tuckova

Oh, hey! We had The Awesomest Visit from "Uncle Pumpkin" for a couple
weeks and I forgot to write about it. I dunno: there are pictures. I
sort of forgot to be all reflective and stuff and even sort of wondered
if I had anything interesting to write when I was in the process of
talking so much. Then Uncle Pumpkin left and I remembered that I Have
Words To Spend. So I'm back. Also, my friend called to tell me how her
son is watching…. well. Okay. We can skip the "my exiting visitor" recap
and go right off.

So the boys in Squire's class are all sophisticated and stuff. When
I went to pick him up from the "week in wilderness" thingie, I asked
one boy how it had been and he said it was "boring". I don't remember
finding things were "boring" until I was in high school at least. You
know that little window between when you find out how awesomely worldy
you are and how trivial the rest of that world is (high school, for me)
and when you find out that if life is boring, it's because you yourself
are boring (adulthood, for me)? I guess the window is wider now, if it
starts at age 11 and clearly being bored is a lifetime occupation for
some people.

And then this friend of mine was telling me how she caught her boy,
Squire's friend, surfing internet porn. And how she told him that porn
wasn't very artistic. To me this is like telling your child that
learning to drive a Trabant isn't a good idea because Trabants aren't
cool. Which first of all Trabants are awesome, but second of all: Are
you really going to judge joyriding on the basis of the car brand? No:
stay with me! This is true. We had a family friend who, upon
discovering that their child had been stealing Playboys, told the child
that if he wanted naughty magazines they would buy them for him,
because stealing is wrong. Stealing is wrong?! Here's what's wrong:
kids reading porn. Leave aside for the moment my own arguments against
porn (and/or cars): The problem with this particular argument is that
kids can't handle this thing, this thing that sometimes is useful but
causes damage that can't be underestimated; this thing that is
absolutely inappropriate for children even though it's legally and
perhaps morally approved for adults. I do tell Squire a lot of stuff
about sex (and about cars) because I don't want him going off of the
bad information he'll get from his peers, but it is made clear that
this is Future Stuff. I can't imagine finding him doing something
illegal and trying to reason with him about the quality of it.

It breaks my heart, these parents who give their kids so much
beyond them. Were their childhoods so miserable, and their adolescence
so marvelous, that they need to rush their kids through the one in an
effort to reach the other at top speed? It just seems so terribly sad.
It's not like I want to bubble my child out of his teen years
altogether. But in my mind, adolescence is the time that you start
taking personal responsibility for your actions, when you start to
realize you can choose something different from what your parents might
have wanted, and when you step up to the consequences of those
choices.  It's when you start to understand the relationship between
privilege and responsibility, where the former is conferred in
correlation to the latter. And it's when you learn what happens when
you totally screw up, in the period in which you still have a safety
net under the risk of your fall. But what I'm seeing increasingly is a
lot of the privilege and a little of the responsibility: I'm seeing a
big safety net and a very low high wire. Kids have mobile phones for
what? For the awesomeness of sending each other snuff videos (I wish, I
wish I were making this up.). We knew to hide what we were doing if it
was wrong; these kids seem to know that if they're open about it
they'll be forgiven for the virtue of their honesty, as if that were
all that mattered.

Without wishing to be all "I walked uphill through 10 feet of snow
to get to school" — because actually, I walked uphill to get home, and
also because there was never so much snow — or all "Damn kids on my
lawn" –because I don't even have a lawn– nevertheless. Nevertheless
and still. Kids are human beings, and I tend to find them absolutely as
annoying as I find all other human beings, but in this case I can see
how they got to be that way, and there are some parents I really want
to punch in the face.