Hats Off to Teens With Bare Noggins
We’ve got hat trouble in our house. Baseball hat trouble mostly, although the skull cap--a red wool thing pulled tight on the crown and down on the forehead--has recently reared its ugly pinhead.
Basically, we think they should remove the blasted things now and again, if only to let their scalps breathe. They think we’re trying to suffocate them.
Welcome to the generation gap of the ‘90s. Once, parents and children argued about Vietnam, racism and sex. Today we argue with our kids about hats. Hats .
It’s a sign of the times: Things are so horrific out there that we’ve seized on the most mundane, the most superficial, the least threatening of issues. Hats. It’s a lot easier to debate when and where to keep the lids on than to muster a substantive dialogue about the deleterious effects of Mortal Kombat and misogynist rap lyrics.
The hat thing is essentially a teen-ager thing, which means it’s first and foremost a control thing. We parents aren’t the only ones locked in this least heady of contests. High school administrators are currently engaged in varying degrees of authoritarian crackdowns on hats in the classroom.
I am highly skeptical that a small swatch of cloth on the noggin can somehow impede reading comprehension or algebraic problem-solving. But I do understand how irritating, how galling, how intrusive those eye-concealing visors can be to the sensibilities of the authorities.
It may be difficult for the uninitiated, but you have to try to imagine what it’s like to sit across the dining room table from nearly grown, supposedly intelligent people who do not speak, who consider a muffled grunt loquacious, who stare blankly, vaguely, in your general direction when you cheerily ask them how their day went.
You have to imagine what it’s like to put a hat on such a beast, and thus be deprived of even the blank stare.
It’s no wonder, then, that we, their keepers, although we certainly know better, are quickly overcome with primal rage. It’s no wonder that we find ourselves screeching: “Hats off! Hats off!”
Strangely, there have been times when I’ve taken the kids’ side on the great hat issue. My father, for example, seems to find a baseball cap in his presence to be a grave offense against Western civilization.
“It’s just the fashion,” I tell him, shrugging with indifference.
Well, the characters may have shifted, but the roles aren’t much changed after all, I guess.
And I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised when, on frosty mornings when a bit of head-covering might actually serve some constructive, healthful purpose, suddenly, defiantly, the hats come off.
