The Grade 4 boy looked haggardly beat up. I playfully messed up his hair to distract him and said, “You look like a steamroller had just ran over you, dude!”
“Worse, Father!”
“Really!?” I wondered what could be more fatal than what I described.
“I want an early retirement!” he said adamantly.
I explained that retirement only applies to someone who has been working in a job for a long time. After some years, he decides to dedicate himself to something different.
Moreover, retirement doesn’t always mean “the start of doing nothing.”
The young fellow was alert enough to stop eye-ball rolling me.
I must have reminded him of his mother!
Although many young people may not fully capture what adults say, it is sad that many of today’s young generation are being bred to already consider “early retirement.”
David Brooks, in his book Road to Character, observes how children are being raised by parents with a “conditional love” that forms their skills, talents, tasks and accomplishments instead of their character.
He says there are two important defining features of child rearing today: “children are now praised to an unprecedented degree” and “they are honed to an unprecedented degree.” He explains:
“These two great trends — greater praise and greater honing — combine in interesting ways. Children are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. Parents shower their kids with affection, but it is not simple affection, it is meritocratic affection — it is intermingled with the desire to help their children achieve worldly success.
“But the whole situation is more fraught than it appears at first glance. Some children assume that this merit-tangled love is the natural order of the universe. The tiny blips of approval and disapproval are built into the fabric of communication so deep that it is below the level of awareness. Enormous internal pressure is generated by the growing assumption that it is necessary to behave in a certain way to be worthy of another’s love.” (Road to Character, Chapter 10: The Big Me)
In these incisive points we begin to understand that there may be some weight after all to children’s claim about being “stressed” or wanting to “retire early.”
It isn’t because they don’t want to do anything. It is more like they don’t know how and are thus reluctant to face the challenges and hardships of life on their own. It seems more emphasis is placed on educating them for their profession rather than for life.
Brooks adds another interesting description of this conditional love:
“Some parents unconsciously regard their children as something like an art project, to be crafted through mental and emotional engineering. There is some parental narcissism here, the insistence that your children go to colleges and lead lives that will give the parents status and pleasure.” (Ibid.)
Under the layer of multiple successes, awards, achievements and promotions is the atrophied and wrinkled layer of the person’s character that was left unattended or undeveloped through the years. The glaring consequence of a parental conditional love on their children is thus described:
“This conditional love is like acid that dissolves children’s internal criteria, their capacity to make their own decisions about their own interests, careers, marriages, and life in general.” (Ibid.)
The solution to this trend within the family and society is not easy. But we could as parents, guardians and educators reflect on Pope Francis’ words to the youth.
“God expects something from you. God wants something from you. God hopes in you. God comes to break down all our fences. He comes to open the doors of our lives, our dreams, our ways of seeing things. God comes to break open everything that keeps you closed in. He is encouraging you to dream. He wants to make you see that, with you, the world can be different. For the fact is, unless you offer the best of yourselves, the world will never be different.” (World Youth Day, Vigil Mass, Poland 2016)
We could convey these invisible ideals to them without “retiring ourselves” or “throwing in the towel” when dealing with so-called millennials. But we must take the first steps to get out of our own shells and climb down from the walls we have built around our egos.
Only then, will we be genuine witnesses and guides who can constantly seek ways and means to invite the youth to leave their artificial shells of comfort and insecurity and walk with them to take on the daily adventures of life and love.
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