Kids These Days

 I confess that as I grow older and therefore further from my mostly examined youth, I find it a challenge to understand what is going on in the heads of the kids I teach. "What's the matter with kids these days?" I fret. 

Then I remind myself that I lived in a world of rather distinct privilege. When I asked for things from Santa Claus, I expected that they would be there under the tree on Christmas morn. This privilege ran so deep that I was willing to sprinkle in words like "morn" in my affected holiday speech. 

There were family dinners around the kitchen table, hot and ready made for us by my mother and occasionally my father. In the summers, as the legend has it, we lived off the grid in a mountain cabin that allowed us to immerse ourselves in the ethos that would eventually be ascribed to John Denver. We were free to return to the base camp, our suburban family home, down in town to do a load or two of laundry and fill up on supplies. Things like bread, water, and Otter Pops. 

I was free from the worries that plague so many of the kids I teach these days. I knew from whence my next meal would come. I even had a sense of what "whence" meant. My parents were my primary caregivers, and my mother managed to serve alternately between her three sons as room mother for the kids in our elementary school classrooms. Later they threw themselves with a fever into the business of being band parents, running concession stands and sewing giant flags for presentation at NFL games to which we were invited. 

I might have taken notice that my family was the exception even back in the 1970s. My brothers and I were constantly bringing home strays, latchkey kids or children of divorce. We fed them. We shared our Atari 2600 and the feeling that we were only looking forward to the next chance for a trip to Mexico. Or a family road trip that would make Clark Griswold blush. 

It is then, that upon reflection, I understand what is troubling the youth of today. If I were these kids, I would be angry too. What happened to their shiny future? What happened to their family dinners? 

I would be angry too.