c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.)
UNDATED _”Adults are hypocrites,”the teen-ager said with conviction.
I was taken aback by the anger in her pretty face, by the transition from partygoer to social commentator in a split second.
Chaperoning a teen-age party, I was working in the kitchen when the young woman stopped in to chat. I’d known her since she was a toddler and had always enjoyed her independent spirit. She overheard the end of an adult conversation _ like so many these days _ about the shooting in Colorado.
One of the adults commented that we need to encourage our teens to be better at including different groups of kids and to help them break down cliques.
As the adults left, the young woman I’ll call Michelle could hardly contain herself.”It’s so ridiculous to hear them talk about what we should do. They’re worse than we are!” I encouraged Michelle to vent and vent she did.”Like my parents ever have anyone over who is different. They have all the same friends who all have the same ideas.”And when my dad is driving he always makes comments about different ethnic groups and how they drive. He’s so prejudiced but he likes to think he’s such a liberal.” Michelle stopped to take a breath and I tried to recap her point of view.”So you’re saying that kids have learned their bad habits from their parents?”I asked.”No, most kids are doing better than their parents. We just get so tired of them acting like they can tell us what to do and then when they’re on the phone gossiping or saying awful things about people, we’re not supposed to notice.” What followed was a fascinating and sometimes convicting conversation with a young woman who probably represents many teen-agers.
Michelle thinks that most parents don’t understand that their social behavior, especially as reflected in”private”remarks at home, reflects exclusion, prejudice and snobbishness.
She says that she and her friends hear parents asking such questions as,”What can that person do for us?””Do we really have to be friendly to those people?”and”You know how …. are,”referring to people of an ethnic or religious group.
Her point was that parents of today’s teen-agers often think they reflect one set of values when, in fact, they model a completely different point of view.
I stopped to think about it and had to admit that Michelle was probably right. My own beefs with my parents were an honest clash of values. They were unashamed of what they believed and I was flirting with the counterculture enough to be bothered by their Ozzie and Harriet view of life.
Yet they were mostly consistent in their views and behaviors. They saw nothing wrong with upholding the American way and the capitalist dream.
My generation came along and claimed to be less materialistic and more egalitarian. Most of us still think that we raised the issues of ecology, diversity and social consciousness to new levels. Perhaps we did.
But now that we are ensconced in our own homes and firmly planted in middle age, we gripe about recycling bins, the neighbors who paint their house a weird color and all of those people from other countries whose kids get accepted at the best schools.
We may believe in many of those ideals but we hate to pay the personal price for making them part of the society in which we live. And our kids see this all too clearly.
I asked Michelle for advice before she went back to the party and she offered some wise words:”Listen to your kids more and listen to yourself. Think about the things you say in the car and on the phone and to your friends. Because that’s what you really believe if you’re honest with yourself.” Michelle bounced back to her party persona, leaving me to think about our conversation. An old song began to play in my mind _”Teach your children well …” When I was a teen-ager I had sung it as an anthem of freedom. Now as an adult I heard it as an indictment of ideals unfulfilled. Perhaps we have taught our children better than we know.
DEA END RNS
