Here is a problem I’ve seen in our never-satisfied culture:

When human beings compare themselves to others in almost any regard, they set themselves up for a world of misery. For instance, there is no point comparing your childhood with your parents’ or your kids’, but still we do it all of the time. My mom always used to say, “I would never want to be young today,” and that was in the 1970s. Are you kidding me, Mom? I got to wear cool pantsuits and read Dynamite magazine. I got to call adults by their first name, and there was no coporal punishment. All of which beats the hell out of working in those coal mines where my great-grandfather worked as a 14-year-old.

Heck, I would love to be able to say that kids were more respectful and benevolent in the 1970s than they are now. But then again I went to parochial school. When you stick 30 kids together in the same class for eight years, they end up becoming more like a bunch of midget IRA members than a great group of friends. Also, my parochial school was a hideout for rich kids who were kicked out of other private schools for, ahem, “deviant behavior.” Frankly, the whole school was bad. How awful were we? Pretty awful. For example, every morning we had to wait outside for the school to open and play in the schoolyard, no matter how treacherous our Ohio winter was. The constant exposure to the elements and lack of organized activities forced us to interact with each other, and the result was you get to know a lot about kids on the playground. Knowledge like who picks her nose, who had mad monkey bar skills and who the real bullies were. When I was in 7th grade our schoolyard bully was a 3rd-grader named Cassie. She was raised in a cushy suburb in the only section of Central Ohio that had hills. However, little Cassie acted like a straight-out-of-South-Boston-Irish-Catholic punk. Even though I was four years her senior, I knew to watch my step around her.

On one chilly Spring Ohio morning Cassie decided that her victim would be some anonymous 5th-grade boy. Without reason she proceeded to pummel him, and as good compassionate kids will, we made a circle around the fight and watched with wild-eyed excitement. Fight! Fight! Fight! Of course, this got the attention of our principal, who promptly marched out to the schoolyard. The principal was a Sister of the Order of the Green Beret and took no prisoners. It seemed like we were busted when, out of nowhere, as if Christ himself graced us with a collective genius moment, someone started singing “Happy Birthday.” The song quickly caught on and everyone started singing the tune as they gathered around this poor kid getting the snot beat out of him. When our principal heard us singing, she stopped dead in her buster browns and smiled from a distance, her view of the helpless boy obscured.

After the 8 am bell rang, Cassie stopped the beating, we stopped singing, and the disheveled, bruised and stunned 5th-grader dutifully stumbled into the school. We made it all the way through our morning announcements but, alas, his teacher, who seemed to be 750 years old, even she could spot a pummeled kid. We were stone-cold busted. And in Catholic school the rules are clear: “If one of you does wrong, you all get it.” We spent a LOT of time copying pages from the dictionary (a standard punishment) and lost our 10 am recess for a month. I would love to report that we all learned a valuable lesson, but I think what we really learned is that Cassie was a very serious badass and that groupthink is one powerful force of human nature.

But honestly, the kids in my school weren’t more or less prone to violence than any other kids; they were just victims of an underdeveloped frontal cortex and low impulse control. There, doesn’t that sound better? Why we expect these little turds to do the right thing when most of us can’t get our own shit together just baffles me. I live on a street filled with a lot of kids, and sometimes they look so old I forget that they are just kids. And really that’s what they are: just smaller people with undeveloped frontal cortexes and little impulse control.

When I was a much younger parent, a psychologist told me that all we really do for our kids is feed them, clothe them, and put them to bed. I know that sounds like lousy parenting, but all of the Flintstone vitamins in the world won’t develop their cortexes any faster. They will grow up someday. Hey, even that mean 3rd-grader, Cassie, is an architect now. I saw her profile on Facebook. I know that she is an adult, and probably a respectable human being, but I still won’t friend her, I’m staying out of her way…just in case.