How many teenagers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

It is true, most of us are guilty as charged when it comes to doing too much for our kids. I admire those few parents that I know that have been able to teach their children to be self sufficient by the time they are teenagers. My mom and dad were part of the last generation that made sure that their children made their own beds, cleaned the house, did the lawn and bushes, took out the trash, and trust me, a heck of a lot more. We grew up knowing that we were not getting out the front door on any day unless the sergeant (in my case mom, not dad) had cleared our leave request by doing the white glove finger inspection of the necessary work detail of the day. In fact, going out typically required the completion of tasks that many times would take several days to complete. I know this might sound cruel to some, but I am 100% in agreement with what my mother and father did in order to teach us responsibility.

The biggest fear I had with mom was for her to need something from my closet. That tiny little space had the magical powers of going into disarray in a matter of days even after I had spent hours getting it in order and just right. Every time she would open the bedroom door I knew that a visual inspection was happening because of the "put away those shoes, dust that dresser, or make sure your bed is made before you walk out of your room" instructions I would get from my maternal boss. If by any chance she would have any business to take care of inside my closet and she found it to be messy, OMG, my day of having anything else to do but clean was over. She would grab all the stuff that was out of place and always just a bit more and drag it out of the closet and throw it out into the neatly made bed that had been camouflaging any other flaws in the room. Then the instructions were clear, I was not to leave the room until it was spotless and everything was in perfect order. She also did the same if she opened any dresser drawers and found them to be messy. Out from the rails and on to the bed upside down spilling all of its contents all over the place. I am not complaining about my childhood. I had wonderfully loving parents that did everything in their power to try to make me a good man. Sometimes they might of gone a bit overboard, but truth be told, we all go overboard sometimes too.

I now assume that my parents strict enforcement of daily rules were out of love and not what at the time seemed like neurotic fits. Dad for example would always call me to be present when he was doing something requiring manual skill. The man was amazing with his ability to fix just about anything that broke in the house or cars. There was no such thing as taking broken appliances, the car, or any household gizmo to a repair shop. He would simply take it apart, find what was broken or damaged, fix or replace it, and WALLA!!! that was that. It is thanks to him that I am now able to change broken light switches, change the brakes in my car, and fix myriad of other things when they go haywire. He would ask me to hold things while he was working, mostly tools and parts of the repair process, and this is probably why I know what most tools are and how they are used to fix things. Sometimes he would also ask me to hold his occasional beer while drops of sweat dripped down his face and on to his typical white t-shirt. "Bring me a cigarette" he would say, and yet I am not a big time drinker, and have always hated cigarettes so I can safely say that I did not learn any of his vices either. One of my sisters confesses that she always took a sip on the journey from fridge to dad, and always took a puff when being so graceful to light one up for him.

When my kids were little they seemed always eager to learn what I was doing. So as I was so expertly trained by my own parents, I would always include them on some of my daily fix this or that routine. Even recently I was doing my rear breaks on my car and asked my youngest teenager if he wanted to learn a bit by watching me do this job and surprisingly he said yes. I was so proud of him for participating that I took extra care in making sure I explained to him how each one of the tools were used, why I had picked them, and how to do the job well. My other son was still sleeping.

It is amazing how much time my youngest child will dedicate to his games, videos, and Manga books. But in the end he still gets his homework done, studies for his exams, and is in Honor Roll. Me being such a computer geek have found myself asking him questions on how to do this or that when it comes to video editing and a few other things on the computer. He is constantly reading blogs and forums on his favorite subjects, and even has a following in the hundreds of other people that read his blogs and watch his YouTube movies in which he critiques games and more. He will buy games and movies not only in English but also in Japanese and works at it for days until he figures them out and understands what is going on. He really is a bright young man and even though he barely ever makes his own bed, at least the time he spends in his room has nothing to do with cannibalizing my stuff in order to make his stuff work.

So why is it that these young people are so apathetic to even making their own beds? Probably because I was not strict enough to enforce the behaviour consistently when they were little. Of course making beds are the least of my worries now days, so instead of being on a constant war path trying for them to be a bit organized and clean, I do what most of all other parents do, I close their door and don't look inside their jungle very often. Interestingly enough though, whenever I do go and do my parental inspection, you would be amazed as to how many of my tools I have found in my oldest son's room. This boils me, the monkey is not able to imitate a single one of my uses for a glue gun, yet he has a master craftsman skill with the gadget when it comes to making bongs. I find myself destroying his handy work in order for me to remove sockets and other tools out of the contraptions which he has used not only in the process but also as part of the devices. The first time I found one I just had to sit down on the only clean corner of the floor of his room to laugh at his ingenious handy work. Of course minutes later then I cried too. Trust me, the tears were not of joy, they were of the realization that my problems with this child had just gotten a lot worse than I wanted them to ever get.

Progress, technology and their advances have taken out much of the opportunities that children used to have to learn and grow skills and abilities. It is true that now they have so much at their fingertips that they are able to learn quicker anything that interest them. I remember the days that if I wanted to learn about planets I would either have to go to the library and research inside an encyclopedia to find the facts, or wait until the subject was discussed in the classroom at school. Now instead the Internet is full of vivid images of the planets and all of their moons, sites that show their motion and composition, and so much more beautiful details that I myself have devoted seem less hours as an adult learning more. The same thing is true for just about any subject. We would wait weeks to have the vinyl record of our favorite song, while now days by the push a button you are in possession of it in minutes, if not seconds. But what about the chance to learn from scratch? My favorite physics author, Richard Feynman, writes in one of his beautifully told stories about his childhood how he would spend countless hours taking transistor radios apart and then putting them back together. Everything he read in books made him more curious instead of satisfying his thirst for the subject. He spent days watching the behaviour of ants as they made their trails trying to figure out why they behaved the way they did, even though the book already had an answer to their curious behaviour. Things are just too complicated now days and by not allowing children to experiment with their own hands and simply providing them with the answer to all of their curiosity is just not enough. I feel we are depriving them of the opportunity to become Richard Feynman's, future Nobel Prize winners, because they are not able to experience life at its core. Instead we feed them the already digested food of knowledge, prepackaged, and all.

So, how many teenagers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, because they have their parents to do it for them!

Dad