I Like Today’s World

My eldest is in grade 9 and today I received this email:

The first thing I did was remember what my grade 9 was like. Exams came, you studied on your own, or with peers, and then you went into the gym and wrote the exam.

I imagine the boomer response to this type of email would be one of rolling eyes and likely some type of outrage. “How dare we as a society help kids with exams. Back in my day, I didn’t need this. Damn snowflakes. Kids are pussies nowadays.”

As much as boomers like to call millennials, and whatever the hell the generation my kids are called babies, I’d call them the most well-adjusted and aware generation to date. By contrast, I’d call my generation and the boomer generation the angry, bitter generation.

Somehow as a society we’ve confused caring for each other with weakness, and I’m not entirely sure how things got that way. I hope my kids don’t go to college or university right out of high school. I hope they get a job, do the gig-economy hustle or travel the world first.

They’ll always have a home to come to.

There’s a stereotype that the job of the Dad is to prepare their kids to live in a cruel world, and I’m guilty as charged sometimes. I’m much harder on my eldest boy than I am on my daughter who’s 18 months his junior.

I was on my own at 18. I worked midnights while going to school full-time because that’s just the way things were back them. My mom and dad were both extremely hard workers. My mom worked part time jobs while raising 5 kids, and my dad worked as a boiler-maker for 3 decades.

Watching how hard they worked instilled in me that hard work is the only thing that matters but today, it’s different. It’s still important to work hard, but it’s ok to ask for help and to need support. Somehow society has vilified that as being weak.

Today’s kids have it much harder.

My boy recently told me he helped another kid on his discord server who was thinking of committing suicide. You can’t imagine the mental strain this puts on a 14-year old. At that age, I was just playing baseball and had no clue about anything outside of my 300-person town I grew up in.

I regularly chat with my kids about trans-gender issues, world politics, public outrage over stupid shit, today’s ‘cancel culture’, and other issues that is like a 3-tonne weight sitting on top of their brains.

It’s ridiculous to think today’s kids are weak because they need more support than my generation.

As much as the media likes to portray a gloomy world, I am consistently amazed with my kids, and what today’s youth are doing from Greta Thurnberg to Sam Demma.

My only wish is that once my kids are my age, they look back and feel a strong sense of community, love and support that the old crusty bastards of my, and the boomer generation, find so repulsive.