but they are doing them so much sooner and so much more, everything seems faster and more intense. And when you listen to them you hear their stories and you realise that things have changed, they haven't got the stability we had. The sorts of stories in the past you would have thought were the exception are now the norm. They talk about what their parent is going to do rather than their parents. They talk about their parents behaviour and you can see that in some ways we really haven't grown up and out of it at all. It's just we do it all behind the privacy of our own front doors now. You can see they are starting to do this "stuff" as a way of dealing with this life and society we've created as well as growing up.
And who is responsible? I guess it's people like us who couldn't make our marriages work, who have taken the attitude that this stuff is just part of growing up, who have thought that breeding independance in our children was brilliant, because it meant we could have our cake and eat it.