Giving Back Your Time Saving Our Children From Social Ills May Be As Simple As Spending More Time With Them

For a moment, let’s put our lattes down, turn off the TV, disconnect the cell phone and close our daily planners. Let’s go back into the not-too-distant world when, as a nation, we lived on farms, worked on farms, played on farms (or in the woods!).

We were Thomas Jefferson’s agricultural democracy. Remember? Two or three generations, living, educating and growing together. Every day filled with nature, a sense of spirit and a rich and diverse family of adults, giving a teacher-student ratio of probably 2 to 1. Ideals and reality tied to a single cultural experience with little in the way of distractions to push them apart.

Over-romanticized? Perhaps. But it certainly was a time when children had structured and substantial adult contact. There was a fundamental container of guidance and nurturing that allowed children to grow into functional adults.

Now let’s fast forward through 50 to 100 years of Industrialism, Post-Industrialism, Modernism and Post-Modernism transformation. Through the suburban flight of the ‘50s, social liberalization of the ‘60s, loss of small farms in the ‘70’s, the yuppie money-making frenzy of the ‘80s and the virtual reality world of the ‘90s.

Pick up your lattes and cell phones again, folks, cause now we are back home. And along with our array of toys we also have some new bugs in the system we did not have on the farm: single-parent homes, homes with both parents working in separate places 50 miles away, a lack of daily connection with nature, the evaporation of extended families, little neighborhood connections, diminishing role of the church as a spiritual or socially cohesive presence.

In short, all the social costs of a more affluent, industrial, mobile and flexible society. Social costs, however, that are 180 degrees in opposition to the world of our forefathers and directly limits a child’s ability to develop and function normally.

The investment decision we made to focus our energy and attention on comfort, convenience and greater material wealth, to make our social/economic goal faster machines and vacations at Disney World, has, in part, been financed by the energy, love, attention and care we had given our children.

This decision has given us everything from two cars to Teflon to 747s. It also has bestowed on us the headline stories we read in the papers month after month — drug use on the rise, gangs more prevalent, teenage suicide increases — and turned a society that once was integrally connected with its youth to one that at times seems more interested in turning children into consumers than into healthy souls.

As this reality has become ever more pronounced, two generations of governments and well-intentioned folks have created an assault team of programs in an attempt to stem the tide of youth suffering, but to no avail.

We have tossed money at programs, programs at agencies and agencies at youth. When problems surface, the adult leadership leaps for the scalpel to lance out such boils as drug abuse or teen pregnancy, leaving the operating room with their latest flavor-of-the-month solution, but not knowing and never even having asked the patient, our children, what they were suffering from.

At a town meeting on youth and the community in Sandpoint, sponsored by the mayor’s office and a dozen community groups, we asked everyone, “What are we suffering from?” and, “What has happened that our children are in such pain?”

From that meeting, from everything I remember as child, from everything our surveys show, what is painfully obvious is that children do not need more quality time. What they need is quantity time.

At home, at work, at play and at school. They need a diverse set of role models and teachers to give them living, real options for how to live a life. They need attention and care not at ratios of 32-to-1 (so they feel like so many widgets in the system), but at 5-to-1 so they know they are valued and connected with.

Within the admittedly large and complex array of social factors that have created America’s youth crisis, we cannot avoid the painful question we must ask ourselves: “Are we interested in giving such time?”

At our town meeting, youth and adults were clear what they were willing to do: more counseling; creating mentoring programs (a la Big Brother); a Unique Gifts Program for adults to feed youth; establishing a Youth Council to help programs address real needs.

None demand an idelogical or philosophical allegiance. They only require an active interface and engagement with kids. Indeed, instead of tossing money at this issue, we need to toss ourselves, and every program, institution and agency must support that action.

Businesses must find creative ways to let parents out of work and into the classroom on a regular basis. School districts must find ways to let the students into the real world of parents on a regular basis. (In Sweden, all 10th-grade kids spend one third of the year in the community doing various jobs and services.) Agencies must see their goal not as promoting a federal policy, but as creating 1,000 formats for getting adults and children together.

When I taught in Sweden, in the small lake-side town of Hjo (pronounced “You”), it was often difficult to know where the school ended and the town began. Students flowed in and out, as did parents. Educating was about community as much as grammar and math.

Our machine culture likes quick-fix, one-stop solutions. Buy the spare part and just get the machine running again. For this issue we need to go back to a more ancient image: love thy neighbor as thyself. Wherever we can, whenever we can, however we can get our institutions to support us, we need to give loving attention to our children.

They do not need to be replaced like a broken part. They were perfect from the start. Neither do we need to be replaced. For we came from the same perfection. We just need to embrace each other again, recognizing we are in this together.

Challenging? Yes. Avoidable? Absolutely not. But we must be truly interested to make it happen. Youth see through us and our often ingenuine spirit so easily. This is both their great gift and the great fear that keeps us part.

Start wherever you can: a group of parents meeting once a month with their kids; a weekly family council; ask your employer about arrangements to attend a classroom regularly. Plant the seed in your own life. It has such good roots and rewarding fruit. Once planted, it will surely grow.