JIM “PAPPY” MOORE: Children Need More & Better Guidance

Children today are losing something we grew up with. Social intelligence. We played outside all the time. With other kids. We created our own entertainment. No parent set up “play dates” for us. Parents said “you kids go outside and play.” That also meant “don’t come back inside, slamming the screen door, letting the flies in, bringing dirt in the house.”

We were given much more responsibility at a much earlier age. Bad behavior was punished. It wasn’t gentle parenting at all. It was “get yourself right with the Lord, and do it right now.”

Children need boundaries and they function best with clear boundaries. Dogs are the same way. A happy dog is a dog which knows they are not in charge. You are in charge. They learn to live best when they recognize you’ve got this, and they obey their instructions. A child who is in charge is a brat who constantly abuses the power they realize they have.

We learned to socialize at an early age because we were outside with siblings and neighborhood kids doing things that required a degree of structure and shared rules. You learned to roll with the punches. A game of baseball might have 3 kids on each team. Or four. Or more. You adjusted to the number of kids you had. You made rules on the fly. You played games that could get rough, like Red Rover Red Rover, but you learned not to be too hard on younger kids. No one was supposed to get injured. Big kids were supposed to look after little kids, and they did.

There was a natural hierarchy in the outside play of children. You had the big kids, the little kids, and the kids in between. There might be 3 or 4 kids from different families involved in a game.

There was give and take. There was making new rules on the fly. There was learning to adjust to whatever the situation. There was ongoing, regular socialization that simply does not exist today.

Today there are kids staring at their device, either alone and in groups. The blue screen captures their attention and their minds. Each one is a unit to his or herself. They might play together, but much of it is stand alone play.

The lack of socialization shows up in abilities to communicate, in diction, in uncomfortable times of not having a keyboard or control device in their hands.

Children do not speak as well today as they did at the same ages in our childhood. We read out loud in class from our first grade on. We were taught diction and enunciation. We learned to write. We did not have devices to look things up for us. We had libraries where we had to learn how to use those books.

Simply put, children in our era learned social interactions better, learned outside activities better, learned to follow rules better, were better at reading, and math, and science than they are today. Year after year, America’s children are reading worse and doing math worse than in past decades. And they are more socially awkward.

Children need structure. They need rules. They need certainty. They need socializing better from younger ages all the way through high school.

Society has allowed schools to become the tyranny of the worst parents, of the worst students. We pass along truly bad students whose conduct toward teachers, admins, and other students is unacceptable. Weed them out. Remove them from school. Send them to special schools with special rules to treat them like the young criminals they are. Do not let them or their parents destroy the school environment. Get them away from standard schools. If you’re trouble, you’re gone. Hit a teacher? Gone. Throw a chair? Gone. Bully others? Gone.