Aloneness
With one in four young people now indicating that they have never had a meaningful conversation with their father, is it any wonder that 76 percent of the 1,200 teens surveyed in USA Today actually want their parents to spend more time with them?
Andree Alieon Brooks, a New York Times journalist, in her eye-opening book Children of Fast-Track Parents, describes her interviews with scores of children and parents who seemed to “have it all”: “If there was one theme that constantly emerged from my conversations with the children it was a surprising undercurrent of aloneness—feelings of isolation from peers as well as parents despite their busy lives.”
Mark DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry, (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 1994, pp. 40-41
Separation of Children & Adults
Cornell University’s Urie Bronfenbrenner cites nine specific changes that have taken place during the past generation which have increasingly separated children and youth from the world of adults, especially the adults in their own families:
1. fathers’ vocational choices which remove them from the home for lengthy periods of time
2. an increase in the number of working mothers
3. a critical escalation in the divorce rate
4. a rapid increase in single-parent families
5. a steady decline in the extended family
6. the evolution of the physical environment of the home (family rooms, playrooms and master bedrooms)
7. the replacement of adults by the peer group
8. the isolation of children from the work world
9. the insulation of schools from the rest of society
This last factor has caused Bronfenbrenner to describe the current U.S. educational system as “one of the most potent breeding grounds for alienation in American society.” When he wrote these words in 1974, this trend toward isolation was in full swing, and it has not been significantly checked since that time.
Mark DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry, (Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press, 1994, p. 37
Rare Disease
“You have a very rare and extremely contagious condition,” the doctor told his patient. “We’re going to put you in an isolation unit, where you’ll be on a diet of pancakes and pizza.”
“Will pancakes and pizza cure my condition?”
“No,” replied the doctor. “They’re the only things we can slip under the door.”
Contributed by Darleen Giannini, Reader’s Digest, February, 1995, p. 59
Profitable Quarantine
In 1832, French engineer Ferdin and Marie Lesseps were traveling in the Mediterranean when one of the passengers became sick and the ship was quarantined. Lesseps was an active man, so the confinement was terribly frustrating for him. The many long hours aboard that isolated vessel, however, gave him time to read the memoirs of Charles le Pere, a man who had studied the feasibility of building a canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. That volume prompted Lesseps to devise in his own mind a detailed plan for the construction of the Suez Canal. When it was finally built under his leadership some 30 years later, it brought invaluable service to the world. That quarantine had proven to be immensely profitable.
Source unknown