Reply To: Youthful Misconceptions

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#2081782
Avram in MD
Participant

Kuvult,

A few of my thoughts.

1. The parents today who you are having a problem with are your classmates and peers who now have their own children. Assuming you’re right that there was some sort of massive genrational shift in behavior, is it possible that your peers may have had different opinions and experiences than you did growing up?

2. What you describe as your childhood is still very much the way things are in smaller OOT communities, where there simply isn’t sufficient infrastructure to provide services tailored to each family’s derech. Maybe an OOT locale or lifestyle would be right for you and your family?

3. You seem very bothered by the perceived rejection and separation, but you also seem unaware of how bitter and hateful some of your statements directed towards the “others” in your community is coming across. Several people have tried to explain the concerns at play with respect to intrusion of an exponentially increasingly toxic secular culture into their home life, but you consistently revert to an insistence that it’s all about “petty little things” like hats and kippas. Do you hold up your end of the bargain, being very friendly to Jews who wear black hats and think the internet is evil, smiling at them, greeting them, and respecting their differences (such as not eating Triangle-K) even if it means their kid is not going to eat lunch at your house?

4. I agree with you that it is vital for parents to instill the family derech into their kids, but unfortunately even in the frum world a kid’s (especially teens) peers tend to have an outsized influence on his/her physical, emotional, and spiritual well being. If your child’s friends all have smartphones with unfiltered internet access and your child does not, and their conversations all revolve around the latest and greatest movie that your child has not seen, and most of their socializing happens on some app that your child does not have, your child may absolutely love his/her derech intellectually, and yet still feel miserable and conflicted emotionally, and feel drawn towards the technology and media that you feel is harmful with a mixture of curiosity, guilt, and resentment towards both their friends and their parents.