Jul 06
11
Dealing with Teenage Rebellion?
I was out at dinner last night with my friend Dan Pitt, who is the Dean of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara U. And a great dinner it was.
We were talking about kids.
I briefly reminisced about a time when I had been at University – around the early to mid ‘60’s. I was at the University of Cape Town. (My parents had emigrated to South Africa and it was a time of apartheid).
One day I decided to go to the campus wearing one black tennis shoe and one white one.
My father saw me wandering around the house before uni. He asked me what the reason was for the shoes. I said I was showing that black and white could co-exist. It wasn’t that I was an activist. I was, like a lot of teenagers, a rebel.
I went to university. I came home. Nothing happened.
When I was in my mid forties, I was out to dinner with my father. He asked me if I remembered the day I had worn the black and white shoes. I told him that I did.
He told me that he had subsequently been visited by the South African secret police. Apparently they had told my father that it would be better for me if I didn’t do what I had done again.
I was jaw-droppingly stunned. My father had never told me about that!
I asked him why.
He said it was much better not to tell me. I was such a rebel then, I would’ve continued doing it to prove the point. Instead he left it alone and whatever was going on in my system that day went away.
He was a smart man, my father. Sometimes it is better to let things just take their natural course. No matter how dangerous it may be to do nothing, sometimes it is more dangerous to put the issue on the table certainly when it comes to teenagers. Perhaps in world affairs too?