Wednesday, July 18, 2012

howwwzattt... forgive us for we are the latchkey kids...


Latchkey kid: is a child who returns from school to an empty home because his or her parents are away at work, or a child who is often left at home with little or no parental supervision.

Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western post-World War II baby boom ended. While there is no universally agreed upon time frame, the term generally includes people born from the early 1960s through the early 1980s, usually no later than 1981 or 1982. The term had also been used in different times and places for various subcultures or countercultures since 1950s.

That is me and most us with the age ranging from early 30s to the early 50s.

We are in a way kind of unique from the generation before us which is the Baby Boomers where it all started from the way of our upbringing which chain-reacted well into our adult lives.

Remember when we’re still kids, left alone to care for ourselves while our parents went to work when maids were the luxury of upper strata of the society? When both father and mother had to go out to earn the living because the cost of necessities beginning to ballooning though not as rapid as today?

We got back from school by ourselves and reheat whatever meals left for us and perhaps doing some chores in the house. In other words, we have the house keys hence the latchkey kids derived from. Without or little adult supervisions, we survived to become what we are now.

The upbringing affects us now. We will become irritated when our bosses hovering on our shoulders just to see what we are doing. To us (me), as long as the work achieved its goal, get lost. And most of our bosses are Baby Boomers, they never came out of their comfort box and yet they forced us to be just like them.

They have the luxury of being cared by their mothers at home because during their time, only the alpha males go to work. They will be under the supervision of their mothers and they got carried away with the systems they’re born into later in their careers. From my observation, not many Baby Boomers knew how to say no to their superiors. A yes man...

We, Gen X prefer flexibility as long as point A reaches point B we are cool aren’t we not?

Dang, I’m getting rusty with words...

Sometimes it baffles me on how major corporations employ consultants or sometimes they have their own trained trainers on this topic to preach on their workforce when in reality the top echelons won’t even come near in analyzing and what more in practicing it.

For me, I approached my work as a job not a career and certainly not a calling. Well to most of us I guess. Don’t just scoff me off just yet but put on your thinking cap instead and feel me...

Nel, I happened to see your link on fb... J

Note to self: I’m getting rusty with words...