The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

News 2020

Making the present look like paradise

The generation born between 1995 and 2005 will have a radically different experience of parenting compared with preceding generations, a new report suggests. Social trends towards late parenting, and ongoing lifestyle transformations, will mean that those now entering maturity may have more positive relationships with their children than has ever before been possible, the report's compilers claim.

The report, which was commissioned by the Ministry for Productive Child Development, notes that children growing up between 1995 and 2005 had greater access to cheap advanced technology than any previous generation. However, thanks to reforms in education and the explosion in numbers of single and/or working mothers, they also had a less consistent schooling and a less settled home life.

Since the early 2000s, however, education has become increasingly the privilege of the few qualified to pay. Now that consumer goods are labelled exclusively with pictorial images rather than words, there is no longer a need for many people to learn to read at all. Similarly, the educative potential of television and the internet is increasingly utilised by those who can afford the fees for quality channels and highbrow servers.

This means that the children of the 1995-2005 generation - the majority of whom will be born between about 2030 and 2040 - will be the first on record whose general living standard is lower than that of their parents' generation. They will be, on average, less well nourished, less exposed to parental interference in their formative years, and less likely to be able to read anything more complicated than a road sign or a retro-fashion advertising slogan.

All these developments will contribute positively to these children's relationship with their parents, says the report. Rather than being resented for having a higher living standard than their parents, these children will have the sympathy of their parents because of their comparative lack of opportunity and leisure. The children will also have to grow up faster than their parents did, according to one of the report's co-authors.

"It's a well-known fact that human resources in Third World countries achieve their mature potentialities far earlier than those in wealthier nations," explained psychologist Dr Theophilus Clenchwater. "In the coming decades, we would expect to see the age for marriage and childbirth dropping steadily, and of course the age for progressive defunctitude dropping in a similar fashion."

The rapid onset of maturity in the children, says the report, could be a major factor in eliminating the so-called "generation gap", particularly when coupled with the lack of maturity in parents who spent their early lives playing solitary fantasy games with advanced computers and acquisitive/emotional games with separated parents.

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