When I talk about “rearing” a child, I’m not talking about raising or nurturing as in the literal sense of the word. What I am referring to is the rear end of the child. That plump, padded posterior which upon the child sits, otherwise known as the gluteus maximus—that special part of the body that was designed for only two things; sitting and paddling.

Any male born before Jimmy Carter became president knows that time-outs and groundings are about as effective as cracking open a walnut with a Q-tip. Goodness gracious; given the choice between some old fashioned “rearing” and a grounding, I would have paid money to sit in my room for a couple days and I didn’t even have an MP3 player or X-Box to keep me entertained, let alone the Internet with all its wicked pleasures.

I can’t even imagine my father, or mother for that matter, saying; “David, now you know better than to stab your brother with a fork. I want you to go to your room and think about what you have done.”

Had either of my parents ever said such a preposterous thing, I would have had to run to my room before they could see the smile spread across my chubby little face. Hell, if I knew that was all the punishment I would receive for assaulting my brother with a fork, he wouldn’t have been able to take a drink of water without springing more leaks than a metal pail peppered with buckshot.

Also, let’s not confuse real fathers with the buffoons we see on television. I suppose if one watched too many of the sitcoms that have come out in the past thirty years they might come away with the impression that the modern dad is every bit as childish as the average six-year-old, and sadly to say perhaps too many of today’s dads are just that—life imitating art, I suppose. These wimpy, browbeaten dads need to have a nice heart-to-heart with their own fathers to see how today’s seniors and boomers were reared by their dads back in the day when “rearing” a child was considered the right thing to do.

I beg to ask; “Are the kids of today more well-behaved than the kids of fifty years ago?” I can almost hear the resounding  “Hell no!” echoing across the land and seas. Of course they’re not; today’s parents are doing way too much nurturing and not nearly enough rearing.