Parents! Gone! Wild!

[...] Parents! Gone! Wild! [...]

[...] Parents! Gone! Wild! Don’t Touch My Maternity Spanx! [...]

Seriously this was ridiculous we were all worried for the kid not to mention it should be criminal for people like his parents to have children! What a bunch of FRRRREAKS! Gosh! Can you imagine being their kid? A huge helium balloon in the backyard I am sure 100% it was a manufactured drama and they should be charged fined whatever for worrying everyone and also using the airforce police and countless other resuce team’s man hours! DISGUSTING!!! On http://www.truuconfessions.com moms have been commenting on this!

I did get a good laugh from your temper tantrum. This was meant to be humorous I hope.

my husband works in the public school sphere. and i have to say that the article is right. *most* parents now would rather their children die of a drug overdose than be the uncool parent who puts limits on their child. By most, i mean more than 50%. Sex, Drugs, underage drinking? Not only tolerated, but encouraged, hidden, and codependantly enabled by both single moms who have better things to do than raise their child, and double income families with more money than time to spend on their child.

This is the National Post. Shaking their fists like grumpy old men is their bread and butter. I’ve never found Babble to be a “hipster parent” site. If it was, I’d never read it. nor do I think it’s a lifestyle site for upper income parents who worry that their nanny may have scratched their Stokke stroller.

If anything, what I take from Babble is an intelligent, and generally non-judgemental, discussion on the wide variety of parenting styles that are out there. As a reader, I’ve never been made to feel that I’m somehow uncool.

And “dad’s X-Box addiction”? Please, I’m almost 40 and I grew up with video games. No, you shouldn’t be playing video games to the neglect of your family, but I’m looking forward to getting a Wii so I can play games with my son when he’s older. Kind of like how parents watch TV or go to the movies with their kids.

The NP also points to this as a trend among “upper middle class” parents which one would assume is a tiny slice of the population. The rest of us are still trying to find potties for under $10 at Wal-Mart, or, as is the case here in Canada, Zeller’s.

I’d suggest that Rosen read a little more of the articles on Babble to get a clearer picture of what it’s about but it probably wouldn’t suit the articles being written, would it?

The thrust of the National Post article seems to be that (1) parents should stop moaning about how hard it is to parent, since it’s been hard for a long time, and (2) this newfound righteousness parents have lately about having their own lives is selfish and infantile.

Here’s what she (Rosen, the writer) is missing:

(1) There are some specific aspects of parenting that have gotten harder in the last half century, and we spent a lot of time not talking about it, that didn’t do us much good. We lost small town America where kids could run around together in favor of burbs / edge cities where moms sat in a white boxes with their kids for years, which is not healthy for anyone; women started working on mass and the workplace hasn’t adapated to give parents the flexibility to make their lives liveable; every single parenting decision as become complex and controversial due to the multiplicity of varied “expert” opinions; and so on. It’s healthy to air these problems, even if some of this expression takes the form of complaint. It is difficult, and we as a society need to come up with better solutions that help parents balance work and family, adult fulfillment and loving childrearing.

In response to Rosen’s second point (2), parents have been selfish about their our time and space forever (remember “children are to be seen and not heard?”). What happened was parents began organizing their entire lives around their children in the American suburbs in the last few decades to a degree that was absurd, and unhealthy for both parents and children. Who wants to be the child of a parent who doesn’t have a life? Who isn’t passionately engaged in adult activities? This pushing back by parents who are insisting that they have a life, who are chosing to live in cities where they are engaged in communities that are organized around more than just soccer practice, is a very healthy thing.

So Rosen, stop kvetching about the kvetching, there is an important and healthy conversation going on here, and you are apparently missing it.

there are a number of specific things going on right now to which Babble in particular and parents in general are responding