KEY POINTS:
I heard a father berating his teenage children recently, for being, among other things, slack, thoughtless, selfish. I happened to know that everything he complained of was true.
I also happened to know that he had been guilty of the same things at one time or another.
As I've been told often enough by those who work with children: If you want children to behave, behave yourself. It never ceases to amaze me how many of my own worst features my children have inherited.
Good or bad, my children are a reflection of me, so it's never been a mystery to me where my children pick up some of their most exasperating traits. I'm always reminded of this when people talk about the youth problem, as if youth were a separate breed existing in a vacuum, or in some kind of parallel universe in which we have no say or influence.
What's wrong with youth today? Where did they learn to be selfish, self-obsessed, greedy, disrespectful, ill-disciplined, rude, self-destructive, and lacking in self-restraint? We shouldn't look too far.
More often than not, what's wrong with youth today is us.
Of course, I happen to think there's a lot right with them too, but if we're looking for reasons for the absence of moral fibre among some young people, or the presence of a certain "moral vagueness", the American sociologist James Davison Hunter offers this in his book The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil.
"We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don't really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us to pay."
He said people want character but without conviction and strong morality without the emotional burden of guilt or shame. And virtue but without particular moral convictions that invariably offend. They also want good without having to name evil. And decency, without the authority to insist upon it and moral community without limitations to personal freedom.
"In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it."
There's a lot of that around. It's like me wanting the body of a 28-year-old without having to step into the gym, or give up any of my unhealthy habits.
Or like a lot of other people I know who feel entitled to nice things whether or not they can afford to pay for them. We may say that we want a fair and just society which takes care of the vulnerable while providing equal opportunities for everyone to flourish, but not enough of us are prepared to pay the price for it. We want community without having to give up our gated estates.
We want an educated populace but we're prepared to sacrifice the ideal of good schools for all as long as our own children are okay. We want strong families without acknowledging that such families can't flourish without economic security and safe, healthy communities.
We want those communities but are prepared to tolerate the kind of disparities that choke off real opportunity and make them unsafe. We want justice (for ourselves) without mercy (for others).
Children are now taught that they'll feel better if they do the right thing, not that they should do the right thing regardless of whether it feels good or not.
If some children pick up the wrong messages, it's no wonder. There wasn't much restraint or compassion in public reaction to the fatal stabbing of a teenager by the man whose fence he was tagging.
The inescapable conclusion was that some people value property more highly than the life of a 15-year-old boy, and that frustration and rage justifies the taking of a life, which is precisely the attitude we rightly denounce in our most violent youth offenders.
Restraint wasn't much in evidence from former league star Tea Ropati, either, or his family after a jury found the former sportsman not guilty on charges of rape and sodomy. The family's attack on the woman who brought the complaint conveniently overlooked Ropati's part in having put himself in a situation that no one who wants to be the public face of a trust for at-risk youth (which Ropati is) should ever contemplate.
We want our children to be kind, compassionate, independent, hard-working, socially-minded and accountable for their actions. But these are not qualities they see in abundance around them. Not in the reality TV shows which reward people for their ability to manipulate and use others, or which celebrate cruelty by making sport out of the humiliation and failures of others for the sake of entertainment.
Theologian Jenny Te Paa is right when she says that what's been missing is a greater emphasis on kindness, gentleness, hospitality and integrity.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
