Care Bears are for toddlers. Not undergrads. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

We kid each other here at BreakPoint that some commentaries just write themselves. Well, this one did. Actually, a student at U-Mass Amherst practically wrote it for us.

Sophomore Bradley Polumbo told CampusReform.org that a display inside his honors dorm was covered with Care Bears to help students deal with stress.

“Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “The people that live in this dorm are either 20 or 21… We could be overseas fighting . . . or working full time with kids at home to feed . . . But the school thinks we need Care Bears” to cope?

Polumbo concludes, “If you don’t know that by age 20 you have bigger problems then you probably shouldn’t be pursuing a degree.”

Amen.

This sort of thing was a main theme in my book A Practical Guide to Culture; we call it perpetual adolescence—kids who never grow up. This story is an example of that. But if we want young people to become adults, we have to treat them like adults.

Images courtesy of John Trainor – Flickr.