What's the matter with kids today

Kids today are pretty much like kids down through the centuries.

They are the product of parents and caretakers whose priorities vary from people fascinated and focused on giving them what they need, healthy routines that include bedtimes, good food and a working knowledge of how manners make life better, to children raised like family pets. They are fed, tolerated and used for amusement when it's convenient.

That in and of itself creates huge gaps in the possibilities for success. Now add in the poverty that leaves some parents bereft of any energy to do much more than survive once they get home from exhausting low wage jobs and you have more problems.

I saw a bumper sticker on a truck the other day. It said, My Soldier Protects Your Honor Student. The fact that this man felt they were mutually exclusive is sad.

I see children in elementary school who already identify teachers and school as the enemy, someone to be tricked and avoided as much as possible when most teachers I know work as hard as they know how to help all their students succeed.

We need to rethink a society that feels some of its children are expendable, because they grow up to be the parents of the next generation of children and on and on and on . . .