Thought for the day...
It basically says that our children are like they are because an increasing number of parents refuse to grow up themselves. This I can believe - so many of us feel like the only time to be alive is our late teens and early 20s, and spend the rest of our lives denying the fact we're no longer that age. This is nothing new - in the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia (The Last Battle), CS Lewis wrote of Susan: "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all of her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."
You can see it's still the case today: in the same paper, the front page talks about today's 12 year-old alcoholics. Sewell is entirely correct in pointing out that many adults today are too busy trying to "identify" with their kids - instead of giving them the third degree over bad behaviour, they try to reason it out. Kids need proper parents who they rebel against, and those parents need to teach them the boundaries by example and discipline. Too many rely on schools to provide that discipline (while government legislation prevents those schools having any tools to enforce it) - too keen to be the nice cop as opposed to the nasty cop.
I hope to God I'm not like that should we be fortunate enough to have children. I like being 34 - much better than being 18 or 21, or 24 or 27 or even 30. None of those incarnations could cook for toffee, dig an allotment and grow vegetables or do any of the things I can do now. I'm probably fitter than I've been in the last 10 years and I'm as uncool as ever, so nothing lost there. And if my kids need an authority figure to rebel against, they'll have at least one: me.
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