Mary Pipher Quotes

I just have a problem with youth culture.

I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.

Television is a young person's medium.

Whatever adults don't understand, because they didn't grow up with it, is the thing they're going to be afraid of and try to legislate out of existence. It happened with videogames, it happened with television, it happened with pinball parlours and rock and roll.

My generation is so tied up in television, computers, and video games. When we were born, MTV was already there. It was normal.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

I think that we have created a new kind of person in a way. We have created a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is 12.

All media work us over completely.

You went to Woodstock and all that trash, your generation is fading fast.

It's going to be a grim day when the world is run by a generation that doesn't know anything but what it's seen on TV.

I just think we as consumers of information media must be very clear what it is we are consuming. Whether we are choosing to get our information by listening to people fight about it. Or whether we're choosing to get it by listening to the facts or watching the facts as they're laid out and then reaching our own conclusions. It's very different ways of info gathering, but it's not all journalism.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

I have two teenage sons, and they're both surviving, thriving, and having a great time, and they're always on social media.

Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.

Another activity that can detract us from the proper way is watching television excessively or viewing improper movies. While fine productions on these media are uplifting and entertaining, we need to be very selective in choosing what we see and how much of our time such an activity deserves. Our precious time must not be diverted to the sideline attractions of vulgar language, immoral conduct, pornography, and violence.

She grew up hard and she grew up fast, in the age of television.

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives.

I'm waiting for my kids to grow up and get into the Offspring and look at me like I'm a total candy-ass.

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

You have to let kids live their own lives and make their mistakes, but it is difficult now because there are so many things in their lives which weren't in mine - I never had Facebook. And some of the things I see now I'm appalled by. So I'm as nosey about my daughter's life as I can be. I tell her, 'I'm all over you, whether you like it or not.'

History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.

I have but nothing to say to young girls. They're fine to look at, in the way I would look at a case filled with Shang dynasty glazes, but expecting to carry on a conversation with the average teen-aged young lady is akin to reading Voltaire to a cage filled with chimpanzees. I'm certain they would feel the same alienation for me. I can live with that knowledge.

We have recognized that the world is changing. How your children are behaving, how their friends are behaving. What they consume and what they watch.

I have tried... believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.