Online searches for a list of life lessons yield a rich variety of people who seem eager to share what they have learned from experience. Many of the lessons are from people who have enjoyed success of some sort. Others may be amusing, helpful or insightful. Most often they fall into a field known as 'Life Skills'.
Life skills and 'positive psychology' seem to be two related areas of study that are popular in the twenty-first century. The received wisdom of the contemporary age seem to be that it pays to be positive as one approaches life. To an extent such advice disseminated largely through the modern means of mass communication seems to replace the messages that were spread by religion and elders in previous eras of human evolution.
People who are older than fifty in the year 2012 were born before the swinging sixties, before the environmental movement got underway and before computers and cell phones radically changed the face of society. Their early lessons were learned in the context of war, feminism and pervading religious dogmas that carried weight.
In the period following the Second World War there was great deal of negativity. It seemed to many people that the Cold War and the Atomic Bomb were sufficient grounds for pessimism. In the twenty-first century such attitudes seem to have been replaced by chicken soup attitudes. The belief seems to be that being positive pays better than being negative, especially in public.
The early lessons of children born during the boom in babies after the Second World War were colored by war even though hostilities had ceased. The idea of military discipline was played out in childhood games. New priorities like sustainable development, climate change and the Internet are new prerequisites for learning towards the end of the twentieth century.
In the year 2012 the Internet has already changed the world considerably from what it was in the 1980s when a new generation of people who would be parents was born. Though parenting may still not taught in many education factories information is widely available on the Internet and TV. A grandparent who has the opportunity of a relationship with a toddler grandchild may find that many of his own experiences are not only obsolete, but taboo in 2012.
Young parents naturally try to exclude harmful influences from the early education of their offspring. If grandparents harbor negative beliefs or attitudes it is understandable that they should be excluded from the inner circle of a family. In some cases this is welcomed on both sides. However, those older people who are prepared to revise their own early lessons might pass muster. For example, eating habits have been reformed so it is not good to feed young children sweets or fat and habit forming foods. It is also good to be positive and bad to be negative so the cruel and often racist fairy stories of the past have to be radically revised.
As time turns slowly into the twenty-first century it is uncertain what challenges await. There may be even greater challenges than those caused by upstart dictators and mad monarchs in the past. However it seems that the rising generation will be better equipped than its grandparents generation was, with its inadequate and often wrong list of life lessons.
Life skills and 'positive psychology' seem to be two related areas of study that are popular in the twenty-first century. The received wisdom of the contemporary age seem to be that it pays to be positive as one approaches life. To an extent such advice disseminated largely through the modern means of mass communication seems to replace the messages that were spread by religion and elders in previous eras of human evolution.
People who are older than fifty in the year 2012 were born before the swinging sixties, before the environmental movement got underway and before computers and cell phones radically changed the face of society. Their early lessons were learned in the context of war, feminism and pervading religious dogmas that carried weight.
In the period following the Second World War there was great deal of negativity. It seemed to many people that the Cold War and the Atomic Bomb were sufficient grounds for pessimism. In the twenty-first century such attitudes seem to have been replaced by chicken soup attitudes. The belief seems to be that being positive pays better than being negative, especially in public.
The early lessons of children born during the boom in babies after the Second World War were colored by war even though hostilities had ceased. The idea of military discipline was played out in childhood games. New priorities like sustainable development, climate change and the Internet are new prerequisites for learning towards the end of the twentieth century.
In the year 2012 the Internet has already changed the world considerably from what it was in the 1980s when a new generation of people who would be parents was born. Though parenting may still not taught in many education factories information is widely available on the Internet and TV. A grandparent who has the opportunity of a relationship with a toddler grandchild may find that many of his own experiences are not only obsolete, but taboo in 2012.
Young parents naturally try to exclude harmful influences from the early education of their offspring. If grandparents harbor negative beliefs or attitudes it is understandable that they should be excluded from the inner circle of a family. In some cases this is welcomed on both sides. However, those older people who are prepared to revise their own early lessons might pass muster. For example, eating habits have been reformed so it is not good to feed young children sweets or fat and habit forming foods. It is also good to be positive and bad to be negative so the cruel and often racist fairy stories of the past have to be radically revised.
As time turns slowly into the twenty-first century it is uncertain what challenges await. There may be even greater challenges than those caused by upstart dictators and mad monarchs in the past. However it seems that the rising generation will be better equipped than its grandparents generation was, with its inadequate and often wrong list of life lessons.
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