Guilt or No Guilt

 

Hi Al,

 

You mentioned children today not feeling guilty for wrong behavior. It seems to me they have no reason to feel guilty and it is unrealistic for us to expect them to feel guilty. Any child of any age, with the click of a mouse, can see naked people performing sexual activities of all persuasions and "meet" complete strangers while in their own homes.

 

As you have mentioned you drove a school bus when you were sixteen years old. You had a legitimate purpose which most children today do not have. Purposes are devised by getting them to work at McDonalds or Burger King which serves no purpose other than to get money, get out of the house and away for the parents and encourage them to believe they can make it on their own and encourages them to believe they do not need their parents.

 

Throughout most of the 19th century, the minimum age of consent for sexual intercourse in many of the states was 10 years old. In Delaware it was seven; as late as 1930 twelve states allowed boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 12 to marry with parental consent.
The world has changed. The transition between childhood and adulthood is much longer today than it was less than one hundred years ago, when a boy proved himself a man when he could shoulder and share adult hardships, risks, and responsibility working side by side with his father in the fields. By the time he was a seasoned seventeen or eighteen, he was ready to start his own family. A girl became a woman by the time she reached childbearing age; fourteen or fifteen was often considered old enough to marry. The transition from childhood to adulthood was so short that adolescence---at least as the distinct stage of life we now consider it---hardly existed.

 

Today the traditional determinations of adulthood---the establishment of occupation and family---are routinely postponed until after college. With the period of childhood innocence seeming shorter and shorter, we've created a new ten-or-twelve-or-more-years-long designation, a no-man's land (or no-woman's land) we term adolescence. Over the past fifty-years or so, this new limbo-land life stage has become an extended period of awkward uncertainty.

 

Yesterday all a mother had to do to prepare her daughter was to teach her how to perform wifely and motherly functions and to cook and clean the house. All a father had to do was to apprentice his sons. Today they are pressured to accumulate tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands or dollars for college. Graduates are usually many thousands of dollars in debt before they find their first job.

 

We have stretched adolescence further than anytime in history. We are fighting, nature and hormones. We think we can succeed by recommending abstinence and saying don't do as I do but do as I say. It will not work.   

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Regards,
John Jenkins
865-803-8179  cell
Gatlinburg, TN

Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
Website: http://www.greenbriersolutions.com  
Blog: http://littlepigeon.blogspot.com/

"Hail to the Chief" was written for James Madison because he was so short that no one ever noticed when he entered the room.