Living in a theme park world

I recently wrote a letter to a friend in which I continued a conversation we had been having about raising children. This friend has children very close in age to my own children and so we often find ourselves comparing notes and discussing things that pertain to child raising. There were so many different aspects to that conversation but what stood out to me as I was writing it was the explanation I gave my friend for the difference in how I raised my oldest based on all the things I do now.

You see when my oldest was little, starting at age two, we had passes to a large theme park every year. Not only that but we took her to very large theme parks that we had to travel for days to get to. When we weren’t going to theme parks we were taking her to carnivals and fairs. We took her to restaurants with large play areas for the simple purpose of letting her have fun. We took her to kid’s festivities. Basically…if it looked fun for a child, we did it.

Oh, how things have changed. I no longer see those amusement parks as the best way to have fun. They’re still fun, and I’m not opposed to them in general, but now I see them differently. I find more fun in a day spent doing something simple, enjoying the Lord’s creation, spending time with my family.

The trouble is…my daughter was very much a product of the theme park lifestyle she was given as a young child. She loved our trips to the theme parks, looked forward to the next one, asked to go again…and again…and again. It was much like a merry go round where the ride never stopped.

And the child that so loved the theme parks…had a hard time enjoying a day at home. When doing something of a simpler nature if asked if she was having fun the answer was always no. She had been conditioned nearly from birth to love the fast paced, exciting fun of the theme park and it showed.

It still shows.

That child, who isn’t a child anymore, loves big cities. She can’t find enjoyment in the woods, in the country. She finds no enjoyment in animals. Watching the stars just to see them in the night sky holds no fascination for her.

She is the product of having lived in a theme park world.

The trouble is…so is everyone else. There is a television show I enjoy watching occasionally. It was made in the 1970’s and is set in the 1800’s. As life unfolds for the people in that show you see them doing the mundane, the everyday…at least it was the everyday things for them…they worked hard and found pleasure in simple entertainment. In the episodes where a carnival, circus or other big entertainment happened you can see their excitement and amazement in what was before them. But for them those times were few and far between. Of course that is television, not real life, but the comparisons can still be made. In the show you can see how the children would try and do the things they had seen and done at those exciting times long after the entertainment had left town.

I see those same behaviors in my own children after they’ve seen or done something exciting. I hear it in their voices as they remember. I see it in the light in their eyes as they talk about it. I see it in their play as they act it out.

The trouble is too many of the people today have grown up in a theme park world.

Too many people today can’t take joy in the simple pleasures because they’ve been programmed by a theme park world from birth. Walk through any toy store and see how many toys you find that require batteries. Too many to count.

Narrow your search a little and stay in the infant toys. You should be safe there…right? I mean what kind of battery operated gadget could a baby possibly need? One trip through the baby section paints what should be a horror story. Not only are there battery operated toys for babies but the list of ‘must have’ items, most of which take batteries or electricity, for babies is enough to boggle the mind.

And it gets worse. Some of those toys and must have items are actually designed to put a tablet in so that the baby is entertained by what is basically a computer.

These aren’t the types of things I’ve ever wanted for my children so I’m not sure exactly what’s out there but I’m going to assume that somewhere out there is a gadget to put a tablet into the baby’s crib. If not then there’s a baby toy that’s made to appear to be a tablet for a baby that goes in the crib. At least I assume there is.

I recently saw something that said today’s children are being shortchanged the child given right to play outside by the electronic world they live in. Simply put today’s children don’t find the pleasures in the natural world that children of times past did because there’s too much ready-made enjoyment to be found in the latest electronic gadget.

And parents are instilling that in their children from birth.

When a baby is raised in an electronic world they learn to enjoy that life and find little or no enjoyment in things that don’t offer instant entertainment.

When I was a girl I remember hearing people talk about how letting kids watch TV was a bad thing because it was unrealistic. They talked of how thirty minute TV shows taught children to expect quick fixes to even the biggest problems.

I saw something not all that long ago that said depression is now an epidemic. I find myself asking why that is. When, exactly, did depression become a problem? Has it always been there, with or without the name of depression to label it, or is it a modern day problem? Is it something that the human heart, the human mind, has always been prone to? Or is it the result of raising children in a world that teaches instant gratification and quick fixes to big problems?

