"Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it"
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A single sly twist turns this into an indictment: the “younger generation” isn’t a weather system that rolled in unannounced, it’s a product parents helped design. Ginott, a teacher and child psychologist writing in the era of postwar domestic idealism and rising youth rebellion, aims his line at a familiar ritual of adult complaint. Parents narrate kids as a separate species - mysterious, reckless, disappointing - because that story is comforting. It relocates responsibility. If “kids today” are a problem, adults get to be spectators instead of co-authors.
The joke works because it exposes a grammatical dodge: “the younger generation” is framed like an abstract demographic trend, not a relationship. Ginott punctures that abstraction with the blunt reminder of causality. The subtext is not merely blame; it’s systems thinking in a domestic key. Children absorb what’s modeled, rewarded, ignored, and punished. Values are taught less through speeches than through daily micro-choices: how adults handle anger, money, attention, prejudice, tenderness.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to moral panic. Complaining about youth has always been a way to mourn lost authority without admitting it. By pointing out that parents “had something to do with it,” Ginott shifts the conversation from condemnation to accountability - and, crucially, to agency. If adults helped make the culture kids are growing up in, they can also change it. That’s the intent: not to shame parents into silence, but to stop them from outsourcing the hard work of raising humans to nostalgia and scapegoats.
The joke works because it exposes a grammatical dodge: “the younger generation” is framed like an abstract demographic trend, not a relationship. Ginott punctures that abstraction with the blunt reminder of causality. The subtext is not merely blame; it’s systems thinking in a domestic key. Children absorb what’s modeled, rewarded, ignored, and punished. Values are taught less through speeches than through daily micro-choices: how adults handle anger, money, attention, prejudice, tenderness.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to moral panic. Complaining about youth has always been a way to mourn lost authority without admitting it. By pointing out that parents “had something to do with it,” Ginott shifts the conversation from condemnation to accountability - and, crucially, to agency. If adults helped make the culture kids are growing up in, they can also change it. That’s the intent: not to shame parents into silence, but to stop them from outsourcing the hard work of raising humans to nostalgia and scapegoats.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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