I'm clearly getting old before my time, even though I am still looking at the soft underbelly of 40 from below. I cannot get over how rude little kids are. I have two small ones (under 5) and we have taught them very simple things like "please" and "thank you" and to just be aware of others sharing this little planet with them. Honestly, it's not that hard.
One effect of this is that folks treat us like we have just cured malaria when they ask one of our kids if she wants a cookie. When the response is "Yes, please," we are showered with all sorts of "isn't that precious?" and "what nice manners" types of comments. I have to suppress the urge to spoil the moment and inform these folks that no, there is nothing special about my kids. They just have the manners that we all should have if we want to counter the rude-ification of our civilization that is a symptom of the societal dark period we have entered.
Another effect, though, is noticing how rude other kids my kids age are. I don't see it so much in our neighborhood but we were at the Monterey Bay Aquarium the other day. So many of the kids there were unbehaved and rude, it was as if they had been raised by wolves. The pentultimate example was an experience we had in one of the areas of the aquarium build for kids' experimentation. One of our children asked my wife to help her figure out how to use an experiment to catch fake krill in a net. As my wife was showing her how to use the little handle, someone else's child comes up and starts attempting to take the handle out of my wife's hand. Assuming that the child was just absentmindedly doing what kids in the haze of being a kid do, she gently reminded the child that she was using it. The response? "Well, let me use it!" Uh, no, and so the kid went running off, presumably to sic his parents on my wife.
This whole bully/victim ratio seems to have reversed itself since I was a kid. It is disturbing that in this era where "character" is driving so much of the national debate, we are raising our children to have anything but.
