Looking Back

Normally I don't invest much energy into dissecting all the things that litter my Facebook feed every day.  You know the ones: share this if you (insert whatever the thing is here).  They come in many variations from: share if you love your Mom to share if you hate cancer, and most are pretty freaking obvious, but there are some that particularly rub me the wrong way, they are what I call idealizations of the past.  Even some of these are pretty harmless, like a picture of a rotary phone or an Atari 2600 with "share if you remember this."  There's a popular set of them that recall the days when kids played outside until dark and didn't have any electronic devices to amuse them.  And there are even some that recall the "good old days" when we used to get beat for doing bad things.
Wait, what?
Yep, nostalgia for getting a whuppin'. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I get that the touchy-feely, timeout variety of parenting isn't for everyone, but does anyone honestly remember getting hit with things fondly?
As an aside, I am not opposed to corporal punishment in certain situations, but let's be honest here, it used to be the default way to discipline kids for just about anything.  And I don't think that in those days the world was free of  criminals, perverts and other miscreants, in fact, there were probably just as many as there are now.
The argument seems to be that the sharer of the post got smacked around a bit as a kid and as a result they turned out better than all these scurrilous rapscallions (love those words together) that the lax parenting styles of latter years produced.  The end logic here is a bit spurious to say the least: the solution to our societal ills is simply smacking our kids more.
Speaking of misplaced nostalgia, it reminds me of that Bill Cosby routine about his grandfather having to walk up hill, both ways. It's the same kind of sentiment that gets hopping mad about the way they teach kids to do math these days. (For a pretty good essay about that read this)  It is simply wearing rose colored glasses and looking in the rear view mirror.  It ignores the fact that our kids are being trained to actually be good people, people who learn to solve their problems with something other than violence and rage, people who do not bully or try to intimidate others into doing what they want.
This morning, while waiting for the bus, my daughter told me that her P.E. teacher (not a gym teacher, PE) had given them all a lecture about body shaming, about how they shouldn't make fun of people for being fatter or skinnier than them, about how they're all different and that's okay.  As a former chubby kid who was actually shamed BY gym teachers, this made me a little misty.  It made me believe in the ability of the human animal to make progress.  My children are becoming better people, despite the fact that they don't regularly receive beatings, shaming and negative reinforcement.  When my kids do something wrong, I talk to them, okay, maybe I yell sometimes, but that's probably because I was beat too much when I was a kid (just kidding, my parents were not actually like that, I very rarely got those precious butt whuppins, maybe that's why I turned out to be such a criminal).
Sorry, I just realized I am employing multi-level sarcasm, which gets confusing, so here's the honest scoop.  I got spanked as a kid, a few times, mostly for things that deserved a spanking, but I don't honestly remember what they were.  I didn't and don't resent my parents for it, and I don't think they were excessive.  But I will tell you that I don't actually think it made me a better person or a better parent to my kids.  You want to know what made me a better person and a better parent?  Knowing that my parents had some standards that they really wanted me to live  up to, and honestly those were relayed in much more subtle ways than with a belt or a wooden spoon. I have come to see that the physical stuff doesn't really work as well as the purveyors of trite memes would have you believe.  I have also come to believe that the past is not really measurably better than the present, and in many ways it was probably a heck of a lot worse.  I understand that playing outside is a good thing, I make my kids do it periodically, however, I am honest enough with myself to know that if I had Netflix as a kid I would probably have died of sloth.  Half the time I went outside because I was bored and tired of watching Hogan's Heroes reruns.  I think of all the sort of questionable situations I probably could have avoided if I had a cell phone to call my Dad to pick me up.
I don't think this tendency to idealize the past is uncommon it's just part of our nature to under-evaluate certain aspects of life, it's probably part of how we stay sane, but seriously let's not be so darn cranky about everything.  Some new things are good, and maybe our kids might just grow up to better than us, at math and at life.  Here's hoping.