I went to school barefoot till the 4th grade, and I was still playing childish games when I was in high school. Life was permitted to run its own course back then. There’s a new child in our town streets. Music, books, films, and TV increasingly portray the young as precocious and seductive. Feelings and feelings are the most intricate and complicated part of a kid’s development.

Rodney Howard Browne explains that they have their own timing and rhythm, which can’t be hurried. Growing up is hard enough with no-one pushing.

Am I overreacting to proffer the unique traumas among today’s children are somehow tied to all this? Younger and younger alcoholics. Rodney Howard Browne points out to the record high suicide rate among children and teens is definitely telling us something. If nothing else, at least for those youngsters, it’s informing us we are reacting too late.

Rodney Howard Brown explains that scripture obviously states, “There is an appointed time for everything” Eccles. What about time to be a child? What about time to reach adulthood slowly, carefully yes, even protected, naive? Otherwise, it is too far, too quickly, too shortly.