When I was your age, children knew to respect their parents. We didn’t give anyone any lip. We owned up to our responsibilities. We took advantage of our opportunities. We knew what was what. Kids these days have gotten everything all messed up. Kids these days just aren’t what they used to be. Kids these days.
Or, this version, if you’d prefer. When I was your age, we had to walk to school ten miles. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. And let me tell you a thing or two about the meaning of hard work. You think what you’re doing is working hard? Well, you just take a good listen.
You can idealize the good old days and bemoan the sorry state of today’s youth. You can point out how much harder it was in the past and how easy everyone has it now. Whichever version you take, one thing is clear: our memory becomes warped over time. Can it really be that every generation is so profoundly different, that the past is both good old days and tough old days, all at once? Hardly. The oft-sung tune reminds me of the ending of Shel Silverstein’s poem, “When I Was Your Age”:
My uncle said, “How old are you?”
I said, “Nine and a half,” and then
My uncle puffed out his chest and said,
“When I was your age… I was ten.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the issue with our memory for the past.
In her most recent book, ,co-authored with her twenty-something daughter Samantha, Robin Marantz Henig delves into the hard data that makes poems like Silverstein’s possible: what—if anything—is it about kids these days? the mother-daughter team asks. And why is it that every generation seems to think that there’s something different going on with kids these days, as compared to any other?
18 Things Kids Under 14 Would Never Believe We Had to Do
Or, this version, if you’d prefer. When I was your age, we had to walk to school ten miles. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. And let me tell you a thing or two about the meaning of hard work. You think what you’re doing is working hard? Well, you just take a good listen.
You can idealize the good old days and bemoan the sorry state of today’s youth. You can point out how much harder it was in the past and how easy everyone has it now. Whichever version you take, one thing is clear: our memory becomes warped over time. Can it really be that every generation is so profoundly different, that the past is both good old days and tough old days, all at once? Hardly. The oft-sung tune reminds me of the ending of Shel Silverstein’s poem, “When I Was Your Age”:
My uncle said, “How old are you?”
I said, “Nine and a half,” and then
My uncle puffed out his chest and said,
“When I was your age… I was ten.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the issue with our memory for the past.
In her most recent book, ,co-authored with her twenty-something daughter Samantha, Robin Marantz Henig delves into the hard data that makes poems like Silverstein’s possible: what—if anything—is it about kids these days? the mother-daughter team asks. And why is it that every generation seems to think that there’s something different going on with kids these days, as compared to any other?
18 Things Kids Under 14 Would Never Believe We Had to Do
