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“When we are out of sympathy with the young, I think our work in this world is over.”
George MacDonald
We can assure Dr. MacDonald (who was a prominent English clergyman) in his particular place in heaven that we are not quite out of sympathy with the young, but we have to confess that sometimes their reasoning gets a bit beyond us. So much so, that it is dangerous for those of us who harbor adolescents in our homes to lecture about them, or to lecture to them, for one can never know what will come up next.
Harbor is a good term, for it signifies a safe area to anchor between voyages. But, unlike the travelers of old, the only time our adolescents get home is when they have no place to go and some only get homesick when they are home. Some of them only seem to know their father is home when he gets into the way of the television screen.
Actually, there never has been a time when it was not open season for deploring unrest in the young. Six thousand years ago, an Egyptian priest carved upon a stone, “Our earth is degenerate; children no longer obey their parents.” And, the lament of Socrates is well known to us: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect to their elders and love to chatter in places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”
In Shakespeare's Winter's Tale you may recall the wish expressed that there would be no ages between ten and twenty-three: “For there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting.” Various observers have written that young people resist growing up as if they were being snared into a trap, but I suppose that writer was most prescient who said: “The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists in the circulation of th