A Generation Gap and What It Means

The Pew Research Institute recently reported a national survey where they compared views held by different age groups. They discovered a fairly wide gap between younger and older people in regard to lifestyle, relationships, moral behavior, and religion. The difference, or gap, is as wide as it was in the 1960’s when there was a lot of generational conflict over the Viet Nam war.

The idea of a difference between age groups is likely related to social change and we know this because historically political or social transformations are often indicated by generational differences. Not all of these social changes are positive, however, and usually have far reaching effects which may not be seen at the time they take place. In the cases where there are negative outcomes for us we often treat them like a historian reviewing the causes of the civil war and suggesting that if only certain things took place the war could have been avoided. By that time, however, people had been killed and the country devastated.

So now, what if we are in the middle of one of those social changes and we either like or do not like the direction it is going. And, what do we do if we do not like the suggested trends because we fear the consequences for our children will not be positive. We do not have to accept what appears to be going on around us, but we need to understand what else we might do. I have a couple of suggestions.

We can realize that children develop and grow over time and this gives us as parents a great deal of leverage and influence if we choose to use it. We can help our children identify directions they are going and then persuade them we can help them be successful. In the process we can teach them values and methods which are designed to help them acquire the lessons of life we hope they will learn. Families are made up of older more experienced pathfinders and younger less experienced individuals just for that purpose.

The second thing we could do is realize that the relationship between adults and children provide the social and emotional context where the forms of thought as well as what children come to believe are first learned from these adults, adopted by the child, and then the child adapts them to fit his own desires. When adults teach children the structure of language they also teach children the structure of thought. What this means is that the amount of time, the quality of relationship experience, and the degree of effort given to the process make a big difference. It is no minor thing when families spend little time together if the lack of time means their relationships are of poor quality. Let’s look around and find a little more time, find ways to make the time we spend powerful, and then teach what we want our children to know with great consistency. They are going to need the best we’ve got.