Scary fairies and other melodramatic assumptions about the generation gap

Lately children in my extended family circle have remembered dreading clowns and adult fairies dressed in wings and layers of pink princess tulle, lending themselves in lieu of all that’s not possible when motherhood is unattained. Female columnists’ parse heartfelt reports on how children foresworn or has made it all the better for other people’s. Few comment on childcare shortages unless trumpeting their own exultant babysitting skills, even less on mothers’ health, unless comparing personal symptoms. Indeed as we boomers grow older, legions of childless and “time disabled” parents have paradoxically reconfigured a progressively limited undertaking of “care”, into a material catalogue of unconditional tenderness, especially useful for deal-making at bedtime.

Parents interviewed for this story occasionally envy my child-free status. Exhausted, they’re also disappointed that children conceived or acquired to affect unsuccessful marriages haven’t solved the original problems. Though they love them desperately, their children take them for granted, and are disrespectful and often hard to control. Others are hell bent on reintroducing or inventing familial tradition as a survival skill, instilling godliness and correct table manners in the very young to paper over cracks in unhappy relationships and extensive absences from home.

Both tribes of children use the “dysfunctional” word like hip-hair product brands. Time is the loaded weapon on both sides of the generational divide, of less than zero concern for many youngsters whose idea of “the moment” is entertainment, connection and materiality, driving parents into a spleenic frenzies. But equally, our preoccupation with the value of time in our own lives has radically reconfigured the act of pausing sufficiently for young people’s time-based needs. This spectacularly inconvenient disparity is paramount to reconsidering how young people are likely to perceive our generation’s value systems.

Suddenly, the anger between the two generations has become practically institutionalised as young people’s eyes glaze at questions about Britney, Delia, Eminem and Foo Fighters by people who still dance to Michael Jackson CDs when they’re pissed. Duh! It's boring being accused of not caring about global issues and told constantly you’re just like us at that age.

We caring-sharing boomer adults think we’ve been allotted rights to exist in harmony with them because of the sensitivity of our experience when, let’s face it, theirs is a parallel universe and we really don’t belong there. An awkward nexus highlighting the spiritual disjunction between social ideals and parental responsibility, as in the nature of controlling our children's fates in a dangerous world that we’ve too busy to share with them.

This confusion, of awareness as a value system with empathy as a life skill prompts another question. What about Mark Latham and all the other schedule-deprived parents whose dashed dreams and truths denied are - disclaimer disclaimer - all “for the sake of the children? How should children evaluate parental duty expressed in such dismally argued instances of “time” materialised as career sacrifices?

Still, it could all be a hell of a lot worse. With no children of my own, I’m nonetheless endlessly interested in other people's, albeit from a certain distance. Many of my friends and family have marvellous children, a dozen or so now in their mid-to-late teens. Physically and intellectually, these young people inspire much that compelled friendship with their parents at the same age. But their parents mortify them. We trade embarrassing stories. They groan and roll their eyes; everybody’s PARENTS should ALL be KILLED always.

Indeed, Henry, Louis, Alice, Tully, Nina, Lili, Jimmy, Bruno, Caspar, Eden, Lola, Tom and Harry are in varying universal stages of the same hormonal call to arms our parents heard from behind our slammed bedroom doors. Accident prone rebels, street angels and dining room devils prancing oblique pop nuances, slouching, breaking curfews and controlled substance prohibitions, scoring high marks one term, threats of expulsion the next.

And painfully for their parents, they’re ungrateful for all they demand and are given. Revealing, tender, needy, inspired, tough as glass, beautiful, vulnerable, selfish, changeable, remote, revelatory, capricious, prone to surprising bouts of generosity or redemptive acts of alarming goodness, they’re just children and well, what did we expect?