We were all talking about raising children the other day and how people used to do it in my parents’ generation. My dad, Fred, said that the best investment they made with kids was getting a microwave, because he could microwave my baby formula instead of waiting for the water on the stove to get warm. Maybe this is why my brain never fully developed and my younger sister got an academic scholarship. They didn’t microwave her milk. If I microwaved my kids’ milk today my wife would turn me into CPS.

 That generation didn’t think it was bad, it was what people did at the time. Apparently, it was recommended to have your infant sleep face down as well. One lady I used to work with even said they would rub a small amount of peanut butter on a baby’s tongue so they wouldn’t get a peanut allergy. I asked my wife if we could do this, and she said that was a Hard No! I argued that maybe that is why we have more peanut allergies today, nobody rubs peanut butter on their babies anymore. I guess I am not a doctor or a good parent.

The same is true in different generations of the banking industry. The way things used to be done changes all the time. We used to send all your checks back to you, now you just get the images. Now people don’t use checks as much as they used to. I have had to teach a couple young customers how to fill out a check. Some customers don’t even carry cash. They use debit cards, credit cards, PayPal, and Apple Pay on their phone. My father-in-law talks about signing a home loan document the size of a recipe card, now it is at least 10 pages. He always jokes, “That was back when you could smoke in church.” People used to smoke in the bank as well.

A lot of the changes in banking have to do with the increased regulation we have to follow. Usually, it comes about the hard way. Someone somewhere violates a law or finds a way to steal, and they must make more regulations and paperwork. Some of it is due to technological advances, process improvements, and keeping up with our peers for customer retention. The more you learn, the more things evolve. Think about where humans would be without duct tape? The changes in the way we do things are how we patch the holes and try to be better than the last generation.

My mom and my mother-in-law come over to help me with the kids a lot. My mom is Nana, and my mother-in-law is Mee-maw. Don’t ask me how the twins came up with Mee-maw, maybe they were Cajun in a previous life. Whenever they come to help- and I could not do without either one- there is always an awkward discussion on, “That’s not how you do that.” Like the two grandmas’ have never raised kids that lived. They raised us differently, not because it was right or wrong, it was common practice of what they learned about childhood development. My car seat was the armrest in the middle of the back seat, and sometimes we rode in the pickup bed. Now we have a crash tested car seat with helmets until you reach junior high school. I am sure my kids will tell me that I don’t know anything about raising kids someday. But I can always tell them people used to smoke inside, and my parents microwaved my milk. 

- Adam Frank Bruning, Loan Officer -