I went to get my haircut the other day when the barber said, ‘It’s a messed up world nowadays.’ I asked him what he meant by that to which he said, ‘It’s not like how it was when we were kids’. These kids get everything. I sat in the chair frowning away thinking about what he said. This isn’t the first time I talked to this guy about parenting. When we first met we agreed that kids today have way too much compared to when we were young. But this time I was deep in thought. When my dad was young you either milked 20 cows by hand or went hunting in the bush to get a pig. Those were your choices when you woke up in the morning. In his mind I bet he thought when I have kids I want to make sure they have the things I never had and don’t have to milk 20 cows by hand.

So when my dad had kids he worked hard and made sure we had enough and didn’t have to hunt or milk cows when we woke up in the morning. Now my dad is a labourer and we never spent much time together because he was working so hard to make sure we would have more than he had growing up. In every generation there was always a desire to have more. More money, better clothes, nicer food.

There is a quote that says by a man called Anthony Douglas Williams that say “Spending time with children is more important than spending money on them”

I suppose now that our children have everything they want we can now focus on giving them something that they need, something that’s more important than all the stuff.