Rebels with(out) a cause

I was having a chat with an old friend of mine whom I had not met up with for some time; en passant, he told me he keeps lecturing his children about the innocent, inexpensive, inventive and unsophisticated fun he had when he was their age in comparison with their demanding, expensive, capricious and unfulfilled lifestyle. Or so he thought till I burst out laughing and reminded him that both his parents and mine used to say precisely the same thing to us!

Parents need to be constantly reminded that they were just as difficult, annoying and non-conformist as their children when they were their age. It would help them no end to be more tolerant and understanding of the frustrations of adolescence and young adulthood and to lessen the inevitable gap that separates the generations. Many go even further by trying to fill the gaps in their own lives through their children, a policy that is doomed to failure at the outset.

It is possibly because I have no children of my own that I am able to take a broader view simply because I have not been placed in a niche as so and so's father or even so and so's uncle (as I have no siblings) and crystallised into a generation that disapproves of this, that and the other! Because of this I feel that I am slipping into the role of "universal uncle" to the children of many of my friends except that I'd be furious had they to call me that. Thankfully, none of them do.

I find the younger generation far more interesting, well-informed, uninhibited, articulate and opinionated than my own. The fact that our adolescence and young adulthood was spent in the repressive atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s made it inevitable that to have fun we had to be far more inventive and resourceful than young people today. We had no PCs and internet to keep us au courant with what was going on in the world and the only international news was what we heard on Rai.

Thirty years ago we had no mobile phones to keep in touch with our friends nor did we all have cars; no nightclubs and discotheques that stayed open till the wee hours of the morning, no cinemas to speak of either as with the invention of the videotape many closed down. That was the tip of the iceberg.

We lived in a highly charged political climate all the year round where the highlight of our weekend was a political mass meeting! Difficult to explain that to people in their teens and 20s today; it was a way of life which will, I hope, never recur again. Malta then was a totally different place, as different as the Malta of my own mother who spent most of her adolescence in an air raid shelter!

There is so much going for youngsters today; job opportunities far more interesting and diverse as the ones open to us when we were their age. Society has relaxed many of its unwritten rules and young people today are much freer to choose their own lifestyles. Naturally in both cases things have gone to the other extreme and one has to take the bad with the good; but when has that not been the case?

Because we live on such a tiny island the worst enemy of people who have just broken out of the chrysalis of childhood is boredom. It is one of the greatest threats to the well-being of our future generations. It has always been so. Young people are natural rebels. You ask any octogenarian whether they were rebels when they were young and I am sure the answer would be yes; our great grandparents, grandparents, parents, ourselves and our children were and are all rebels; they and we all live through a time when they were searching for a cause, searching for who they really were as they grew to adulthood with raging hormones and black moods, euphoric outbursts and irrational irresponsibility, contrariness and dangerous living.

They all were a worry to their parents because that is the way of the world. Because parents want the best for their children and because, in Malta, proximity and close blood ties make it impossible to effectively break out of the parental mould, young people tend to remain overgrown toddlers for too long.

This state of affairs has been exacerbated by the totally different relationship parents have with their children's schools today. Because parents are far more deeply involved, there is too much interference. This problem manifests itself in the periodical news items reporting that teachers are actually assaulted by irate parents because they dared to discipline an unruly child; something unheard of in our time. We were disciplined; we accepted rules grudgingly but never questioned or challenged them, knowing that in such a case our parents would never back us up. We accepted corporal punishment as an occupational hazard and our parents approved of it. They trusted the schools to provide a sound character moulding in addition to a sound education. There were, as expected, people who thrived and shone despite the so-called repression and those who didn't. That is the norm.

In today's world; a minefield of political correctness, where one is unable to call a spade a spade for fear of falling into some obscure ethical pitfall, controlling a class of 30-odd students without the resort to punishment should it be necessary for fear of some irate parent coming to beat you up, must be frustrating in the extreme. There are teachers who are bullies, I had them too; and there are teachers who are weak. They are all human beings after all and school is a preparation for life wherein all these types rub shoulders all the time and one must learn how to cope with it.

There is one highly untranslatable Maltese word that encapsulates that elusive requirement to be the perfect educator, suggizzjoni. We all know what it means and what it implies. There are people who are cast in the Dame Maggie Smith mould who exude this quality that makes it clear that there is zero tolerance to any liberties and monkey business. Strangely enough these were the teachers who were the ones who were most loved and respected; the ones who taught us most. I am sure there are similar characters in our schools today and you may be sure they are the best.

All parents want the best for their children but must not lose sight of the fact that their children are strong-minded individuals in their own right and while it is right to guide and counsel it is wrong to impose and force one's child to follow a path that is unsuited simply because that is what the parents wished for themselves. This leads to unhappiness, frustration and lifelong resentment.

So, three cheers for young people today in whose hands the future of Malta lies.; a generation brought up in a far less inhibited, far less repressive and far more opulent atmosphere than we were. Should they need a cause to feel fulfilled do ensure that they find the right one and remember that they are not simply extensions of yourselves but wholly diverse individuals who must fulfil their own destinies.