Little Charles in Charge

I told you recently about some cases where parents ended up doing whatever their small children demanded in order to keep peace in their little worlds. It's all too common. The result, it would seem, is a reversal of the biblical command, "Children, obey your parents." We are seeing more and more families run by tyrants too young to cross the street alone. And their subjects are bigger, stronger, and better informed than they are. Still, they rule. Why is that?

I already suggested one reason. The primary goal of too many parents is not the welfare of the children or the bringing up of the next generation. The primary motivation is peace. "I don't want to hear all that screaming, don't want to deal with the conflict, so I'll give you what you want to shut you up." Really, bottom line, the motivation is "Me" with a capital "m". "I want to be immediately comfortable with the minimum of effort." Or, in terms of antonyms, the primary motivation is the opposite of love.

The problem, however, is only made worse (I wanted to say "exacerbated", but it sounds so ... pretentious and dirty) by today's messages that our entire society is sending to our little children. It started some time ago. Consider, for example, the Smurfs. Originally a comic book in the '50's, The Smurfs was fed to our kids in the '80's as a cartoon series. Consider the basic premise of this group of small blue creatures. The only good creature is a small creature -- all large adults are evil. (Some human children weren't so bad.) While the world is a mess, the Smurf society is a genuine communist society, sharing all they have with each other and living in a kind community. In other words, Smurfs = good, those who are running today's world = bad. Sound familiar?

Think about the kids in most media provided for kids. The children are generally brats as a default. They are always wiser than the adults in the given situation. There is no discipline in most cases. If "discipline" is portrayed, it is offered as abusive. The real goal is to make the children immediately happy and anyone that gets in the way of that is summarily evil. Interestingly, in most cases anyone represented as "Christian" is a bad person with overbearing views and unkind attitudes ... you know, not like those kindly Hindus or Buddhists.

We keep feeding our kids television (a dangerous medium regardless of the content) and movies and books filled with "warm stories" that affirm that they are the most important beings on the planet and any adult who gets in the way is evil. Well, actually, most adults are too stupid to be evil. We teach by action and lack of action that this view is right. We know that what parents allow in moderation kids indulge in excess, but we still move the standards toward more and more excess. And then we wonder why teachers can't teach with more than 10 kids in a classroom and why businesses really don't want children in their establishment and why it's much better to do your social interaction over the computer rather than in the company of the whole family with those little hellions running around. We can see easily why marketing is aimed at little kids these days, since little kids (and not their parents) control the purse strings. We live in a world where training up your children in the way they should go is considered by a growing number of adults to be abusive. "Just let them bloom where they are planted." When "I want" becomes the command for action and children are no longer taught that selfishness is a bad thing, we're headed for some serious problems. Oh ... wait ... look around you. Perhaps "headed" is the wrong word.