tw383

 Oh yeah, I wanted to get this Growing Up Different section on page 383 in my log.

     "To begin with, the child of tomorrow is likely to grow up in a society far less child-centered than our own.

     The "graying" or aging of the population in all high-technology countries implies greater public attention to the needs of the elderly and a correspondingly reduced focus on the young. Furthermore, as women develop jobs and careers in the exchange economy, the traditional need to channel all their energies into motherhood is diminished.
     During the Second Wave, millions of parents lived out their own dreams through their children - often because they could reasonably expect their children to do better socially and economically then they themselves had done. This expectation of upward mobility encouraged parents to concentrate enormous psychic energies on their children. Today many middle-class parents face agonizing disillusionment as their children - in a far more difficult world - move down, rather than up, the socio-economic scale. The likelihood of surrogate fulfillment is evaporating.
     For these reasons, the baby born tomorrow is likely to enter a society no longer obsessed with - perhaps not even terribly interested in - the needs, wants, pyschological developments, and instant gratification of the child. If so, the Dr. Spocks of tomorrow will urge a more structured and demanding childhood, Parents will be less permissive.
     Nor, one suspects, will adolescence be as prolonged and painful a process as it is today for so many. Millions of children are being brought up in single-parent homes, with working mothers (or fathers) squeezed by an erratic economy, and with less of the luxury and time available to the flower child generation of the 1960's.
     Others, later on, are likely to be reared in work-at-home or electronic-cottage families. Just as in many Second Wave families built around a mom-and-pop business, we can expect the children of tomorrow's electronic cottage to be drawn directly into the family's work tasks and given growing responsibility from an early age.
     Such facts suggest a shorter childhood and youth but a more responsible and productive one. Working alongside adults, children in such homes are also likely to be less subject to peer pressures. They may well turn out to be the high achievers of tomorrow.
     During the transition to the new society, wherever jobs remain scarce, Second Wave labor unions will undoubtedly fight to exclude young people from the job market outside the home. Unions (and teachers, whether unionized or not) will lobby for ever-longer years of compulsory or near-compulsory schooling. To the extent that they succeed, millions of young people will continue to be forced into the painful limbo of prolonged adolescence. We may, therefore, see a sharp contrast between young people who grow up fast because of early work responsibilities in the electronic cottage and those who mature more slowly outside.
     Over the long pull, however, we can expect education also to change. More learning will occur outside, rahter than inside, the classroom. Despite the pressure from unions, the years of compulsory schooling will grow shorter, not longer. Instead of rigid age segregation, young and old will mingle. Education will become more interspersed and interwoven with work, and more spread out over a lifetime. And work itself - whether production for the market or prosumption for us in the home - will probably begin earlier in life that it has in the last generation or two. For just such reasons, Third Wave civilization may well favor quite different traits among the young - less responsiveness to peers, less consumption-orientation and less hedonistic self-involvement.
     Whether this is so or not, one thing is certain. Growing up will be different. And so will the resultant personalities."