Whenever someone starts complaining about how bad the younger generation is, I think what exactly is missing. Much of the time, the person wants to bring back some form of corporal punishment. All the kids of today need is a good smack in the face and all will be right with the world. Lionel Shriver, in her recent column, adds another missing element — ignorance. She writes that modern culture is turning out messy empty individuals instead of good characters that society used to produce. Shriver starts her column with the controversy regarding trans children even though she contends her point is a much broader point and is about all modern children. Shriver feels that modern institutions (read here parents and schools) listen too much to the children’s feelings instead of guiding children like in the good old days. Then, based on these children’s feelings, society lets them make important decisions like gender identification about their lives.

I have some issues with what Shriver’ thinking. Sometimes children do know what they feel and they are right. Take for example what hand a child should write with. In the good old days, children who were naturally left handed were told to write with their right hand since most people write with their right hand, it was obviously the correct hand to use. Adults, wrongly, guided children to behave against their nature. These adults thought they knew better than the child. They were, however, wrong and they did damage to these left handers.

Then Shriver argues that children couldn’t possibly know anything about gender identity problems because they don’t know enough about gender to make these decisions. Shriver may be right but there is no way to determine this because, in the past, parent and schools pretty much ignored sex except at the most fundamental level. They certainly didn’t discuss homosexuality or gender confusion so how can she determine that the society handled this better in the good old days.

Shriver wants adult guidance so that when a girl says she wants to be boy, that some adult is guiding the child to a better decision. But then what does Shriver mean by guiding and what is a better decision? The best guidance would vary from child to child since every situation would be different. There is no stock answer that resolves all sexual identity questions. The only way for an adult to know how to proceed is to listen to the individual child. If all Shriver wanted was for people to be cautious when a child makes these statements regarding gender identity and to be extremely careful before allowing body altering surgery based on a child’s feelings, I am willing to listen to what she has to say; however if she is suggesting shutting down any conversation about what the child is saying and guiding the child to heterosexuality, then I think she is damaging the child.

But to contend that the character building regime of the old days was somehow better is quite a stretch. In fact, gender confused children or gay children had a pretty miserable life in the good old days which is something I can personally confirm. My parents told me exactly nothing about sex – heterosexual, homosexual, gender confusion, and how babies were made were all equally ignored– which, judging from the conversations with my contemporaries, was a fairly standard parental practice of the good old days. As I went to Catholic schools, I didn’t get much more from them until my senior year of high school. So when, a gay person or a gender confused person started having sexual feelings there was no one they could talk to much less get support from. My first attempt to learn more about homosexuality was from a Webster’s dictionary and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t much help.

How is not knowing anything about sex better than listening to the concerns children have about sex? Neither my education nor the parents of my generation gave enough information regarding sex for a child to know how to move forward in their character building. The good old days opted for ignorance over information. This didn’t stop anyone from having sex though. We ignorantly fumbled in the dark with our sexual desires because we wanted to have sex which is a pretty normal feeling for adolescents. Ignorance has its own problems because some poor kids suffering the consequences of young parenthood, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases. Even heterosexual children have a much better time now because people accept the notion that teenagers might have sex and educate them on how to handle these situations.

Then Shriver veers over to the young serial killers who shoot up American schools. She contends that the proliferation of mass casualty shootings have less to do with the availability of guns and more to do with the moral nihilism. Now moral nihilism may be good explanation for the mass killers’ feelings but how this supports her bigger point that all children are suffering from a lack of guidance and are left to their own devices when fleshing out their character is quite a stretch. She only discusses trans children and serial killers. She is extrapolating her theory from two incredibly small and troubled groups of children. How this affects the vast majority of children is a complete mystery.

The good old days, at least in Shriver’s very specific focus, have little to tell us about how to move forward. The good old days had precious little to offer the troubled child or the sexually confused child. The good old days didn’t even deal with these children. They ignored the sexually confused children and kicked out the nihilist trouble makers. Shriver believes that children need guidance in order to build character, yet, her reference point, the vast ambiguous but nonetheless good old days, offered very little in the way of adult direction even for the majority heterosexual population much less for gay and trans children.