My husband and I recently visited a cemetery with graves that dated as far back as the early 1800’s, possibly the 1700’s…some were too old to make out all the writing on them. I have this strange enjoyment of visiting old cemeteries. It’s an enjoyment my husband shares. It isn’t the kind of entertainment, instant gratification, fun of today. For me it’s being able to look at those headstones, to imagine the people buried there, to think of what their lives were like.

And to hurt for them.

In that cemetery we saw numerous graves for young children and babies. In some places there were many children from the same family buried side by side. To walk through that cemetery, or any old cemetery, it appears that children in times past were very fragile. Their lives were ended while they were still young. Even the adults…so many of them died in their twenties, thirties, and forties. In fact forty-something seemed to just about be old age for the people in the 1800’s based on the graves in that cemetery.

Age, it seemed, was a detriment to the people of times past and it wasn’t because they had grown old enough to enter into what we now see as fragile years. It was simply that being young made them fragile. What caused the deaths of all those young people…who knows? But their lives were ended during a time when our society today would say they were too young.

Today our young people are just as fragile only now it’s in a different way. We no longer fear plagues and outbreaks of illnesses that can and did kill hundreds of people. It isn’t that we aren’t suseptable to those things today…the outbreak of Ebola last year confirmed that…but that today we have what we consider to be modern medicine.

The thing is we still have outbreaks of things, epidemics that take our young people as sure as cholera and other dreaded diseases took them in past eras. According to what I read on depression…our young people are being lost to the dark void of depression in record numbers. So much so that it’s now an epidemic and they don’t expect it to get better.

Once again I must ask…Why? When did this ‘epidemic’ start? Has it always been there or is it a product of our modern times? Did children that were raised seeing true pain and depravation fall prey to the darkness of their own emotions in times when a family might lose every child they had to influenza? Did children that grew up moving from state to state, fearing Indian attacks and outlaws, walking for hundreds of miles…did they suffer from depression when something went bad in their young adult years? Did children that went hungry because their family had little food and less money grow up to feel depressed?

Or is depression and ‘epidemic’ of our own making? Did we set the stage to create depression in our children by giving them everything they wanted? Did we set the stage for depression by raising them in the nicest house we could afford? Did we set the stage by putting them in every kind of class or lesson their heart desired? Did we set it by giving them big excitement? By providing them with the instant entertainment of television, movies, and computers?

I often think of the times my friend has told me she would have liked to live when people had the Lord and not much else. I think, too, of the times most people cry out to God. By their own admissions it’s often when things get so bad they can’t face them alone. Then they want the Lord to come make it all better.

And that brings me back to thinking of how our world has turned into what amounts to a theme park. Go into any decent sized town and entertainment abounds…movie theaters, malls, shopping centers, museums, parks with fancy playgrounds, skating rinks…and the list goes on. Without ever stepping foot in a real theme park we can live in one every day. Instant entertainment and instant gratification are the norm. And our lives, including the fragile emotions of our children and young people, show it.

Because we are living in a theme park world.

When I was in my teens and twenties I heard often about men and boys that suffered from what was called ‘Peter Pan syndrom’. Now that wasn’t a true disorder, it wasn’t medically diagnosed, wasn’t seen as some kind of disease. But it was all too real. Girls spoke of it often. Back then it was well understood that girls matured faster than boys. It was a good part of the reason most girls were only interested in older boys and men. Even if those boys and young men were growing up, maturing, they weren’t doing so at the rate the girls were.

Then there were the ones that suffered from ‘Peter Pan syndrom’ they had fallen prey to ‘I don’t want to grow up’. This was seen in boys and men only. I never heard of any female being labeled with that particular syndrome.

Today…a good part of the people in our society have it.

Children suffer from it.

Adults suffer from it.

But the worst…parents suffer from it.

And our world suffers for it. We live in a nation of people that have been raised on having all their problems fixed or wiped away with the ease of loosing themselves in video games, movies, and music. They can live on the edge by riding a roller coaster, jumping off a platform or out of an airplane.

Poof! Their problems are gone.

Until they show up in all their ugly details. And when they do….too many people aren’t equipped to handle them. Because they’ve been insulated from the bad. They’ve had all there problems fixed with little or no effort on their part. Their problems have been erased with the huge magic eraser of entertainment.

Because we live in a theme park world.

It’s expected. It’s understood. It’s unspoken. It simply is the way things are. All our problems can be erased by finding something to consume our thoughts and our time. Whatever your method of entertainment…it can be found. Whatever you need to get your thoughts off real life…it can be delivered to your door.

Because we live in a theme park world.