Paul's Passing Thoughts

My children are grown adults, and moved out, so for years I have not had to deal with the yearly crisis. However, at least temporarily, I find myself in father mode. So, once again, it is that time of the year. It would seem that mothers are in a state of terror because of what might happen to their children during summertime: yes, it could happen; boredom. With more time outdoors, the fear is not kidnapping. With all of the swimming that goes on, the fear is not drowning. No, no, the real fear at hand is the psychological trauma of boredom.

And dejavue; as I listen to Susan expound on the possible consequences of children not having an activities director  during the summer, an eerily similar treatise heard from my first wife, I throw my arms up in the air and state incredulously: “The child will not die if he becomes bored!”

I was never raised in a situation where those overseeing me and my brother gave much thought to keeping us busy. In fact, asking would have invited an invitation to work in a cornfield or some other labor field of another vegetable. So, believe it or not, my brother and I came up with our own activities. We hunted snakes, we built tree houses, we visited the hippies who lived on the farm across the road and played army in their marijuana field because it looked like a jungle. Hey, we did just fine without an activities director.

Yet, if  the yearly crisis must be addressed, we might as well address it in a way that will save the world. I have succumbed; I will be Blayne’s activity director this summer, but in addition, I will be doing my part to save the world.

The first step is realizing that fun in its purest form should be a very, very small percentage of life. Kids watch enough cable TV and play enough video games to consume a lifetime of brain food with no nutritional value whatsoever. There are fun activities that actually teach something about life in the process.

Fact is, when one considers what goes into a happy and productive life, we must confess that most childhoods are totally wasted. The prevailing attitude follows: life is passive and kind of happens on its own. Of course, the extreme opposite is true; what we eat, what we do, how we think, and what we believe determine who we are.

This laxness towards life development is grounded in collectivism. More than likely, your child is going to grow up to be just another producer overseen by the state, so why all the fuss? And, why should I carry a baby that I don’t want to term and raise it when producers are a dime a dozen? With the kind of numbers we are talking about regarding abortion, have you noticed the following never enters into the conversation? How many of them were the next George Washington? How many were the next Jonas Salk? This is because we have been brainwashed into thinking about humanity in collective terms and not individual terms.

As parents, the following is job one: to prepare our children to be the best them; to prepare them to make their assigned mark on humanity based on the gifts they were born with. And, the standard is so dumbed down that if you merely teach your children to think for themselves you are heads above the rest. Indicative of our steroidal collectivist mentality is feeding our children junk food, junk information, junk history, junk thinking, junk examples, and then taking them to “experts” for fixing.

Life building isn’t rocket science, but it is a myriad of simple concepts to be diligently taught and applied. I cite the following example as a snippet only: if you allow your child to eat junk food, they will become obese which lowers self-esteem, which in turn lowers their self-worth and confidence, which causes them to do many stupid things like marry a loser because they think they can’t get anything better, which in turn is enough on its own merits to totally wreck their lives. And it all began with just the one subject of eating. That’s just one branch of the life chart, which is massive in and of itself. What we put in our bodies weighs huge on overall wellbeing regarding many life categories.

What we do with our children during the summer is indeed very important, but not because of the dreaded boredom crisis. The goal is not to merely keep our children busy to save them from boredom…

…the goal is to make our world a better place by investing in the individualism of our children.

paul