What's Your Opinion on this article?

[sigmagrrl]

Act Your Age, and Vice Versa

By Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners)
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page D02

Social problem No. 1: Children are growing up too fast. Elementary school students are routinely exposed to sex and drugs, and not just in the television shows they see and the video games they play. Ten-year-olds are dressing like world-weary tramps and thugs. The young are extremely touchy about being treated with respect. At a tender age, they start rebelling against authority.

Social problem No. 2: Adults are refusing to grow up. Middle-aged people are watching animated shows, playing games at work, collecting stuffed animals and paying high prices at restaurants for comfort food. Businessmen protest against wearing business clothes to work, and partygoers protest against wearing party clothes to parties, all with the claim that they feel comfortable only in their simple and sturdy play clothes. They are insulted at being treated with respect. At an advanced age, they are still rebelling against taking responsibility.

It has thus become possible, Miss Manners notes, to go through one's entire life dissatisfied with one's own age and pretending to be another.

It strikes her that there might be possibilities here of arranging a swap. Children would be in charge of running things, keeping their sins private and their tastes privileged, while adults would forfeit respect but gain respite from responsibility.

Or has that already taken place?

In the manners realm, it would certainly seem so. It is a favorite complaint of adults that children don't know how to behave toward them, but it seems to Miss Manners that the little ones are learning the manners that the big ones are teaching them.

These stem from the great modern prudery, which is not about sex (as you may have noticed) but about age. Adults have taught children that it is rude to notice that they are much older than the children themselves:

"Don't call me 'sir' -- that makes me feel old."

"I'm not Mrs. Wiggleston; that's my mother-in-law. Everyone calls me Muffin."

"Why are you getting up? Do I look as if I'm too old to stand?"

"How dare you offer me a senior citizen rate!"

Adults who are busy assuring one another that they look implausibly young, taking drastic measures to sustain the illusion, and condemning aging and death as the result of improper health care and attitudes, are not going to take this sort of thing from the young. What they are teaching is that any violation of the elaborate hoax that nobody ever ages is an insult.

Having defined the teen years and twenties as the only desirable ages to be, they can hardly be surprised that children share their pretensions. As each age group ridicules or deplores the other's falsifications, an idea of how their own look might arise.

Each has its excuses, Miss Manners understands. Children can't remain in the artificial comfort of childhood when they are so blatantly exposed to the harshness of the real world. And adults who are beleaguered by the harshness of the real world naturally want to retreat to the comforting artificial one.