JustAsking
Sexy Member
But back to the topic at hand. I find good points in what everyone is saying, including BC. What I haven't seen talked about is something that I have always considered important in raising children.
There is an old African saying that says, "It takes a village to raise a child." I really think that we have driven the notion of "village" out of our daily lives, regardless of whether we live in a small town or a city. Out here in rural Ohio, you would expect this not to be true. But I think the isolation and lack of feeling a part of a community is now at its worse in rural areas.
I am not necessarily pining for the good old days of town baseball teams and ice cream socials, except for that aspect of it that gave a townsperson and his children a sense of belonging and identity.
These days, we have arranged our lives so that our households are mostly self-sufficient. We socialize in our community only a few times per month. Our children's lives are programmed to the limit with "activities" that are mostly geared around their improvement. If kids don't have driver's licenses, they need to wait for their parents to take them somewhere, since destinations in the country are so far apart. Its no surprise that the social lives of kids is mostly in cyberspace now. MySpace has taken the place of the local hangout. Perhaps that is not completely bad, since it clearly fills a social need. But the fact that it is doing so at the great expense of real social interaction is what worries me.
There is a deep sense of isolation in our communities. I believe that the idea of living in the suburbs has become a social failure. It would be no surprise to me to find that more kids with social pathologies come from rural areas than from urban areas. (I guess I am not counting the inner city, which is a subject all its own.)
There is an old African saying that says, "It takes a village to raise a child." I really think that we have driven the notion of "village" out of our daily lives, regardless of whether we live in a small town or a city. Out here in rural Ohio, you would expect this not to be true. But I think the isolation and lack of feeling a part of a community is now at its worse in rural areas.
I am not necessarily pining for the good old days of town baseball teams and ice cream socials, except for that aspect of it that gave a townsperson and his children a sense of belonging and identity.
These days, we have arranged our lives so that our households are mostly self-sufficient. We socialize in our community only a few times per month. Our children's lives are programmed to the limit with "activities" that are mostly geared around their improvement. If kids don't have driver's licenses, they need to wait for their parents to take them somewhere, since destinations in the country are so far apart. Its no surprise that the social lives of kids is mostly in cyberspace now. MySpace has taken the place of the local hangout. Perhaps that is not completely bad, since it clearly fills a social need. But the fact that it is doing so at the great expense of real social interaction is what worries me.
There is a deep sense of isolation in our communities. I believe that the idea of living in the suburbs has become a social failure. It would be no surprise to me to find that more kids with social pathologies come from rural areas than from urban areas. (I guess I am not counting the inner city, which is a subject all its own.)