The Hugging Threat

Sometimes an article comes along that doesn’t even deserve a comment. Such is this one.

Oh… forget it. I can’t hold back. I’ll change it up by giving you my comments before you even read this article.

COMMENTS:

“Needless?”

The “threat” of hugging? Seriously? a “threat?”

You’ve gotta be kidding. Someone PLEASE tell me this is a cynical piece. Pick your battles people. This is the least of our concerns.

Okay… I’m done. Here’s a piece of the article:

In their endless campaign and their inherited duty to confound their elders, this latest generation of teenagers has adopted a new weapon:

Hugging.

As detailed by a recent front-page story in The New York Times, teenage hugging has become an epidemic stretching from one coast to the other. Girls are hugging girls. Boys are hugging boys. Boys are hugging girls and vice-versa, which is not really a new development, except that now the inter-gender embraces do not necessarily have ulterior motives.

“For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?” according to the story’s headline.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” a male high school junior is quoted as saying. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

“We like to get cozy,” an eighth-grade girl in San Francisco explains. “The high-five is, like, boring,”

One might think that the practice of kids exchanging hugs, not drugs — or slugs — would be welcomed without reservation and even with open arms by parents and educators. One might be wrong.

• A parenting columnist for the Associated Press admits that she is baffled.

“It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” she writes in her book, “13 is the new 18.” “And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge each other. No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug.”

• Experts have been consulted to delve into what this threat of teenage hugging is all about.

Click here for the entire article.

(ht to Rick from PA)