THE PLAGUE OF IDLE BOYHOOD

William C. Michael, August 2010

"He who tills his land shall be satisfied with bread:
but he who pursues idleness is very foolish." 
Proverbs 12:11

Working in education and being a father of 5 young boys, I face the same questions any time someone learns that I live on a farm and teach my own children at home:

"Do your kids play video games?"
"Do your kids watch TV?"
"Do you kids play sports?"

My answer:  "No, they don't." 

While that may be shocking to American adults, what is really shocking is the fact that these three activities have somehow become the tests of "normal" childhood.  I don’t believe these activities can be considered normal at all. 

It is safe to say that children have roamed the earth about as long as men and women have.   If you're an evolutionist, that would mean, oh, several million years.  I'm not an evolutionist, so I'd prefer to think that children have been around for closer to 6,000 years.   If they've been around longer than that, we don't know anything about them anyway, so it wouldn't matter, and it won’t matter much for this article.  Now, if we can agree that children have been around for at least 6,000 years, wouldn't the "normal" childhood experiences be at least a few thousand years old?

• Video games became popular in the 1980s.  Therefore, for 99.7% of the history of childhood, no child ever played a video game.  A child who does not play video games stands in a crowd that includes 99.7% of all children who have ever lived.  I'd call that normal.
• Television came onto the scene in the 1930s.  Therefore, for 98.8% of the history of childhood, no child ever watched a television show.  Again, if my boys stand in a crowd that includes 98.8% of all children who have ever lived, I'd say they are perfectly normal.

Sports, of course, are a little more tricky--especially in modern America where there are very few people who know much about life outside of the U.S..  Children (mainly boys) have always participated in athletic games of some sort.   Olympic-type activities are ancient and have always been a part of education because they were practically useful for military training.  They featured skills that were used in ancient warfare.  Soldiers had to throw javelins, fight hand-to-hand with spears and swords, shoot arrows, climb city walls, fight on horseback, chase down enemies on foot,  and so on.   The Olympic games motivated both experienced and future soldiers to cultivate and demonstrate their military skills by offering great prizes and honors.  The games lifted morale among citizens and strengthened the military at the same time.

None of this, however, has anything to do with sports in modern America.   Here, we're talking about organized recreational sports such as baseball, basketball, soccer, football, swimming--not Olympic events.  Even the modern idea of the "Olympic Games" now includes figure skating, speed-walking, ping-pong, snowboarding and other sports that really exist for their own sake.   Rather than making all men compete for a few prizes, we multiply pointless games so hundreds of people end up with medals and the awards mean less and less.   From the modern Olympic games down to the local T-ball league, the goal seems to be to make an award for everyone, and that for any activity, no matter how useless in life.  Again, this idea of “sports” has nothing to do with the ancient contests.

The craze for sports among American youth doesn't actually begin with the youth, though.  It begins with their parents and usually for a few reasons: 

• Sports can teach important life lessons (teamwork, sacrifice, endurance, etc.).

• Sports can earn scholarship money for a student.

• Sports allow kids to get physical exercise. 

There may be a few more, but these are the more respectable answers.  The problem with each of these reasons for sporting is that they are easily supplied by means other than sports.  

First, It is not necessary to sign up at the local recreation league so that a boy can be a member of at team.  Boys are born onto teams they are supposed to work with and for...they're called families.   All of the lessons of teamwork are available to them in their own homes…if families would pursue them. 

Second, it is not necessary (or realistic) for a boy to earn college money through sports.  There are also academic scholarships available and, more importantly, it first needs to be proven that a boy needs to go to college!  College is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.  Before a boy spends his youth working to hit curveballs and kick field goals, it would be better if he first concentrated on the things he will definitely need to do well in life.  Despite all the time, money and energy put into team sports by American families, only 2% of high school athletes actually earn a college scholarship, which means that 98% of those playing sports don't earn college scholarships.  What is worse, is that playing sports is usually just the tip of an iceberg of a whole culture of sports TV, sports magazines, sports apparel, sports music, weightlifting and training, etc..  No boy can show up and play on game day who is seeking an athletic scholarship.  An entire way of life must be adopted and oriented around that athletic scholarship.  Not only is it an unrealistic explanation for the devotion to sports, it is also a distraction from traditional spiritual life. 

Lastly, then, there's the physical fitness argument:  “Sports allow kids to get physical exercise.”   It seems that parents are forgetting that there is an alternative source of physical exercise available to children of all ages.  Even better, it is a source of exercise that teaches better lessons than sports and actually makes the student--and his family--wealthier.  It's called work.  Children would not need artificial forms of physical work were their parents arranging a routine of daily work for them to do.  One of the reasons the kids are so idle is that their parents have bought up every available convenience appliance and service, leaving nothing for the children to do!  Let the children learn household work.  Set them to work washing dishes, doing laundry, preparing meals, cutting grass, caring for gardens, managing animals, etc..  Let them start businesses and earn some money, then teach them to use that money as responsible Catholics must—not for wasting on toys and treats, but for sharing with those who cannot work.  Let charity be the motivation for their physical fitness.

