As technically advanced as we have become as a society, one thing has changed in the opposite direction. If you catch any episodes of a show portraying a past era, such as “The Waltons”, you find something that’s missing today. As much time as we spend talking and texting, we spend much less time communicating with our children.
Parents work around the clock, taking business calls whether at work or at home and kids spend it either on Facebook, Tweeting, or texting their friends. Never before has there been as wide a generation gap as there is today.
Past generations didn’t need ad campaigns urging them to eat family meals together. Regardless of which end of the economic scale you are at, the issue remains the same. Each having their own reason, either too many work hours to make ends meet, or too much responsibility to keep the hours of 9 to 5, sometimes to the point of not even being able to finish a sentence without their cell phone ringing, and each time having to instantly decide which conversation is more important. Sometimes, we’re not even aware of how wrong those choices turned out to be.
We need to find a way to slow down and teach our children the things we should be teaching them, because right now their sources are friends and media, leaving a lack of common sense and wisdom. Older generations taught their children a trade and pride in a job well done, along with integrity. Character was something that took years of doing things together and knowing that they mattered to their parents. Hard work was something they taught in both what they did and what they expected of their children. Our society as a whole doesn’t share that as much any more. Each generation is more involved with their own, rather than the next.
If we created a holiday to get immediate family to just spend the day together, how successful do you think it would be? How many would even acknowledge it? Maybe we should make an ad campaign for that. Will we learn from our mistakes and teach them or will it take them looking for a better way? Maybe at some point we will learn to notice the error of the era of our ways.