Giving kids tools for life
Our future is our children. Your remarks (in the commentary: «That was then,» August 13) on the youth of Greece are quite accurate. Our children are developing into adults much earlier than we did. Their exposure to social, technical, economic and political systems is much more sophisticated and complex than ours. Yet, as you remarked, their development is stifled by our old ways, the patterns of opportunity and economic behavior which existed so much in our own years of youth and continue to be very evident today. Largely, we are responsible for their limited opportunities by not fostering survival strategies from early on. Since we have more than we had in our youth, we decide to provide as much to our children. We should be pushing our children to create, imagine and try new ideas of economic opportunities for survival. We should support them in pursuing new ideas of economic growth and creative thinking. The role of the state should be to provide the creative freedom and prepare the conditions for imaginative thinking. Ultimately, it is the parent, not the state, that should be responsible for the individual child’s development. Then we can truly say that our children are our legacy. C. Solomos, Media, Pennsylvania, USA
