by Tony Hudson, Stevensville
Every so often I find myself thinking about the world we are building for our children, and whether the pace of our inventions has outrun the pace of their maturity. We are raising young people in a civilization that moves so fast it barely gives an adult time to breathe, much less a child. Technology grows more clever by the hour. Wisdom, on the other hand, grows only as fast as the human heart can handle truth, responsibility, discomfort, and patience. That part has never changed. Children today know how to operate machines that their grandparents could not have imagined, but many struggle with the basic inner muscles that make a life work: attention, resilience, discipline, humility, and judgment. These things cannot be digitized. They come only from experience—the long, slow apprenticeship into adulthood that every generation before ours understood instinctively.
What has changed is not the child, but the conditions of childhood. Screens multiply faster than instincts develop. Entertainment replaces imagination. Processed food replaces real nutrition. And convenience becomes a kind of counterfeit virtue—something that feels helpful in the moment but weakens the foundation over time. We protect children from everything except the very things that used to prepare them for life. There was a time when the natural world shaped a young person. Livestock taught responsibility. Chores taught discipline. Handwriting taught memory. Books taught patience. Boredom taught creativity. Hard days taught humility.
But modern life has tried to replace all these things with systems, apps, and digital scaffolding—as if complexity could stand in for maturity.
We build layers of order to compensate for the character we no longer insist children develop. Then we build layers on top of those layers, until the whole structure becomes so heavy that even adults struggle to live
beneath it. We call this progress. I’m not sure that’s the right word.
A society cannot outsource its character.
A school cannot download its wisdom.
A child cannot automate his maturity.
Yet that is the direction we seem to be headed: a world where young people navigate temptations their elders cannot resist, and a culture where childhood becomes a race of constant stimulation rather than steady formation. No human being grows well under that weight.
If we want children who are ready to lead—ready to endure, to sacrifice, to build, and to think for themselves—then we must return to the basics that worked because they fit human nature. Books. Handwriting. Teacher autonomy. Real food. Recess. Quiet. Imagination. Slow mastery. Fewer shortcuts. More responsibility. A world big enough to grow inside of, not a digital box that shrinks the longer they stay in it.
Leave a Reply