In March of 2009, circumstances landed both my daughter and I under the same roof for the first time since she was two years old. On her part, the circumstances were that her mother was about two inches from having her committed to whatever facility they had in Orlando where parents send kids they Simply Cannot Deal With, and being suddenly uprooted and shipped off to a tiny little shitburg in Oklahoma seemed like a better idea than basically having her locked up.
One thing I noticed right from the get-go — something I hadn’t noticed during the various visitations I’d had with her and her brother over the years — was that she seriously lacked any respect for anything. I tried working on it, making a point to be precisely what her mother wasn’t (at least according to my daughter), but that pretty much ended the moment I caught her out in a particularly egregious bit of wrongdoing. Of course, by this time she was over eighteen, making most courses of action less than effective.
But I’ve reached a conclusion after three years of dealing with not just her, but her friends (and given the sparse population around here, understand that this really means “damn near every 18-23ish kid in the county”). I don’t think it’s just her. I think the vast majority of kids her age suffer from a complete lack of social skills.
I don’t think it’s all of them, of course, and I have my theories on what sort of kids might be more inclined to avoid this — kids from well-off families with both parents and reasonably stern discipline — but it seems pretty universal around here. These kids are chronically self-absorbed, lack any true sense of courtesy, and expect everything to be handed to them without them putting in any effort first. (I should note that when I refer to “courtesy”, I don’t mean “politeness”; in fact, there are a veritable boatload of Eddie Haskells in the neck of the woods, if you catch my drift.)
Some examples:
- My daughter has a seemingly infallible ability to not bother to let me know when she has to go to work. Even as I type this… last night, a friend picked her up instead of me going to get her, so that he could take her to evening church service. I dropped her off at work at noon yesterday. She has neither spoken to nor messaged me since. (However, she is home, and in bed.) The catch? She doesn’t find out whether she works on Mondays until she leaves work on Sunday, which is a problem I have with her employer that I can do nothing about, but I’ve told her over and over to let me know ASAP so that I know whether I have to schedule Monday late morning around her. I have no freakin’ idea whether I need to take her to work tomorrow. I could wake her up, but I’m not a complete dickball.
- Her friends have this bizarre predilection for parallel parking at the end of the driveway when they come by. That is, parallel parking behind the cars IN the driveway. Yeah, sure, it’s not a big thing to ask them to move their car if I have to go somewhere, but… uh, guys? WHO DOES THAT? There’s plenty of space on the shoulder along the 100 foot of frontage that’s actually in front of the house south of the driveway, so why block the cars in like an asshole?
- Her last boyfriend… jesus, man. He didn’t have a car. He’d arrange to get a ride over here to spend a day or three over here, and no sooner did he get here than she’d be knocking on the door of the mancave asking me if I could take them into Pryor to go trade in games at GameStop or some shit. Invariably, this would happen a half-hour before they closed, meaning the only responses I could give were “Uh, sorry, but NO” or a resigned sigh as I grabbed my keys and wallet. (You can guess which was the most common, although there were a lot of resigned sighs too since the request usually came with bribery.)
- Her grandmother, who’s 64 years old, works 12-hour shifts in a hospital psych unit, generally four shifts a week, sometimes five. She works 25-30 hours a week as a carhop. Would you care to guess how many times she’s talked to her grandmother (often just about to take off to work a 12-hour shift, mind you) about how tired she is because OMG she just had to work seven hours? Hello? Self-awareness, anyone?
That’s just a taste. I mean, I could go on for 5,000 words here. But like I said, I have theories, and I think the biggest problem these kids have these days is that they grew up in an era where their social interaction has been far more skewed toward the internet. Whether it’s Facebook or MMORPGs or textaholism or spending hours with a headset shooting people on a console, these kids have been dealing with their peers in ways that folks even 5-10 years older than them never did as kids. Hell, I’ve been online long enough to have used an actual 300 baud modem to dial up BBSs, but it still wasn’t until I had broadband that I finally reached a point where more of my interaction with people was online than actually going out to do things. When I was 21, if I wasn’t at a bar after work, I’d be hanging out in a car wash parking lot with literally dozens of other people, or hanging out at the bowling alley, or out on a date. If someone wanted to talk to me, they had to either find me or call and leave a message and wait for me to get home. Now, nobody has to find anyone, and these kids just come home and plug into the internet.
And as a result, they don’t know how to deal with other people, because they’ve learned how to deal with other people in a venue where you can lash out and hurt others without any real repercussion other than having them lash out right back at you. When I was 21, if you wanted to say half the shit these kids say to one another on Facebook, you had to do it to their face.
And you know what usually ended up happening then, don’t you?
That’s right. I have reached the conclusion that kids these days are prone to being discourteous narcissists precisely because they’ve been able to be absolutely horrid little assholes to one another without actually having to worry about getting their asses kicked. What a wonderful world.
