A Trivial Matter

I recently saw a couple movies that dove-tailed quite nicely into something that I have had my eyes opened to this past year.

I have said before, and I will continue to say, that parents have got to be the hardest working people on the planet. Even bad ones, ones that have no idea what they are doing, are always on the job.

Why is this? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s because children are always watching. Every lesson, even ones poorly taught, are learned. Whether or not the lesson is one that should be learned is irrelevant. The fact of the matter remains that the lesson is learned.

This is significant because I had occasion to ask myself a question. This question is prefaced by a story, so bear with me.

Not so long ago, only a matter of a few months, a friend of mine, someone that I have known for quite some time, told me that her daughter had decided that a man was now her boyfriend. There wasn’t any fireworks, parades, or anything of the sort. The girl simply knew.

Weeks later, when she had found someone else, she asked her mother to tell the guy. She was very concerned about the prospect of hurting him, and she felt that her mother could let him down easy.

The girl was eight years old. The guy was twenty-two.

Now before anyone starts thinking anything improper, I have to tell you that nothing inappropriate happened. All in all, it was rather sweet. The involved adults took it as a right, proper joke.

Here’s where I have my question. While it may have been funny to the adults, the child never once took it as one. The girl, bless her heart, was quite adamant about her affections.

Why did the adults make light of it?

I ask this, not as a criticism, but rather as something to think about. Children learn how to treat life by virtue of how the adults around them treat it.

Isn’t love an aspect of life? Did we, as the guiding forces in their lives, show a cavalier attitude toward love? Is that the lessons that children are learning from it?

Perhaps that is why our society has become the way it is. One hundred and fifty years ago, in this country, it was not unusual for a girl to marry as young as twelve, or fourteen. As a function of that society, it was impossible for the frivolous dating of today to happen.

It wasn’t even unusual for marriages to be arranged while the children were still very young.

This all, of course, was a function of society prior to modern medicine. When it was unusual for someone to live beyond sixty, even though it wasn’t unheard of, life must begin at a younger age.
Because our lifesapan has become longer, we encourage the young to cherish their youth. We don’t force them to accept responsibility for their actions until they are eighteen.

In doing this, are we doing them a disservice?

People condescend to children all the time. Even now, I find myself tempted to marginalize the trials of someone only ten years younger than me.

I am forced to ask myself a couple of questions, and they are the ones that I will leave you with:

If it is true that children learn how to deal with their own life by how the adults around them treat it, then, when we trivialize the problems that they present to us, are we teaching them the wrong lesson?

Are we teaching them to trivialize their own lives?