“I find parents to be truly funny. I’m sure they were wild and crazy – smoking weed, doing drugs, having sex – when they were our age, a lot more than dancing. I learned in my history class that 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks worried that their children would come to no good that they wouldn’t work, or marry. I guess human nature, or at least parents’ human nature, hasn’t changed over the centuries.” (Appleton, E.)

As this quote suggests, parents’ nature have not have changed over the centuries. However, the unspoken footnote to this quote is that at some point in our own lives, our nature changes over to that of a parent. How does this happen? How do people go from adolescents mocking their parent’s lame attitudes to being lame themselves? Colloquial knowledge insists “one day we’ll understand.” I agree that one day we’ll probably see things the same way, but this doesn’t mean we have come any closer to understanding why adult attitudes toward popular youth trends always seems to be stigmatizing and negative. If this has been happening for centuries, why isn’t there colloquial knowledge to help parents quell their natural skepticism for youth culture and give their kids the understanding and loving support they need to develop as healthy sexual adults?
Personally, I am at a place in life between feeling like an adolescent misunderstood by his parents and an adult who see’s through their eyes. I think this period a critical time for people to start asking questions about what will happen in the coming years that allow for them to loose empathy with the experience of a youth misunderstood by his parents. I can already feel it happening. I look at the next generation and feel that they are somehow lesser. That their attitudes are worse, their media is more shallow, their maturity far behind where mine was at that time in their lives. I know I am not the only one that feels this way. And I suspect that this has been happening for generations. Despite this happening, generations always seem to end up all right. While the exponential social changes happening might discontinue this trend, why is it so natural to look down upon those who succeed us?
I am asking so many questions in this MVP because I think it’s of the utmost importance that parents and teachers begin to examine this problem from a more philosophical and perhaps research based angle. If we want to take part in the development of adolescents – whether as parents or teachers – it is unfair to harbor these toxic attitudes toward the social choices they make as a generation.