I converse with my nephew Collin who lives in Oklahoma every few weeks, with him calling me on his way home after work. He is a busy man raising his family in a rural setting between OKC and Tulsa, with his wife, and three kids, all under 4. He just turned 30 and has been with the Vermeer family of corporations since he was 18, taking up their internship program that teaches young kids and provides practical work experience and technical training at Oklahoma State University-Institute of Technology at Okmulgee. We talk about his family and work in our chats, and it’s fun to hear of the progress of the kid’s growth, and what they have been up to. He’ll of course ask about my health, making sure I’m OK. We’ll discuss how he and his brothers were raised and the challenges that parents face today. We will also discuss his managerial work, which is outstanding in him being trusted by the corporate office to go in and fix underperforming or poorly led shops. We talk about leadership and employee expectations, and his willingness to tell his underlings about competent performance and its required behoovement if they wish to remain in waged occupation at his shops. He makes great money, and in a time when young couples are delaying buying a house, he’s working on his third, and besides my little help to buy his first ten acres in Conroe, he has done it all on his own.
In our conversation on his birthday on October 15th, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of his success, and how his situation is unique; having an educated wife, whom he met at OSUIT, his kids, having a large house on 12 acres. And it’s being done all on a single income, which is more rare these days, than for a man of his age following World War II. Ranges vary between who you talk to, but generally a third of families with children live on a single income, and given his age I’d figure the numbers in range would be much lower.
I’d like to take some credit in his success, with me being the uncle that offered an adult-like perspective in the raising of a child, challenging him to think in different ways other than an average child. I left the day-to-day rearing up to his parents Gary and Ramona. I moved up to Montgomery County to help them out with their three boys, picking them up from school, so my sister could jump-start her career again, which worked well with my flexible schedule following my cancer. They stayed over at my residence quite often, we went on vacations together, while their parents chiseled out their careers, so I had a fair share of responsibility in their upbringing. And in all the thinking that I did in my cancer time, being quiet and in solitude of my thoughts, when the boys were quite young, 5 and 7, with the youngest born after I started recovering, I decided that I wanted to give them the gift of thought, and challenge their minds constantly.
And it worked. I mean, none of them have boomeranged back to their parents in failure, asking for money or a place to stay. Collin and his brothers make good livings, with only the youngest not yet married. But as they age, the focus switches to the next generation. And the raising of their kids, and with technology there are choices that need to be made to maintain a child’s positive state of mind. In the birthday chat with Collin, I got to chatting with him on projects I was working on in reference to kids and too much technology in their lives, as well as their inability to properly express themselves in the written word. The simple act of putting pen or pencil to paper. Not to mention the need for kids to spend time away from their smart phones and tablet computers, which allows them to develop an ability to think critically. The studies I see out there are showing more conclusively the exact need to stay free of tech for a set scheduled time, and stay true to penmanship and personal thought.
Collin and his wife decided to limit their kids’ exposure to tech. Instead, their large property allows for them to explore the outdoors. Twenty years ago, Collin and his brothers would drive the family golf cart around their family compound; and now, Collin’s kids, a daughter almost 4, a son 2, have their own electric vehicles, driving themselves around their acreage for 10-20 minutes at a time. And by the time you miss them, it’s ‘oh, there they are.’ That alone time is remarkable. No tech is involved. Driving for them, becomes essentially second nature, which allows for thinking, for thought. Which is just fine. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve self-actualized while driving.
I’ve been trying to understand how I developed my mindset, and my ability to express my thoughts on paper, and I recently ran across an idea that kinda makes sense. Boredom. Yes, being bored, the time where you spend being free from distraction, free from outside influence; just being with yourself and your thoughts. My driving great-niece and nephew, riding around the family acreage on their own. It’s sitting, right? And some of us do our greatest thinking in boredom. lol. During our morning constitutions. Who knows how many great ideas were developed on the toilet. In fact, do you where I’m penning this portion of the piece on my reMarkable 2 tablet right now? You guessed it. lol.
Kids need a scheduled amount of boredom daily. No television. No tech. No internet. If they can’t write yet, put a coloring book in front of them. Otherwise, put a writing tablet on blank books (and a pen) for them to write their thoughts, ideas, stories, basically anything that comes to mind. Encourage them to practice their handwriting, and cursive abilities. I cannot stress the need for parents to have expectations in self-expression of their kids in things other than social media posts. And I believe there has been enough data collected to support that constant exposure to tech is debilitating to a child’s ability to properly develop ideas to meaningfully contribute to society.
I’m reminded of the 1895 8th grade final exam from Kansas that went viral some years ago, and the interesting thing was that way less than 0.1% of us could actually pass the exam today. And it was designed for middle school kids near the end of the 19th century, 130 years ago. Of course, they barely had telephones back then, only relying on their local Carnegie library, or whatever collection of books they could muster. 1890’s kids were well read, from Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, the Bronte sisters, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker. The kids would have been reading the classics of literature with Plato and Homer, the modern classics of Austen, Shelley, and Louisa May Alcott. Teachers had expectations of their students back in the day. And besides their chores around the farms, etc., they would have had their boredom built in with regularity. There was no late night television to help you drift off to sleep.
As for my boredom, I spent years recovering, studying what happened during the summer I was confined to my deathbed. It turns out that when you look a death sentence in the face, you think a lot. Thankfully I survived, because I still had about twenty years of Rush Limbaugh to go through. It makes for a great formula.
Now of course, my nephew’s kids will be exposed to tech in time, and that is fine. I just don’t want their intellectual growth to be stunted by a total reliance on it. Kids need to be taught the old fashioned way without AI butting in and taking their abilities to think for themselves. They need to have crayons in their hands for art, pens in their hands to write, pencils for math, and actual books in their hands to read. If they are not allowed to grow and develop properly, their great-grandchildren, the 2090’s kids will be nothing but mindless drones.
Ruben can be reached at: ruben@montgomerycountynews.net