Sergetalks Blog ~ The Official Blog of Serge LeClerc

In my last chapter of my blog, I was speaking to the destructive influence of media, advertisements and violence, upon our teenagers. Let me explain how it is done.

Allow me to bring you back to a yesteryear – in your own life of growth and development. Let me fellows bring you to the Saturday evening bath, when after the water turned cold and you emerged wrinkled as a prune, you wiped the steam from the mirror to review yourself and your body from the previous week. And at the grand age of 13 years, you would stand there and bring your arms up in a pose, then flex those mighty biceps and upon close review, wonder when they would actually begin to grow larger than your sister’s? You would turn this way and that, looking closely at your upper lip to see if anything had sprouted during the previous week, check underneath your armpits for any growth, and check whether any pubic hairs had erupted in the movement towards manhood. You wondered whether your thighs would ever become larger than your knees. More importantly, you wondered as young boys do when one begins to move towards the next phase of developmental life cycle, whether you were smart enough, handsome enough, and manly enough – whether girls would like you, find you attractive, would you fit in with the other guys and would they find you cool. Would you be popular and successful…..would you be happy. (more…)

We ended the last blog with speaking about the societal changes begun in the mid-1960, the moral and ethical left-hand turn, the movement into ‘MEism’, which has set up the change of consequences for the choices that young people make today – and the foundation of comparative values to judge those choices against. They are faced with the exact same choices every young person has always faced; sex, alcohol, drugs, how to dress and how to view one’s identity. We reviewed the reality of today’s consequences in the arena of sex by looking at the startling increase in the number of teenagers having sexual transmitted diseases and more alarming, the increase and diversity of the STDs themselves. Then we looked at the numbers of crisis pregnancy rates, the proliferation of abortions and the proportion below the age of 17 yrs, and the interrelationship of those factors to the spike of teenage female rates which is the 2nd leading cause of death amongst our teens. (more…)

As I discussed in the last blog; our kids live in a different world today then our day of yesteryear. There are two major differences, amongst a number of more minor ones, that has set the stage for the world that our children must make their way in today. They will be the first generation that will fully exist within the social fabric that the ‘MEism’ generation created. The second unique factor for the current generation is that they will be the first generation totally brought up within the ‘media parenthood’, from cradle to grave, never knowing a day when TV and advertising didn’t dominate their lives.

Let us start with the first factor – the moral and ethically reality that my generation put into motion beginning in the mid-60s. It was a time of teenagers and very young men fighting a war in a before unknown and strange country called Vietnam, dying in the thousands in its jungles – of a time when bomb shelters were being built in fear of the ‘atomic bomb’ being dropped on us by the evil ‘red empire’, the Soviet Union, of college students being shot on the campus of Kent State University for protesting the war, of Martin Luther King leading peaceful protest about ingrained racism, the Black Panthers declaring war over racism through violence, and a President and his Executive Cabinet resigning and going to prison over getting caught breaking into the Watergate office of National Democratic Party’s Headquarters – the British invasion of the Beatles giving way to the celebration of ‘a magic carpet ride’ and the indulgence of Dr. Timothy Leary’s promotion of ‘LSD’ – the ‘acid rock’ movement of Woodstock and Monterey Pop Festivals. (more…)

As we approach Christmas and a New Year, thought that I would begin to write over the next while about the Reality Facing Modern Day Youth and their Parents. Hope you join me weekly for each installment and please share the blog site with friends, co-workers and family.

I often hear parents say to their kids, “I know what you are going through, I was your age once.” Well quite frankly, that’s not quite correct as the times have change – the world is a much different place in say just 25 years – the pressures and challenges facing our young people are so vastly different from the society – and its fabric – we grew up in. Let me tell you how I know that – well simply by the stats:

Alcohol and alcohol related deaths are the number one killer of our young people. While we have the most informed and educated group of young people about alcohol – just from MADD and SADD and public health information for instance – we still have the heaviest drinking group of young people in the history of our country and province – 79% will have ‘binge drunk’ at least 3 times before they turn 17 years of age (drinking one drink directly after another until they pass out or are totally blasted) often resulting in serious biological, physical damage or death caused by ‘alcohol poisoning’. It is opinionated that very few, if any, young person in our society today will graduate from high school without being personally effected by the death of another young person caused by alcohol. (more…)