Front Porch: International Children’s Day is a reminder of intergenerational struggles

Here we are part way between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, so it’s perhaps fitting that Thursday is International Children’s Day in America. It kicks off the observance of Children’s Awareness Month, a time to celebrate our children and work to protect them.

In that regard, every day should be children’s day.

I recently heard discussion on a TV talk show about the unique-to-our-times difficulties of raising children – from threats coming from the internet to them no longer being safe in their schools, from the aftermath of COVID to the coarsening of music and entertainment in general – pretty much all the things in the headlines these days.

I minimize none of that, but I am reminded how this kind of “this is the worst time” for our children is intergenerational

I recall (vaguely, as I was quite small) my grandmother wringing her hands and lamenting at how awful that time was for her daughter, my mother, to be raising a family. It was just after World War II and there was the Cold War and the specter of nuclear Armageddon, a whole societal shift as men returned from war and a peacetime economy had to be rebuilt, followed a bit later by high interest rates and inflation and a recession. Oh, yes, and polio.

And this concern came from a woman who had a harrowing journey fleeing Europe in the big immigration migration of the early 1900s and raised a large family, mostly in poverty, in the South Bronx. There wasn’t always enough food and where, and in addition to everything else, she scrubbed all the stairs and steps of the tenement house they lived in to bring in a little extra money for the family.

While that was happening, also going on were World War I, the great influenza of 1918, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Not insignificant things.

All of her children, of whom my mother was one of the youngest, prospered and made it to the middle class, and some beyond that.

And the generation of children that my mother and her siblings raised (including me) managed, for the most part, to do just fine as well, despite all my grandmother’s concerns.

It was interesting that when my children were young, my mother would often say to me that she would not want to be raising children in what she considered the worst time to be doing so. What was happening then were political upheavals (Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the Iran hostage crisis), AIDS, rising drug use and abuse, hippies and experiments with changes in the creation of life (animal cloning).

Of course, we should have concerns about what’s taking place in the world and work to mitigate the imagined, potential and actual harms that threaten our children. Nothing is more important. But there are always children to raise, and I am suggesting that this is not the worst of times for our children.

It just seems like it because it’s the time we’re in now.

Those earlier times may well have been just as scary – and I suggest maybe even more so – but they are just fading memories now, as, I hope, today’s demons will be by the next generation.

June – a word derived from the Latin “Ju-Ven,” which translates to “youth” – begins the official and designated time to celebrate our children.

That, too, is intergenerational. Hugs to them all.