It May Take a Village To Raise a Child After All...

Just to warn you, this is going to be a venting entry. *Deep breath.*

Here we go.

I am growing increasingly disheartened with the future generation. Well, maybe not the one directly after mine, but the one that consists of the current pre-teens/tweens and early teenagers. Just to be safe, we'll say this includes kids between the ages of 11-13.

As I am writing this, it's the middle of the summer and that means that I have been taking the kids on lots of outings. We've been out to the playground at Parkview North Hospital, the zoo, and we just started going to the library. While these outings are inherently fun, it doesn't take too long before some bratty and/or rude kid has to put a damper on my day.

Yesterday, for instance, we had a lot of running around to do. I told Max that if he was patient and well-behaved, I would take him to the playground at Parkview North. Bless his 2-year old heart--he was well-behaved and patient, so we went to the playground. Being that it was hot, we weren't there too long, so we went to the library (which Max has a newfound love for--YAY!). Okay, I'm not sure about the rest of the parents out there, but whenever I have to take my kids (aged 2-1/2 years and 8 months) anywhere, I have to bust out the double stroller. As much as I love my stroller, it's a tandem, so I usually have to hope that someone is going to be kind and hold open the door for us or hope that there's a handicap accessible door opener. You know, these lovely little buttons that will open the door for you:

So I loaded up the kids into the stroller and let Max hit the button to get into the library. No sooner did those doors start to open then did a swarm of these lovely tweens run me and the kids down to get into the library. I was so appalled by their behavior that I actually called them out on it. What the kicker of it was that not one of them apologized. Grrrrr.

Fast forward to today.

I was sitting in my family room with the kids enjoying my coffee as they (well, Max) watched "Clifford the Big Red Dog." All of the sudden, I heard a muffled "popping" noise that could only be coming from outside. I went to look out on the back patio and saw 2 boys (maybe 11-12 years old) lighting off firecrackers. Not only was I angry that kids were ballsy to be doing such a thing in the daylight, I was angry that they were doing it right off my back yard.

This is my view of our backyard looking out from our patio. We were very excited when we went to a showing of what's now our house and saw that our backyard butted right up to the Tot Lot of our neighborhood. Also, you may be able to see that there's a sidewalk running in front of the park. This sidewalk leads down to a makeshift baseball diamond, a basketball court, and a playground for older children. We couldn't believe how lucky we were to have such direct access to a playground for our children--until today.

Those kids who decided to light off firecrackers were doing so right behind the play structure on the Tot Lot. Yep, I saw them pedal away as fast as they could and I regret that I didn't scold them for being so careless to public property. I didn't say anything because I was too stunned to form the proper words.

In both of the aforementioned instances, the hoodlums in question were unsupervised. I would be willing to bet that had their parent(s) been around, such behavior wouldn't happen (and if they behaved that way when their parents were around, I'd be having some words with them if the parent didn't scold their kids for such behavior). I've been sitting here racking my brain trying to figure out why kids today act worse than we did when we were that age. I will be the first one to admit that I wasn't the best kid, but I also did not behave anything like these kids did. I remember once when I was about 7 that my dad yelled at me for walking on someone's lawn and to this day I will not walk on grass unless there is no feasible way to get from point A to point B (I remember being at Ball State and watching people cut across the Quad through the grass and I kept thinking my dad was going to jump out from behind a tree and yell at them).

Why do parents fail to discipline their children? The only two reasons that I can think of are that either they want to be more of a 'friend' than 'parent' or that they are not around. Both of these circumstances are unfortunate, but I feel that the first situation is the worst between the two. The second situation is regrettable, but sometimes, especially in this economy, the parent(s) need to work more in order to support the family and let their older children look after themselves. Anyway, it does bother me that parents would rather be a friend to their children instead of a disciplinarian. Children need rules and boundaries and any parenting book will tell you that they like life with parameters. Personally, I think that you can have a healthy mix of being fun and stringent (called "authoritative parenting" as opposed to the drill-sergeant style which is "authoritarian parenting") and that this style benefits your child the most (I know I'm not alone on this because there are many studies that back this up). You can be a friend to your child, but I would save that for when your child has left the nest, but I digress.

So back to the title of this entry, "It May Take a Village To Raise a Child After All." I'm going to have this mean that if you're not going to correct your child, I will. I'm not going to yell at them in any way, but I will correct them when they blatantly do something wrong. If the parent is around, I probably won't say anything because I despise confrontation (which is why I quickly abandoned my childhood dream of becoming a lawyer) unless their kid hit mine or something. I feel that I am actually helping your child if I have to correct them. More often than not, the only time that I'll be hard-core about it is if my kids are around. I want to set a good example for them and if I cannot maintain that example both in and out of the home, they may not take me seriously. However, if my kids aren't around, I'm more likely to let things slide (and may just mutter something under my breath). I think that I'm going to call this my Type AB behavior. I'm not a Type A person unless my children are around and am usually Type B the rest of the time.

The moral of the story: discipline your children so I won't have to.