Hear, my child, your father’s instruction,
    and do not reject your mother’s teaching,
for they are a fair garland for your head
    and pendants for your neck.

Proverbs 1:8-9 (NRSVUE)

It never seems to go out of style: somewhere someone is always complaining about “kids these days.”

“Kids these days” are an easy target, and the focus of a timeless time-wasting argument about how the world is changing around us. There’s even a song in the musical “Bye-Bye Birdie” on the topic, and it’s a funny one. By the end of the song you know the truth: kids these days are much like kids back when we were young. They are just exposed to different challenges, challenges that seem foreign to most of us as we age.

But when people are complaining about the state of childhood and teen life in 2025, they are usually invoking some rage-baiting meme they saw on Facebook or on some “news” channel. Those quotation marks are not an accident. Kids today are far less of a problem than what passes for news about kids. And a lot of those stories are either rehashes of years old stories or just plain made-up.

Speak not about what you know not.

Do you interact with kids today? They’re wonderful! Kids today are full of contradictions, but they’re also full of possibilities. They’re given to some interesting wordplay, and they seem to know a little less about how to read a map. On the other hand, they’ve got skills we couldn’t have even conceived of at their age.

Once in a while I get to be a part of productions at The Black Box Theater with the Franklin Performing Arts Company. It’s a treat for me to be able to keep a toe in live performance. I was trained as an actor in college, so this also gives the benefit of not thinking I wasted those four years. I don’t really think that, but you get my point.

In most of the productions I’m around younger actors. That seems to happen to me more and more as time goes on. Ever notice how young your doctors are getting? Then you know what I’m going through.

Several things I saw during our recent production of Annie reminded me just how alright the kids really are!

I got to see a dozen kids play the orphans who form Annie’s tormenters and friends, and they learned more choreography for this show than I think I’ve learned in my life. They didn’t just hit their marks. They learned song lyrics, they sang with gusto, and they made real characters come to life on stage. The young woman who played Annie learned more lines still, and carried the show off like a professional.

Students from Dean college took many of the adult roles in the show, and their commitment to showing up on time and staying late was inspiring. We had assistant stage managers of the same age who were not just efficient; they made backstage as joyful as on-stage. We wouldn’t have had nearly as good a show without them.

But two in particular stole the show for me in this production.

These two young women are still in high school. At every production, in addition to singing and dancing their hearts out, they carried (both on and off stage) a heavy conference table for our scene in the White House where I got to play FDR. I started calling them The Hardest Working Women in Show Business. I don’t believe it was an exaggeration at all. They did it all, and their love for theater shone through.

It reminded me of what I’ve seen from Pilgrim Youth Group in their service projects, and the way kids are always pitching in around here. I guess I’d just like to remind everyone to find the great things kids and youth are doing every day. And the next time someone starts complaining about “kids these days,” remember: they’re saying a lot more about themselves than they’re saying about any actual kids.