Kids Can Call Him Mr. Pitts, Please

Welcome to the most hypocritical column you will read today. See, I’m about to chide you for something your kids ought to do - and probably don’t. But my kids … well, we’ll get to that.

This prattle is occasioned by the results of a recent survey in which React, a teen news magazine, asked its readers: “Do you call your parents’ friends by their first names?” Of 7,500 respondents, 63 percent said yes. Twenty-six percent said it depends on the circumstances. Only 11 percent said no.

The poll was unscientific, so we can’t draw from it any firm conclusions about adolescent mores. But perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to be gleaning meaning from a comment made by Sam, an 11-year-old respondent. Said Sam, “I think you should be able to call your parents’ friends by their first names. Unless kids are treated like equals, they’ll never get any respect.”

Ahem. Pardon me while I climb up on my high horse.

Have we really become such a topsy-turvy society that an 11-year-old thinks he should be treated as an “equal” with adults?!? Me, I come from a day where the adult-child relationship was blessedly simple, a benevolent dictatorship with the grown folk firmly in charge. Can it be any accident that children of that day respected their elders? This was evident in the fact that we never, ever, called adults by their first names.

So why don’t you train your children better, America?

Whoa, got to climb down off the horse now; I’m getting a nosebleed.

And here comes the hypocritical part. Guess whose kids are deep in the habit of addressing their parents’ friends by first names?

Mine.

I’m not saying they’re disrespectful. They’d never presume to be “equal” with their elders. And yet … when my friends come by, the kids more often than not address them by their first names.

Here’s my explanation: Blame their mother.

Oh, all right, blame their father, too. But don’t ask why we never taught them otherwise, because I don’t know. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it just sort of … happened. Now I find myself wishing I had insisted upon this little bit of protocol, less for what the failure says about them than what it might say about me.

See, the first time some kid called me mister, I said, “Hey, man, Mr. Pitts was my dad.” I thought I was too cool for useless formalities. But it occurs to me that cool has nothing to do with it. I am simply the child of a generation that has yet to grow up. Remember what folks said about Bill Clinton when he took office back in ‘93? The new chief exec seemed to lack the necessary gravity for the job; he came across like a kid playing president.

It’s a boomer thing. Childhood was such a great place we decided to stay there forever. Small wonder we allow kids to be on a first-name basis. It helps maintain the fiction of our endless youth.

The adults I knew as a child were, I suspect, more at ease in their own skins. Perhaps they lived by fewer fictions. Whatever the reason, it never entered my mind to call them by their first names. Still doesn’t.

Take my mother’s friend Miss Dora, for instance. Though Mom is dead and I long ago lost track of Miss Dora, though I stand before you a grown man in the shadow of 40, I remain convinced that the earth will quake and the sky rain fire if ever I slip and call the woman simply, Dora.

Maybe that indicates to you that here’s a guy who could benefit from therapy, and maybe you’re right. But, I can’t escape the sense that somehow the world was also better, clearer, when there was a sharp line of demarcation and respect between the folly of children and the unquestioned authority of adults.

You should really talk to your kids about this.

And yes, I can hear what you’re thinking from here. But that’s Mr. Hypocrite to you.

xxxx