One Village Elder to Another

This post comes to you courtesy of a few hours spent studying at Starbucks while various yuppie parents let their children run around like they were at Chuck E Cheese:

Raise Your Damn Kids.

I recognize that saying that puts me squarely in the category of Cranky Old People, which I'm totally comfortable with because I'm 33 now and I've made my peace with it. But at some point when I wasn't looking, it's like a whole mess of people decided that saying "no" to their children would suppress their little ones' creativity and spirit and life force.

What it might suppress is their badassness, and I'm fully supportive of this.

The Starbucks parents--and there were several of them in a steady stream--let their children wander around, yell, throw things on the ground, touch strangers' computers (NOOOOOOO), and then gave me dirty looks when I said firmly to their kids, "Do not touch this. This is not yours." (I bet you those kids didn't come back by me again, though.)

Raise your damn kids.

Or when I was waiting for the subway recently and a kid who was maybe 3 or 4 was jumping around perilously near the train tracks, with nary a glance from his parents:

Raise your damn kids.

A friend of mine once complained that his teenage daughter, who was still in high school at the time, had stayed out all night and not come home until 5 THE NEXT AFTERNOON and hadn't told them where she'd been. I asked if they had grounded her. "How do you ground an 18-year-old?" he asked plaintively. Ummm..."you're grounded"? How about "since you are entirely financially and emotionally dependent upon us, you can forget about using your cell phone or the car or the computer or any other item that renders your existence non-Amish-like until you remember how the house rules work?"

I cannot imagine trying to pull that on my parents when I was in high school. When I say "I can't imagine," I literally mean "the human mind doesn't have the capacity to go to that dark space." I don't know what they would have done. I just know, you see the face of God and you die. The most you can bear is a glimpse of the shadow as you hide in the cleft of the rock. You don't test it.

Raise. Your. Damn. Kids.

People who know me know that I have a lot of children in my life, but there is one that I have a particular measure of responsibility for, who has lived with me and for whom I make most of the educational decisions. Phenias is 13 now, and recently his school cracked down on porn on the kids' phones. My concerns about this are one of the reasons I advised Phen's dad not to let him have a cell phone (if you have an emergency, you can use an adult's cell phone, because you are 13 and you should therefore not be out of the reach of a responsible adult). He was one of the few kids not caught up in the sting. When his teacher asked him why, I am told he responded solemnly, "Shannon said if I ever got caught with porn, it was gonna be a shitshow. (Note: my pastor has said of disciplining children, "Do not underestimate the power of an appropriately timed curse word" and I was using that technique here.) I don't know what that means, but she never lied." HA! A little appropriate fear and respect goes a long way.

Now I am the first to agree it takes a village. (That sounds so wise-African-proverb/ubuntu-y/Hillary Clinton, doesn't it?) But from one village elder to another: stop letting the village children run the village council. Stop letting them vote. This is not a democracy. It is a benevolent dictatorship.

And if you can't get on board with that, your village needs to not reach beyond the confines of your house. Certainly it shouldn't reach all the way to my Starbucks.