Let Kids Be Kids

 

 We live in a world where information is literally at our fingertips and where "news" is thrown at us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We, as a society, are more digitally connected to our world than ever, but we are also less physically and emotionally connected to our world at the same time. I would argue that this is unhealthy for us as adults, but we need to consider what it may be doing to our kids.

I recently saw a report, if you want to call it that, about a young child, I think they were a preteen, who reportedly responded to their parent's concerns about the tariffs that the U.S. is imposing on other countries by asking if it was because of Donald Trump. While I doubt the overall sincerity of the reporting given the nature of the reporting overall, I still have to wonder why a preteen needs to know anything about national economics and politics.

I am old enough to remember a time when kids were allowed to be kids. A child's world revolved around their family, their activities (school, church, sports) and their friends. Nothing else mattered to them; and kids were much happier and well balanced. Now, mom and dad are always engaging with the news media, either through their television prattling on all day with news and talk show programming or with their eyes glued to their devices. Politics and social justice have become a near full time distraction for parents, which automatically brings it into the realm of the family.

Now, I think it is important for parents to introduce their kids into the realm of politics where and when appropriate, but it has become an obsession for many adults. And to make things worse, there has developed a notable bias in the media against values that have typically been viewed as those held by Christian families. Unfortunately for that, the weak willed and weak minded spend too much time listening to the talking heads instead of reading their Bibles, and are thus misguided into thinking that Christian thinking is wrong and that we should all be compassionate towards the things that the Bible tells us is wrong.

These ideas are also permeating our school systems. It started with post-secondary learning institutions where liberal ideas have been festering for decades, eroding the social fabric that used to hold this nation together, but over the last 15 to 20 years, it has also been permeating our secondary and even our elementary schools, brought in by the teachers who learned it in university, and this has been done regardless of whether or not the parents agree with it.

It can start in what may seem to be a benign manner, but if it is allowed to, it will grow to the point that the teachers think it is their job to raise the children that they are only supposed to be teaching. I remember something from many years ago when my youngest child was in kindergarten. The teacher was brand new, just out of university. My wife would occasionally send one or two mini chocolate bars as the snack for my child. Otherwise the snack would consist of crackers and cheese or fruit or some type of home baking. The teacher, for some reason, took umbrage that my child would very occasionally have mini chocolate bars for their snack, and she would send notes home to my wife to please provide better snacks for our child. After a few such attempts to interfere with our choices, we made it very clear to that teacher that she was not in charge of deciding what our child would eat, and unless she wanted to pay for our food, she had no say in what our child had for snacks. This same attitude of superiority based on a "higher education" came out again later in another matter, the nature of which I currently forget, and I was able to tell this teacher personally and face to face that her role was to teach my child the alphabet (which we had already taught) and whatever else the curriculum dictated. It was not her role to be a parent to my child and she would do well to remember that.

I don't want to rag on teachers too much; I am sure that there are some excellent teachers out there, but we have had little exposure to good ones, especially among the younger ones. There seems to be some inner need for teachers to try to influence children to their way of thinking. This has to stop, but I doubt it will. For all I know, this is taught at the universities, and with parents being worn out and distracted by the burdens and cares of this life, that leaves the teachers with more lee way to try to instill their own values into children that are not theirs.

We see this so much in reports that we hear where schools are actively hiding things from the parents of the children. The schools push alternate lifestyles on the kids, claiming that these are normal and good, then when the kids act on the things that they are taught, claiming to be gay or transgender (often because they see that those students who claim these things get special attention), the teachers act to keep this information from the children, painting the parents as potential enemies of their own children.

This insanity has to stop!

Why can't kids just go learn the three R's at school (reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic) like what used to be taught, learn how to interact with other kids under normal circumstances and not get inundated with politics of all kinds?  Why do television cartoons need to push racial ideologies, gender nonsense and climate hysteria on little kids? We are burdening our children with things that are entirely unnecessary.

Why is it that so many children have their own psychiatrist/psychologist/therapist for things that only adults ever dealt with in the 70's, 80's, 90's and even the early 2000's? Could it be that we are exposing the kids to things that are too heavy for them to deal with at too young an age?

It is my position that even adults are being inundated with too much information too fast these days, which is driving up adult anxiety; so what effect is this having on our kids? They are far too aware of what is happening in the world of the adults all around them. The kids are growing up too fast and are carrying burdens far beyond their understanding far too soon. But there is a solution; it may not be fast, but it should be effective.

