Stories From Under A Bootheel (Rants, Laughs, and Tears)

Chapter 1 Did You Learn Anything Part 4 Justification

I know this hands-off parenting behavior sounds harsh by today's standard, but remember, my parents grew up during the tumultuous twenties, and the distressing thirties. They lived through and won a world war. They had seen more than their fair share of Man's inhumanity to man.

There is a reason they are known as the Greatest Generation. Despite their hard childhoods, they freed the world from fascism, they cured polio, they laid the foundations for ending small pox, for the beginnings of the civil rights movements, and the computer age. (Kids, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did not invent the computer. It was invented forty years before those two turned computer technology into the disaster it is today. Don't get me started on that rant.) And let us not forget the Greatest Generation's ultimate achievement — they gave birth to and raised my generation, the Baby Boomers. (Cue the comedic sound of a muted trumpet showing disappointment, "Wahn wahn waaaah.")

Kids, just to be clear my generation was not called boomers because of what we left in our diapers, but because of the "boom" in births between 1944 and1964 following World War II.

I'm not saying the Baby Boomers were a complete bust. My generation accomplished a few things. We turned the potential of the internet into a purveyor of porn, a fountain of falsehoods, and a slum of social silliness. When we became teachers, we took the United States number one rating in high school education in the early 1990's down to 18 out of 36 industrialized nations by 2009. As a society, we practically abandoned the space program. We engaged in several futile wars, popularized drugs, violent protests and welfare, and it looks like our offspring are continuing our efforts. Yeah, when it comes to parenting, we boomers may have dropped the ball. Or possibly, we just ran in the wrong direction with it — "Boom!" they said as they spike the ball behind the wrong goal line.

We tried, but perhaps too hard? In retrospect, it occurs to me that parenting may be like governing, where "the government that governs best is the government that governs least." That was said by either Jefferson or Thoreau, but since I admire both, I'll credit them both. I get all the credit for, "The parents that parent best are the parents that parent least." I'm sure that will never be embroidered on a pillow, but you must admit with both government and parenting there is a fine line between too much and too little. I think I have seen that cross stitched on a framed sampler somewhere.