Family Life: Looking back so we can do better as we move forward

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Relaxing in my favorite chair on Christmas Day, I noticed a blur pass through my peripheral vision.

I turned and discovered it was my 10-year-old son whizzing by on a hoverboard while watching a video on his iPad and listening to the audio on wireless Beats headphones.

Meanwhile, my 15-year-old son was playing Madden NFL 17 on an Xbox One video game console that made the games of my youth, like vibrating electric football, seem prehistoric.

Sometimes advances in technology trick us into thinking life is getting better every year. But that's not always so.

As a kid, I was quite happy with my banana-seat bike, Etch A Sketch and that vibrating football game, which had little players who sometimes ran around in circles.

My sons aren't any happier because of all their high-tech toys. In fact, my younger son told me on Christmas night that his favorite gifts were a new throw blanket and a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a camper.

Sometimes, I long for the simple gifts we took for granted when we were kids. The passing of time can come at a cost. In fact, here are some trends I wish we could start reversing in 2017.

* Poor customer service. I wrote a column recently about examples of poor customer service in everyday life, everything from unintelligible call-center employees to banks closing neighborhood branches. Both are symptoms of a business culture that values shareholders over customers. It's a short-sighted strategy that focuses on quarterly profits.

Lesson: Buy and hold shares of companies with excellent customer service and you'll be ahead of the game when the tide turns on these trends. I believe that it will.

* Rude behavior. I was enjoying a sandwich at a favorite restaurant this week when I heard a mother unload on her young child, "Do I need to kick your butt?"

Pardon the interruption, but, "No ma'am, you do not." As far as I could tell, the child's only offense was asking meekly to play on the playground.

Lesson: After an election season that seemed like a professional wrestling match, this, I fear, is the trickle-down effect. Let's be nicer to one another in 2017. Especially to our kids.

* Health care insecurity. Maybe it's a sign of my age, 58, but the one issue that keeps me up at night is lifetime access to affordable health care. Both of our political parties have tenuous records on this issue, and compromise seems like a faint dream.

Lesson: Pray that our leaders come together to do what's best for us all.

* Stagnant wages, poor job security. Despite a gradual recovery from the Great Recession, many Americans are still stressed about flat wages. What's more, new data shows that many young adults (about half actually) are no better off than their parents were at age 30.

Lesson: Limit debt and brace for lifestyle regression.

* Loss of free time. It turns out that, for a number of Americans, social media has become a huge time eater. The New York Times has reported that the average American now spends 50 minutes a day on Facebook, about the same amount of time they spend eating and drinking.

Lesson: Social media is a slippery slope, and some users are already underwater.

* Slipping faith. According to the Pew Research Center, only 36 percent of Americans now attend religious services at least once a week.

Lesson: A nation built on Judeo-Christian traditions is becoming less and less religious. For some of us, this is a distressing trend that throws a shadow across our path forward.

I know New Year's Day is supposed to be a day of hopefulness and new beginnings. So here's hoping that we come to embrace the fact that all that's new is not better; and there's no sin in looking back occasionally for virtues that may have fallen out of our pockets.

And that some of the best advice is over 2,000 years old.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.

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