The first step is to remove smart devices from children, especially any forms of social media. Kids have forgotten how to play, by themselves or with others. If they are playing with others, it is often in organized sports where there is no imagination or creativity and where there are parents overseeing and instructing the kids in what to do. Kids need to have freedom to explore for themselves and to test their own limits. This last one is especially important for boys. Let them climb, and dig and wrestle and fight! Our highly scheduled and organized world leaves little room for kids to learn the things that the older generations took for granted. My wife and I have long complained about the busy schedules that our friends and their kids have had. Everyone is exhausted every week because they fill almost every waking moment of almost every single day with activities. They barely get home from one thing and they are preparing to leave for the next.

That leads to the second step; stop scheduling activities for every moment of every day. If you have kids, when was the last time that you sent them outside, unsupervised and with no time constraints to do whatever they found for themselves to do? Have they ever had that opportunity? When did your child last get to look into a lake or river or even a puddle and play with bugs and worms? I'm serious! When did they last have a chance to just be? When did you?

Somehow we have become a society wherein our worth is found in how busy we are. We have so many acquaintances from all of our activities, but do we have many, or any, friends? Those with whom we can sit and rest and talk, without planning some upcoming event or scheduling something? When was the last time someone asked to get together with you or your kids and you could give them an opportunity to do so within a day or two or even a week or two, never mind an hour? When I was a kid I lived on a farm in the country. My parents didn't drive me to friend's houses and there were really only two friends whose houses I could reasonably get to on my bicycle. But you know what? I don't ever recall a time when I called one of them up and was told that they didn't have time for me to come for a visit. And when I went there, we didn't sit and watch T.V. or play video games; we went outside or played with toys, using our imaginations to interact with each other. That seems to be a lost art.

The same goes with too many of our adult friends. Too many of them are planning their lives weeks in advance. We ask when we can have them over for a visit and they have to pull out their ever-present phones to look at their calendar in order to see when they can squeeze us in. Our kids experience getting "squeezed-in" even more than we do. Too often, when they want to see their friends they are told of a window of time on a given day when it works, between other things that they have planned. We, as a society, are too highly scheduled. We have no free time, no down time, no "us" time.

We lose a lot when we have no time to just sit down, slow down, read, think, nap. Remember when people used to think instead of being told what to think? I do. We used to have philosophers who would delve into humanity, not through experimentation, but through thought processes. They would write stories that have impacted humanity for hundreds of years. Now we have so much information being thrown at us so fast that we can barely process it enough to decide how we feel about it before something else is thrown at us and pushes the first one out of our mind. We are being told what to think and what to believe; we are no longer considering these things for ourselves.

I am reminded of too many interviews that have been done at some protest or another, be it an environmental protest, a racial protest or some social justice protest, and the interviewer goes to individuals to get their perspective on what they are protesting against, and the individuals can't even elucidate why they are there, never mind what their stance on the issue is. They were simply told that this is important and that they needed to be there. So many don't understand the nuances of their own apparent position.

I didn't plan this article; I really just started writing. Maybe it doesn't make sense to you or maybe it struck a chord. I guess I just miss the days when people had time for themselves. When people could just stop and consider something that seems important to them and to hammer out in their own mind why that something was important. But most importantly, I miss a time when kids didn't concern themselves with adult issues, and adults didn't force adult issues onto kids. Maybe society is too far gone to ever return to that. I know that I intend to build a life for me and hopefully my grandkids where we can stop and enjoy a moment for the moment. We won't need to take a picture to remember every activity or every moment; we can just enjoy it.

I want to encourage you to let some stuff go, for you and for your kids. Schedule only a couple of evenings a week for you and your kids to go to some activity; that includes church activities. As good a church involvement is, it can also become too much. Step back from everything else. Spend time at home. Spend time together. Turn off the T.V.'s and the phones - don't just put it down, put it away. Read a book. Play a game. Grab your spouse and sit outside while you talk and watch your kids play without structure. If your kids are older, just sit and talk with them. Play with your kids, even if they are adults. Play sports or games. Throw a baseball, a football, a frisbee. Sit around a fire. Look at the stars if you can see them. Stay up late in the summer.

I hope that this article has caused you to stop and examine how you spend your time and how you manage the time of your kids. If you have gained anything from this article, please let me know what you have gained and how it has affected you.