Where Did That Time Go?

What's a good way to spend an evening? Watching "The Pentagon Papers" (Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks) and discussing the history and legalities of this excellent film with a college student named Charlotte Vieth. Nineteen years ago I was helping baby Charlotte to take her first steps and introducing her to ice cream. Somehow, it has now come to this very different sort of activity. It makes me think of that common lament of parents: "The time goes so fast." Yes, indeed, it has, regarding both of my daughters (Charlotte and her big sister, JuJu Vieth). Luckily, we have lots of photos to prove that those intervening years actually happened, year by year.

Now the passing of time no longer clicks by in seconds, but in semesters and quarters in Chicago and Denver. Whenever I get to welcome home my adult-children after they've put in several months of hard work, these are not merely satisfying times. I don't think life gets any better.

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Peering Into the Past Thanks to Old Sears Catalogs

Ancestry.com recently emailed me an offer to look through archived Sears Catalogs. I searched the year 1922 and found it to be a worthwhile portal into the past.

I decided to focus on toys. Notice that some toys are specifically marked "Girls Toys" and "Boys Toys." The prices are always interesting. Also, many toys from 1922 seem to still be excellent toys, superior to many modern blinking bleeping toys. Those excellent toys from the past include my childhood favorite, wooden blocks.



Go to full article to see a small sampling of pages from the 1922 Sears Catalog

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The Lack of Free Play is Damaging our Children

"In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children." From the NYT, it's really getting difficult to find happy well adjusted young adults because we've (their caretakers) deprived them of many opportunities to attempt (and sometimes, to fail) to form relationships all on their own. Too much well-intentioned parent-structured play time is making for anxiety-ridden and depressed young adults.  They are struggling to figure out this alien-seeming thing of learning to form meaningful relationships, and it's driving more than a few of them to suicide.

What follows is anecdotal, but I am sure it could be established statistically: When I and many of my well-adjusted peers were kids, we left the house in the morning and we played all day. We came home when it started to get dark.  When we disagreed with each other, there were no adults to adjudicate the differences. We did that ourselves and we figured it out well enough often enough. We didn't have ANY adults telling us how to play. No one arranged play dates for us. We chose who to spend time with. If another kid was a pain in the ass, we avoided him/her, and he/she would need to learn make adjustments in order to get back in our social graces. Same thing for me, of course. If any of us offended someone, we didn't run to our parents to negotiate with their parents; rather, we needed to go to the fear and figure something out on our own (though many parents did provide a good listening ear in the evening).
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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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Three Important Questions to Ask

Michael Mulligan, head of Thatcher School, presents the three most important question we can ask teenagers. Excellent questions, and we should ask these to adults too:

Who tells us who we are? Where do we want to go with our lives? How do we want to get there? Question one is important because forces are lined up (internet, television, movies, advertising, just for starters) that tell us who we are is not about how hard we work, how curious we are, or how much we are willing to make a positive difference to others and to our world in distress. No, these forces say: You are what you wear, what you buy, how thin or buff you are, how many like you (on Facebook or anything else) - or for the elite college bound crowd - where you go to college. When we focus on the wrong things, we create these conditions for monumental cynicism in our kids. Our children need to learn that they are important not for reasons of appearance but for reasons of substance. Question two is important because if we believe that the only thing that matters is college and job status then how can we not end up frustrated, angry, and lonely? Where we want to go with our lives is intrinsically linked to the question of what leads us to fulfillment and happiness? For most of us the answer is passion. We all know we are in the right jobs when how long we work at something is driven by interest and not only about earning a paycheck. The truth is that we are all going to have to work hard to succeed in life, and if that is the case, let’s us at least try to work hard on things that matter and that we care about. Question three may be the most important because how we get anywhere is as critical as where we end up. Kids cheat in school because they think grades are more important than what they learn. They take short-cuts because they believe the longer, harder path has no value or because they are afraid of stumbling or of being seen as someone who stumbles. They are mean or cruel or uncaring often because they do not like themselves; they feel they cannot make the grade that will earn them a spot at That College. They begin to see others as competitors for those spots - not as fellow-journeyers. Diminished self-respect skulks alongside little respect for others. No one wins.

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