CHILDREN RAISING CHILDREN

The Roman philosopher Cicero famously said that

To not know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.

and the danger we face today is that most children are being raised by adults who are largely unfamiliar with the history of family life.  In Cicero’s words, there are children raising children.  It is normal for an American boy to never learn how to produce his own food or clothing, to state his religious beliefs clearly or to know any habits of prayer and reflection.  Now, historically speaking, do you think that is normal for Catholic children? 

American families have been so hardened in this modern narrow-mindedness that they can no longer think outside of the fish tank of suburbia--even if they try.   There is an historical ignorance that makes them unable to reflect upon what families have done successfully in the past and a cultural ignorance (or arrogance) that keeps them from understanding what families are doing in places outside of America.   It is hard for many Americans to accept the reality that most of the saints we know lived before 1776 and outside of America.  They did not live like Americans do and the way of normal American life has many detrimental consequences.  St. Augustine represented ungodly culture with the image of a rushing river and American families, for all their swimming about, are largely moving with the current, not against it.

The real problem we face is an accepted culture of idleness--particularly among men and boys.  There's no reason why boys are waiting around the house to suddenly evolve into men who, by the time they are physically ready to produce children, ought to know how to earn a living, manage a family, and live a wise and virtuous life.  There is no reason why boys are not praying, studying and working in their youth just as they should for the rest of their lives.  There is no reason why two (or fewer) members of the household work and the others go about consuming and wasting.  Boys are capable of an incredible amount of work--and bearing the responsibility of that work and enjoying its fruits are the natural sources of maturity that should come to our boys--not when they're 25 or 30 years old, but when they're 11 or 12.  Nevertheless, they are allowed to impoverish their families and supply no help to their parents.  The parents, having embraced the foolishness of this generation accept this abuse, believing it is a necessary evil.  They are mistaking the evil river of ungodly culture in which they are caught up for some real condition of childhood, but history teaches us no such thing.  Consider some historical examples of great young men and women:

• David defeated Goliath in battle as a boy, filled with zeal for God's glory and mature faith.
• St. Aloysius Gonzaga resolved to become a missionary and began an ascetic life at age 12.
• St. Dominic began his university studies at age 11.
• Alexander the Great tamed a war horse at age 10 and was fighting beside his father in battle at age 16.
• St. Therese of Lisieux became a nun at age 15 and died a Doctor of the Church at age 24.
• Mozart was paid to perform before royalty in his early teens.
• The Virgin Mary was chosen to bear the Son of God when she was 14.
• Jesus was disputing with the elders in the Jewish temple at the age of 12.

Now, these are obviously history's brightest stars, but their example shows us what great people were doing in their youth.  They weren't waiting around to turn 18, watching movies and playing games.  No one was cleaning up their mess or making excuses for their behavior because they weren't "adults" yet.  Save for a small number of extreme cases, they were doing in their youth what they would go on to do in their adulthood.  Moreover, their parents understood that:

Youth is the time for extraordinary toil.

as Plato put it.  The families in which history's greatest young men and women were raised shared a common understanding of childhood that America has rejected.   They believed that youth was a time free, not for play, but for the cultivation of knowledge and skills that could not be cultivated in adulthood.   In other words, we cannot imagine that our children will become great at anything they are not working on today.  St. Aloysius was taught by St. Charles Borromeo and learned to live an ascetic life by observing the lives of Catholic missionaries.   Alexander was taught by Aristotle and given opportunities by his father to act like a man.  St. Therese lived with four sisters who would all become nuns, in a home famous for its sanctity.   Mozart was taught by his loving father Leopold and wrote his first piece of music when he was 5 years old.   Jesus was raised by Blessed Virgin Mary and good St. Joseph, who made sure their Son learned a balanced life of work and prayer.   Through all this we see a common thread:  diligent adults provided children with good work to do and the children did it.  As they came to adulthood, all the flowers of that early diligence opened and the world was filled with its fruits.  These were not miraculous deeds, they were the effects of wise and diligent parenting.

Fathers, we must work to restore a traditional view of the importance of youth and end this plague of idle boyhood.  We must be fathers are known for the virtues of St. Joseph:

Joseph, most righteous,

Joseph, most chaste,

Joseph, most prudent,

Joseph, most strong,

Joseph, most obedient,

Joseph, most faithful,

By being such men, we can succeed in raising boys who become such men--but the task requires great care and sacrifice.  It is not a part-time job or a hobby to be attended to when time permits.  St. Joseph is our model and we may hope in his help as we devote ourselves to him.  I would like to invite fathers and sons to join me in making the recitation of Litany of St. Joseph a part of our weekly devotions that we may obtain the help of his prayers and raise the kind of young men our society and the Church desperately need:  righteous, chaste, prudent, strong, obedient and faithful young men.

Comments?  Questions?  E-mail Mr. Michael at mail@classicalliberalarts.com.