As a child , it seemed to me that my father delighted in telling me how hard life is. He took an unusual pride in detailing all of his struggles and hard work. He also took an unusual pride in detailng all of his ways of getting around some of that hard work and his "finnagling", deals and contacts.

The point I'm trying to make or am ponderig making is two fold.

1.Parents should be encouraging their children and supportinve of them when they hit bumps in this life.

2. That if you're jealous of the social climate or the opportrunities your child has, that you didn't have, don't take it out on your kid... After all they had no choice in when they were born or who their parents would be!

Back to point one, and my belated negative father.. He was so... jealous of the relationship I had with my mother. And while my mother spoiled me(I freely admit that, and so does she...) she never gave me any illusions that life didn't have ups and downs. What she did do, and still tries to do, is make the downs a little less irritating. (Cause they're gonna be irritating!) She never told me that life wouldn't be frustrating or painful, she just didn't pound the negatives into my head!

Back to point two. I think a lot of people have issues with the next generation, doesn't matter when they were born. Opportunities and social circumstances change as times change. What was available to the youth of the 1920's wasn't available to the youth of the turn of the century. Is that the fault or responsibility of the youth? NO. It's the responsibility of the generation before them! Opportunities and social circumstances were different for my mother and father's generation than for mine. Is that my fault or responsibility? No, but I live in the world created by the generations before me. So before we 30, 40, 50 and 60 somethings start complaining about how the next generation is behaving, let's take a look at the world we created for then to live in!

Today's youth aren't responsible for the Internet, cell phones and the "I want it all and I want it now" pressure cooker we find ourselves in. On the contrary, the generations before us that wanted ease and convenience and change from what they were used to set out to create a more comfortable world for themselves, and the future generations were/are left to deal with those changes, for good for for evil.

Complaining about the relative ease of certain processes or social circumstances doesn't alleviate or solve the issues that succeeding generations have to deal with. Maybe we should stop and ponder that Native American proverb-"We don't inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children." more closely. Anybody that's had to clean up an estate left by a dead parent has a pretty good understanding of this proverb. And as a whole,- a city, a nation, a country, a world, we need to realize that the messes we create today, our children of tomorrow will have to clean up and the negative words spoken over then today will be the haunting and painful memories of tomorrow.