Our Children

I was at the Starbucks at Plaza Del Lago in Wilmette this weekend. There was a group of young girls with “New Trier” t-shirts on. Everyone of them had a smart phone that they were using to play games. (Is this what today’s young people do? Get together at the local Starbucks and play games on their smart phones?)

When my son was in high school, it would have been fabulous if he could have carried a cell phone – but in those days his school would not allow it. They apparently felt that students only needed cell phones for illicit shenanigans – like doing drug deals or some such. They were definitely not tuned into the realities of life with a teenager. I would drop him off in the morning and he could never tell me – did he have band practice that night? Do I pick him up at 3:30, 4:30 or at 5? Did he need extra money for this, that or the other thing? Was there a field trip today? It was like shooting in the dark. A cell phone would have made my life SO much easier. But somehow we managed to get through it.

We oldsters like to gripe about how our children our spoiled – how they have it so much better than we did when we were their age, etc… On the other hand, would we really want it any other way? Watching this group of young girls and their smart phones, I can gripe about spoiled little rich kids and their naivete about ‘the real world’. As in, “They would not last 15 minutes in…” But would we really want it any other way?

We carefully shelter our children from ‘living in the real world”? We shelter them from having to cope with our too adult problems. And by so doing, we encourage their youthful energy and exuberance. Oh sure – they can be annoying, arrogant and blissfully ignorant. But this is far preferable to having their youthful enthusiasm quashed at too young of an age.

Indeed, once they become adults, we will desperately need that energy and enthusiasm to solve the messes that we have left behind for them. Nothing else will get the job done.

“All Things With Exuberance!”
mary!